- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
You must log in or register to comment.
Good thing I exclusively use Firefox.
I use Firefox everywhere which means I have ads blocking everywhere, including and especially on Android. All my tabs are synced and are easily transferred between devices.
While I dont use Firefox itself any more I am using librewolf on my PC, which sadly doesnt exist for phones yet. Also, GOS comes with its own privacy oriented chromium fork called vanadium, so I’m using that in the mean time.
I also use librewolf and have settled for iceraven on my phone. the list of installable extensions is much longer (even if not everything is working yet, depending on how far mozilla has come along) and it has about:config support, which gives me a pretty close approximation of my desktop browser.
I’ve found the Mull browser (which can be found through the DivestOS repository on F-Droid) works great as a privacy-focused firefox fork, similar to LibreWolf. I hear Fennic F-Droid is also a pretty good but less extreme alternative, but I’d imagine you don’t care much about that if you use LibreWolf.
If we want to be honest, Firefox on Android has way worse performance than Chrome.
(But I still use it instead of Chrome)
Ive been using Firefox on Android for years but it really needs some TLC. It doesn’t support scaling to a tablet/desktop UI at all so it doesn’t work well in DeX or anything larger than a phone. I also recently had to swap to Brave because I noticed Firefox was draining a lot of battery all of a sudden. There’s some kind of leak or running process that isn’t sleeping properly. In a few months I’ll re-install and try again.
I use both on a Pixel 7 Pro.
Can’t confirm that.I use it on a Pixel 5 and even there it is fluid while browsing. Only on Youtube there is the slightest stutter for HD Videos. Heavy sites like Discourse fora or Cryptpad or such work flawlessly.
TIL Cryptpad.fr is just one instance apparently
Yeah wow nice that’s fantastic
I use both on a Galaxy Fold 5 and can confirm Chromium based browsers are smoother. Although I still use Waterfox on my phone. I just keep a Chromium based browsers in case a website doesn’t work when I visited it using Waterfox.
It depends I think. I found Chrome to be a tiny bit faster but then ads bogged the page down so most of the time, Firefox is faster for me.
In some very rare cases when I need to disable ads blocking, Chrome is indeed faster but I’d rather abandon websites rather than disable ads blocking.
So if you love ads, Chrome is better. If you hate ads like I do, Firefox is miles ahead.
There are other ways to block ads. Adguard does a great job on Android. It establishes a local VPN, so it can do HTTP[S] content filtering in addition to DNS blocking.
Can’t use my VPN and adguard at the same time iirc, unless android has two active VPN “slots” now. Can’t bring a pihole with me 24/7 either as much as I would like to.
There’s always nextdns.io that can be configured to use ad blocking filters on the dns level. You can set it up on your phone as well
Can I use it in conjunction with my normal VPN? AFAIK android has only one active VPN slot available at a time.
Yes because there is no need to setup another VPN. You only configure the DNS settings (Private DNS). I know that Mullvad on PC has an option to use custom DNS server
How does this affect browsers like Brave?
Last fuck up I installed Firefox. I left chrome in place. It’s finally time to remove chrome.
Long live Firefox.
Pretty great outcome for firefox really.
I don’t think firefox numbers will get a huge & immediate bump, but I think that over time it will support a reputation for firefox as being cool different and just plain better.
I can’t imagine raw-dogging the internet without an ad blocker in 2024. I’m aware that most people aren’t bothered by ads, but surely… surely some people might be interested in blocking them if they become aware that it’s possible and easy.
hear ye
Switched to Firefox at work today. Looks like I still need Chrome to do the VPN handshake, but the more of us there are, the more pressure we have on IT!
If you still need Chrome, consider Ungoogled Chromium!
Is that project going to maintain Manifest V2 support?
I have no idea. I’d guess not, as it’s not a strong fork like other Chromium-based browsers. Its main selling point is that it’s nearly identical to Chrome, but with a lot of the Google garbage stripped out. I don’t use it as a daily driver, but only when I need something Chromium-based like the use case mentioned by @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml. It’s very likely to work wherever Chrome does.
