Do you remember the Internet Explorer days? This, unfortunately, is still much better.

Pretty good reason to switch the Firefox, now. Nearly everything will work, unlike the Internet Explorer days.

• Firefox User

Yeah, same with people here declaring the death of reddit, or Twitter, or any of these massive, mainstream services. People in bubbles (and Lemmy is definitely a bubble) always seem to underestimate how little everyone else cares or even knows about the things that are important to them. The service needs to be extremely bad in a user experience way, not an ethical way, for an extended period of time and there needs to be a big social movement where lots of people migrate to a direct and equivalent competitor within a short space of time. Most people will not do it on their own, they will wait until they see their peers doing it and only then can a migration start to snowball.

The uBlock Origin chrome extension has had 34 million users. Chrome has 3.45 billion users.

Even if every uBlock user switched, it’s less than 1% of chrome users.

I’ve been on Firefox since manifest v3 was announced. Firefox has its own shortcomings but no dealbreakers.

Hopefully it will give Firefox a bit of a boost anyway. Firefox needs a boost.

High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.

You’re not wrong about the high switching cost.

Switching from Chrome to Vivaldi (because of Chrome’s whole FLoC thing) to Brave (because I didn’t like Vivaldi’s layout) to Firefox (because of Brave’s whole thing) was a pain.

And I don’t mean as a whole. Taking the time each time to change from one browser to another was always a pain. Transferring bookmarks and passwords was easy (Chrome and Firefox are at least compatible in that regard), but transferring extension settings was a whole different beast.

Some extensions had cloud sync support. Others had local export support. Some didn’t have either kind, and I’d have to manually copy the settings from one browser over to the other. And that’s not even getting into finding replacements for the Chrome-exclusive extensions (of which there were only a few, thankfully).

Not to mention all the people who don’t even have an adblocker and for some reason don’t seem to care that their web browsing is infested with ads.

My friends will stick to chrome, I switched to Firefox months ago. You’re right

I think probably the single most important thing that nobody is saying is that Google have ALL the numbers on this decision and they are not stupid, so it would be silly to assume this will work against their interests. Not only do they know how many people use chrome, their ad network gives them insight into ALL browsers.

And then there are Safari users who are watching from the sidelines.

I agree folks are overestimating how many will switch. but also maybe you’re underestimating too - a lot of browser installations are managed by the “family tech guy”. the father, mother, brother, sister, aunt or uncle who sets up everyone’s new laptops on Christmas and has the suggestions when you look for a new phone. we all know the type. a lot of us are the type.

setting up granny’s laptop? I’ll install whatever browser lets me automatically block the most “1000th visitor!” banner ads and change the desktop icon to the old AOL icon because that’s all she knows the internet as. she doesn’t know of care about the browser options so it’s up to me. Chrome used to be fast and simple so it was the right choice. Firefox has caught up a fair bit on UX simplicity and speed and now offers better blocking and general security, so it just stole the crown for these installations imo. I trust it more to not let her mess the computer up, so even if I’m not using it as my main personal browser, it gets use here.

• Just as some Firefox users like Firefox, many Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.

Do you have some source for that? IIUC, you mean that more Chrome users like Chrome than Firefox users like Firefox, right?

It’s not like they contracted some sort of terminal illness. Anyone can migrate whenever. It’s not hard.

And I mean, there’s still time now. Switching browsers isn’t that bad. Export+import some bookmarks and adjust some settings, good to go.

I think FF has been a good option for a while. But the second best time is now. I can totally get it if people didn’t want to switch until they had more of a concrete problem.

For all the firefox fans out there it might be good to note there have consistently been more Safari users than Firefox users since 2014. Hell Safari has been the number two browser by market share since 2015.

Browsers have to get very SHITTY or a new browser has to have a killer app to unseat a dominate one.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share#monthly-200901-202408

“The browser built to be piping your data into our hands”

There, fixed.

