laughs in Firefox
Cries in only Chrome and Edge at work 😢
Download Firefox portable
At large organizations you’re generally not allowed to download much of anything without it passing through IT security and management first. If it’s a no, it will probably stay a no.
Just remember,it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission!
Tell your IT.
Yeah. What company wouldn’t allow it?
When I was working for an ad exchange, everyone had adblock installed in their browsers, I found that quite ironic.
I would argue it’s a security issue not to have any ad blocking. Many scams online start with popups or fake ads.
So if you get the opportunity to talk to IT that’s what I would mention.
A good IT is blocking ads at a company-level. Browser extensions wouldn’t matter, and in fact, shouldn’t be allowed for the same reason.
Yeah. What company wouldn’t allow it?
My IT department uninstalled it from my work laptop, and told me not to reinstall it because - and I quote: “The only browser IT officially supports is Google Chrome.”
What makes this doubly stupid is that I’m a web developer. I literally can’t test my stuff on another browser…
Edge extension store still has it I think. Use it until Edge removes it as well. Then tell the IT to use Firefox highlighting the importance of adblocking.
I don’t like my chances of swaying IT. The organisation is too big and I’ll get told I should be using Edge which is the only officially supported browser.
Yeah, that’s true.
Is there any firefox based browser on android where I can have easy gestures for the arrow buttons? All the firefox versions I can find require me to do this in two clicks which for the way I browse is a pain in the arse. Can I fix this somehow?
You mean swiping left up go back? Works fine for me in regular FF on Android…
Doesn’t work for me. I don’t have “plain” android but a specific type that’s compatible with my eink screen.
Chromium gestures work fine though.
No feature for it that I know of. They may be thinking of the swipe to change tabs support?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-gestures-in-firefox-android
Chrome is no longer available in my Start menu.
Been a loooong time
Yeah, I switched to Firefox when this whole Manifest V3 thing was announced, I only still have Chrome installed because it’s better for PDFs than Firefox and once in a great while i run into a site that doesn’t work right on Firefox.
I actually really like Firefox for reading pdf’s, how is it in chrome? I’ve never actually tried chrome for that because I was still using okular back when I still had chrome installed on anything.
The main issue I have with Firefox is that some pdfs have this side-by-side layout (especially rpg pdfs) that Firefox respects and I keep having to turn it off every time I load a new one. Chrome doesn’t respect it and shows it a page at a time like I want. My eyes don’t work too good so side by side the text is just too small.
Interesting, funny enough I have sorta the opposite problem using Firefox for PDFs: I like the side by side view of two pages and Firefox always loads books with single pages, zoomed way too far in for my taste. Have you tried it for PDFs recently? It’s a new way of reading them for me, and I wonder if they’ve changed it since you used it last.
Yeah, it’s still set as my default for handling PDFs, so I keep opening them in there and then copying the address over to chrome by hand because I’m too lazy to go find the default app settings.
Google is not an IT company. It’s an advertising company. Surprised Pikachu, it blocks ad blockers.
It’s been an ad company for a long time, though, and blocking ad blockers is new.
Because they are at the end of their growth phase and have entered their squeeze until dead phase.
Yeah it’s always been an ad company. And you are correct, blocking apps is new, welcome to the last stage in the ad-blocking arms race. Glad I degoogled my digital life a decade ago.
Hey, can you tell a little bit about your stack, what apps and services do you use? Also on phone? I guess in a decade you could work that out pretty well.
deleted by creator
Yes, but enshittification doesn’t happen all at once. And this is a textbook example of the actual meaning of enshittification.
I am from Germany and it is just sad how many people use these apps from shit companies without thinking, when suitable alternatives exist everywhere. Just use Firefox, it will work for 99,9% without any flaw. I would love to ditch WhatsApp, but could only convinge a few people to change to Signal. It is as easy as downloading a new app to prevent supporting Meta, but that’s too much effort for many :-(
it will work for 99,9% without any flaw
Unfortunately not anymore.
