cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/20260243

Google Chrome warns uBlock Origin may soon be disabled

Google Chrome is now encouraging uBlock Origin users who have updated to the latest version to switch to other ad blockers before Manifest v2 extensions are disabled.

  • cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    I see many people say to just use forks of Firefox. I use Librewolf myself. However, are such forks not very dependent on upstream Firefox not being completely enshittified? Will it be possible to keep the forks free of all new bullshit, or does that at any point become a too difficult/comprehensive task for the maintainers?

  • anticurrent@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    Firefox’s desktop market share is the lowest it has ever been, and its mobile share is zero-point-smithereens. not to be a party pooper but google and chromium’s monopolistic hold is only growing stronger.

  • ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    I really wish there was a GPL-licensed rendering engine and browser, accepting community funding, with some momentum behind it.

    I feel Ladybird have correctly identified the problem - that all major browsers and engines (including Firefox) get their primary source of funding from Google, and thus ads. And the donations and attention they’ve received show that there is real demand for an alternative.

    But I think the permissive license they have chosen means history will repeat itself. KHTML being licensed under the LGPL made it easy for Google to co-opt, since it was so much easier to incorporate into a proprietary (or more permissively licensed) codebase.

    There is Netsurf, but the rendering engine understandably and unfortunately lags behind the major ones. I just wish it was possible to gather support and momentum behind it to the same extent that Ladybird has achieved.

    • wuphysics87@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      I’m probably wrong, but isn’t the Mozilla License non-permissive? It’s likely more complicated than that. Non-permissive*

      • ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Agreed, it’s licensed under the MPL, a “weak copyleft” license. Each file that is MPL must remain MPL, but other files in the same project can be permissive or even proprietary.

        While I definitely think it’s better than a fully permissive license, it seems more permissive than the LGPL, which is the main license of WebKit and Blink. So I don’t feel it’s strong enough to stop it being co-opted.

    • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      GPL is not good enough, a new browser meant to thwart Google should have a strict anti-corporate anti-commercial license, even if it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of open source.

      If you don’t believe me, please consult proprietary vendor android distributions.

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
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    3 months ago

    Mozilla == Democrats

    Google == Republicans

    {qt,gtk}webkit, netsurf, ladybird, textmode browsers == The actual way forwards

    Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk on US Politics

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Firefox has a lot of issues

    I dunno… I mean, what are your expectations?

    Ultimately I have actual problems in my life, my browser choice is an absolutely marginal decision I make when the actual goal is to visit a website that in itself is usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something, checking on a piece of information, etc etc.

    It’s kinda weird to even think so much about browsers - excluding when you are actively developing for/with them - that you recognize issues beyond a single big one like “Has no support for an adblocker”. I can get behind that being big enough to matter in regards to which browser is usable or not.

    But again, if you develop for Firefox or an addon for it, I can see why details matter and you’d probably have a long laundry list of issues, sure.

    • 2ncs@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      usually just a tiny component of something else - say ordering something

      Funnily enough, when I go to a restaurant and they have receipts with QR codes (I think it’s Clover), it just doesn’t work in Firefox.

    • CafecitoHippo@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I dunno… I mean, what are your expectations?

      Honestly, some sites just don’t want to work properly. Firefox is my main browser. For some reason, Dicks Sporting Goods has like a 50% success rate on whether the page wants to load correctly. I fire up Brave when I’m looking at their website.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I think people come down a lot harder on Firefox than they should. It’s a great browser, and they do a lot for the freedom of the community and as an open source ambassador.

    I feel like people generally feel that, given their prominence, they could do a lot more. This is certainly true. Their weird corporate structure, their half-baked experiments like Pocket or VPN, their Google ad money, these are all valid issues.

    But do you know what else is supported by Google ad money? Chromium and every browser built on it. Do you know what has a far more corporate culture? Chrome, Edge, Safari, etc. Do you know who else had weird little money making experiments? Every other browser (Brave’s Basic Attention Tokens, DDG’s Privacy Pro, etc.).

    Firefox makes a bigger target because of their relative popularity and long history.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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      3 months ago

      I want there to be a competitive market so that Firefox gets better. Without good competition it will continue to rot.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I don’t understand the premise of this statement. Do you think Firefox doesn’t have competition in the browser space?

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          It only has Chromium which somehow is worse than Firefox. We need something that supports all the same features as Firefox but isn’t a fork

          • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            Are you talking about the rendering engine? Safari still uses WebKit. Everything else was killed off by chrome. No one wanted to make addons for Internet Explorer, so they switched to Chromium as well.

            It would be extremely difficult to put something new into the market at this point. If even Microsoft lacked the resources, it’s hard to imagine anyone succeeding IMO.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Honestly it’s more that Lemmy as a whole is just a big group of curmudgeons. Most discussions on here veer strongly negative, not limited to Firefox.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Yeah same.

      People on here love to go all doomposting on every little thing though, so for them stuff that they’ll never actively interact with is automatically horrible. But them, I bet those very people are the ones that do “proper privacy stuff” like blindly turning on hardening settings, and then in turn also complain that Firefox “keeps making FF use more memory and be slower and not load pages properly” when they have changed so many settings that they’d in turn make a compelling case for why most companies don’t allow so much fiddling with settings: It just leads to endless complaints.

  • kbal@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    It’s a good opportunity for any Chrome users in the crowd to switch to Librewolf. It may be a small project but it’s been around for a while and they haven’t made any mistakes that I’ve heard about. Google has its various off-brand browsers using the engine, why shouldn’t Mozilla get some? It comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, and has none of the telemetry and ads of Firefox.

    • land@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Have they implemented the update option yet, or does it still rely on unofficial methods for updating?

      • kbal@fedia.io
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        3 months ago

        They provide official deb and rpm builds for linux, which get updated in the usual ways. I don’t know about windows but the website says:

        you can choose to install the LibreWolf WinUpdater, which is included in the installer.

        • ditty@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          The LibreWolf WinUpdater works great. You get a small pop-up when there’s an update and it updates super quickly (in my experience in like 15 seconds).