Having ublock on mobile is such a breath of fresh air. I wish I had made the transition sooner. I knew this was coming and completed my transition a few weeks back so I could abandon Chrome on my own time table and not on Google’s. Other than a little headache trying to find extension replacements for pc, I’m LOVING it.

I switched from Chrome to Firefox in 2019 because that’s when Google adopted Manifest V3 and I never looked back. There were already articles then describing how it’d break ad blockers, and Firefox had at the time just recently released their “Quantum” overhaul which drastically improved responsiveness.

I’m a bit surprised it took five years for Google to drop support for Manifest V2, but the threat has long been there.

This is the way.

Most users are fucking idiots and will continue to raw-dog the internet while visiting the most malicious sites possible.

Lemmy has a really biased idea of what the average computer user can do. Imagine Janet in accounting, who calls help desk to reset her password every morning, and takes 30 minutes to remember how to check her email. Or the late GenZ just entering the workforce, who was surprised that their desktop wasn’t a touchscreen, and doesn’t know how a file structure works, because literally every device they’ve used growing up has been either a tablet or a Chromebook. That’s the average user.

My boss once asked me to take a look at her computer that was super slow and barely functional, and the thing that surprised me the most was that she had been running Chrome without any adblock since ever, and when I asked her about adblock, she answered: “adwhat?”. Mind you that she’s still a millennial, and only a few years older than me.

There are also loads of people using Edge.

A lot of them don’t know the difference between ab, abp ublock and ublock origin

There are billions of people on earth who don’t have access to a computer.

It’s not just large amounts of money. It’s chasing more and more money each quarter, and when it starts slowing down panic sets in and they start trying to find any and every possible avenue to keep profits up. It’s how we’ve ended up in subscription based hell and it’ll only get worse.

Or just use Revanced or Grayjay, both of which are ad free and support sponsor block. Revanced is still a bit more feature complete imo, but also more buggy on my device, and more of a hassle to update. The browser YouTube experience is so bad, ads or ad free.

Can also use Vinegar (for YouTube) and Baking Soda (for basically every other site with videos) with Safari on iOS. It’s not a perfect solution, but it at least revamps Safari’s built-in video player so watching in the browser is actually tolerable.

It’s pronounced GNU Stallman.

I can’t listen or look at this man anymore after seeing him scrape shit off his feet and eat it in front of a bunch of people. 🤢

Too bad he spent all his energy getting Linux users to say GNU/Linux instead of talking about the real issues

who

“What’s a browser?” —the general populace

I just install uBlock Origin on every device I come across. Graffiti software.

Because I use chrome for standard use and Firefox for sailing the high seas. And I much prefer just having 2 separate browsers for containerization. I’m just going to have to use librewolf or something when I do get the the mv3 update.

Personal preference I guess. I’ve tried Firefox many times over the years and always ended up going back to other browsers. I find Firefox doesn’t render some pages quite right, the user agent stylesheet is odd, and the UI is less streamlined. Performance also used to be a problem although I hear it’s caught up now.

I used to be a Chrome user but now I prefer chromium based alternatives like brave and edge (which incidentally, uBO will keep working on). Chrome is still required for work, but uBO change won’t be an issue I think, there are plenty of other ad blockers that will work with MV3

I am using Firefox as of last week I made the switch to the browser a different password manager and so far it is fine but there have been a couple of hiccups but it’s not necessarily a Firefox issue but an implementation with Android issue.

For example auto forwarding to an app from a webpage in Firefox has worked half the time for me and the other half not so much.

This is a small example, having Google Chrome and like wise the Google app be native to Android so they move back and forth between one another and are interchangeable while using my phone is much more smooth on my Android device.

Other than that, I am not positive as to why. On Desktop, zero issues. Works like a charm.

I use multiple profiles in chrome for my different logged in usages, for some reason Firefox makes it hard to switch profiles.

Use chrome to download Firefox.

Ive been testing out ungoogled chrome with uBlock, and it still seems to be working. But I think I’m going to add Waterfox along side of my Firefox to look at that one also.

But I’m also not sure you can install uBlock anymore from the Chrome repository either.

No Rugrats!