And it doesn’t help, that Mozilla is also slowly turning towards enshittification… (since they fired all servo devs…)
deleted by creator
I’ve been using Firefox mobile since they enabled extensions on it a little over a year ago on my Pixel 9 and haven’t had any performance issues with it. My only complaint is that it doesn’t handle form auto fills, or opening links associated with apps as well as chrome, but I think that’s because of chrome’s inherent ties into the OS. I prefer Opera on desktop for the UI and features.
I use Firefox mobile since they support extensions but I have to admit that mobile browsers that are based on Geckoview are worse than browsers that are based on Blink.
Mozilla said that they want to concentrate their power on the mobile version, but I could not find the statement anymore.
But ublock origin lite is by the same dev… Not as many features but it conforms to the new rules and is still much better than not having a blocker if you use chrome or edge.
Missing critical features:
Filter lists only update with the extension, you cannot update them dynamically
No making your own filters and thus no element picker for blocking annoyances on a webpage (a feature so good apple literally baked it into safari)
No support for external lists (which means if you back up your own filters into a list you cannot easily reimport)
No changing behavior on a per site basis
A number of other features as well that are more strictly power user features but still really handy like dynamic filtering and strict blocking domains.
If you have the option stop using chrome and edge, they are some of the worst options you could choose. Even outside of adblock and manifest v3 chrome is horrendous for data harvesting bullshit and edge isn’t great. If you don’t have the option because of an overzealous it dept or whatever and are forced to use it ubo lite is your best option probably and my heart goes out to you
I’m a bit confused as an Adblock Plus user, why did the ublock dev drop those features? ABP uses manifest v3 too and it still has all of those. So it’s clearly not about them being impossible.
Lol who downvoted this
Probably because of the Adblock Plus mention. It’s mired in controversy because of its acceptable ads toggle and requiring ad giants to pay for it. So I can imagine people downvoting comments that put it in a positive light compared to other adblockers.
You may be right, but whether you hate ABP specifically or not should be irrelevant to the question. The question was why other extensions - like Adblock - can have those feature but uBlock Lite can’t. What’s different?
I’d also like to know, personally. I’d wondered the same thing.
deleted by creator
I love this movie but honestly it’s getting to the point where I can’t even watch it without getting upset.
I only made it through like one season of Handmaid’s Tale, it was too real.
What movie is that?
Movie turning into a documentary in real time.
uBO is not just an ad blocker, its almost a firewall against malware and a tracking filter
Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.
Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.
It’s even worse when you consider the entire point of advertising is to deliver a targeted payload at a very specific demographic. So you can target IT folks of a specific company, etc.
Im old enough to remember the internet before ads, and with ads became a thing and you had to make sure to keep your speakers low/off all the time less some screaming loud ad popped up somewhere to burst your eardrums at 2am.
There were so many obnoxious, visual cancer ads.
Then they became actual digital cancer by being injection points for viruses and malware, and thus adblockers became a necessity.
And they remain a necessity to this day, for the same reason as they were 20+ years ago.
and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking.
not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.
Use firefox
And if you don’t like Firefox, use one of the Firefox forks. Some of them are very Chrome-like.
Webserial is only reason I see to install Chrome. For everything else Firefox works great.
I switched to Firefox many years ago, after their announcement I switched to Waterfox and I’m very happy with it.
Chrome is no longer available on my computer.
Yeah, I heard someone say a week or so ago that they straight disabled it in the browser, and now only the gimped version that works with Manifest V3 works now. Thankfully I switched to Firefox when all this Manifest V3 stuff was announced. As far as I know it’s the only browser out there that isn’t based on Chromium (which Google also controls, so browsers like Brave will likely be affected by this soon as well, unless a bunch of those smaller browsers get together and fork Chromium and maintain it themselves, which I’m not very hopeful about) and so doesn’t have to worry about these shenanigans.
Safari had its own web engine, WebKit, which chromium’s web engine, blink, is actually a fork of.
Opera Used to have it’s own web engine, presto, but they rebased to blink in 2013.
But yah, your options these days for the basis of your browser are basically WebKit(Apple), Gecko(Mozilla) and Blink(Google).
Brave and Vivaldi are chromium based but have adblocking built in rather than relying on an extension. So while they will eventually be impacted on extension support, the built in adblocking (which is quite robust) won’t be affected.
But then you’re indirectly giving the enemy (Google) power by increasing their browser market share, which in turn lets them dictate the future of the web.
Fair, unfortunately though the chromium browsers have features that I enjoy that are not available in Firefox on mobile (for example, tab groups).
This isn’t a direct replacement for tab groups, but there’s a Firefox extension called Tree Style Tab that organizes your tabs into a nested tree structure. I use it a lot to emulate tab groups and the way it lays out the tabs makes it much easier to read imo. It might be worth taking a look if tab groups are chromium’s “killer feature” for you.
If you don’t mind me asking, are there any other must-have features that chromium has that Firefox doesn’t?
It’s mobile where I like the tab groups really, and unfortunately the extensions I’ve found that try to mimic the functionality don’t work there. Honestly that’s the big one but it’s pretty major for me. With the way I tend to browse and research topics it’s hard to manage without tab groups.
The only other big one is services that don’t support Firefox. I use GeForce Now for game streaming so I do that through Brave.
I swapped to Chrome years ago because YouTube stopped working right on Firefox.
I’ve started the process of swapping back to Firefox after 10 years with Chrome over this.
If they break youtube in alternative browsers or force ads I’ll finally be able to ditch youtube for good.
never had a problem with firefox and youtube
I know what he’s talking about- there was some javascript spec or something that google proposed, and nobody else bought in, so it never actually became part of javascript’s standard.
But google implemented it into chrome’s javascript engine anyway, and then used it for youtube. There was some fallback code if the new functions weren’t available, but, because of a ‘mistake’ they didn’t work and basically made playback ass for a while until the open source community basically debugged and fixed the issue FOR google, and then spent a few weeks cramming it down google’s throat that it needed fixed.
google does this kinda shit on purpose to reinforce their market position
One of the many reasons why Google should be splitted into different companies
Isn’t it? YouTube isn’t its own company?
He means separate companies with few or no ties with each other.
What problems with YouTube did you have?
Something was going wrong with video playback. Unfortunately, this was about 10 years ago so I don’t remember many specifics about what the problem was.
I’ve exclusively used firefox to watch youtube on Arch and Ubuntu for years, never had a problem so far for what it’s worth. I keep a laptop in the livingroom with Arch specifically to have adblocking and piping the video out to the TV. The youtube apps are terrible on the Roku last I remember, haven’t tried it in forever but I think the main reason was I didn’t want to see ads anymore.
Switch to vivaldi
Any Chromium-based browser will be in the same boat sooner or later. None of them have the resources to continue to support v2 long-term, or to support their own extension stores.
At this point the only viable alternative is Firefox and its dirivatives.
And that is why I went to Firefox once Google announced this bullshit.
Swapping is pretty painless. It even brings over all your passwords and stuff these days. Best get to swapping before Google disable that as well. They’d just love to keep you hostage.
Use a third party password manager, don’t rely on browser default ones
Some suggestions:
- Bitwarden (US based but with EU hosting, free tier, open source)
- proton-pass (Swiss based with free tier)
- Keepass (open source system, free “self-hosted” through cloud saves)
- 1pass (Us based, paid tiers only)
- Lastpass (US based, free tier. Lots of breaches in the past so I can’t recommend)
Just as a heads up:
Double space thenEnterto do a linebreak :)If you self-host Bitwarden you can also get the paid tier features
They hate us
It is 100000% a reason to split Chrome and the ad sales part of Google into different companies.
It won’t solve the problem but the pressures end up being orders of magnitude different.