I don’t have official information, but I doubt it. They tend to stick as closely to the Chromium experience as possible, with the exception of the ungoogled part, of course. Maintaining Manifest V2 support would also just be a massive amount of work, for which they likely don’t have the manpower.
I’m still confounded by workplaces that run the old nineties way of VPN handshake by browser. Clunky, clumsy just straight up bad digital workplace setup.
There is no reason to not do it the modern way where all the handshaking and connecting is done under the hood, hidden from the user. At the most you as a user should only see the tiny little systray icon switch how it looks.
since people here are more tech savvy than i could ever be if like to ask what you guys think of Vivaldi, because i like it a lot. super customizable, has quick command search, side panel lets me use some websites like extensions, and workspaces help me organize especially with work… has anyone used it and can anyone tell me if waterfox or other forks are better and how?
Vivaldi is cool af and I used it for a few years but ditched it for firefox the minute i read about manifest v3(2 years ago? don’t remember). Not the devs’ fault but I’ll be damned if i allow ads on my devices.
is that guaranteed to force all chromium browsers regardless? like, does that ban the ublock origin extension (or something to the effect of rendering it useless)?
It does! However, uBlock Origin has a “Lite” version that works with Manifest v3.
wow. ok. time to experiment with Firefox forks.
Yeah, all chromium-based browsers will be affected, sadly.
As a long time user of Opera (from before they went with Chromium), I’ve been using Vivaldi as my primary browser since they first released a public preview. It has its downsides (i.e. the UI is slightly slower than that of Chrome), but at the same time it’s the thing that feels most “at home” for me after migrating away from the joke Opera has become. The developers seem to hold a strong anti-manifest-v3 stance, but unfortunately at one point they might have to comply. I just tried the built-in blocker instead of uBlock Origin I normally use and it seems to do a pretty good job.
I get the whole “switch to Firefox” thing; for me the major blocker is that it doesn’t have global mouse gestures and this messes up with my muscle memory. If they add that, I might give Firefox another chance.
- another chromium
- GUI looks good
- Cross platform
- Highdpi kind of sucks on plasma 5
- Fast
- Not Firefox
I tried it for a week, but eventually left back for Firefox.
Vivaldi is the new Opera, right?
If by Opera you mean as it was back in version 12 before it got sold to some chinese company and completely changed, then yes. Nothing to do with what opera is now.
If Vivaldi were free and open source, it would make an interesting alternative to Ungoogled Chromium. But it’s not, so I’ll stick with extensions on Firefox (and Ungoogled Chromium as a backup).
It is source-available though, so that’s a plus.
According to Vivaldi’s blog post “Why isn’t Vivaldi’s browser open-source?”, all of Vivaldi’s UI is closed source and not source-available:
Note that, of the three layers above, only the UI layer is closed-source. Roughly 92% of the browser’s code is open source coming from Chromium, 3% is open source coming from us, which leaves only 5% for our UI closed-source code.
Keeping Vivaldi’s UI layer closed-source and obfuscated allows us to set these worries aside, so we can focus on the job at hand. It may not be a perfect solution, but as a business, we have to make decisions that minimize uncertainty, if only for our self respect as employees – and employee-owners.
The UI is the main thing that differentiates Vivaldi from Chromium, and Vivaldi chose to keep it closed source and obfuscated for business reasons. That’s a negative compared to Firefox and Ungoogled Chromium.
Huh, hadn’t seen that bit before, thanks for that. Ok, well that is disappointing. I did notice this bit in there too though:
What about security benefits? Even though most of the security-relevant code for Vivaldi browser is in Chromium, there is also some security-relevant code in the UI. If you think that specific security-relevant parts of the UI should be open-sourced to make Vivaldi more trustworthy, let us know, and we’ll consider putting it out as part of our code bundles, so you can check it for yourselves.
It not much consolation, but it’s better than nothing. As it stands though, FF still has too many problems for me. I’ll have to see how this ad blocking thing shakes out though, might have to revisit my decision then.
it’s all inevitable. client signatures, the end of privacy, jerking off on my way home from the office. there is no God
deleted by creator
As with others, I use Firefox for my main browser, and Brave when I need a Chromium-based browser for something. I don’t see many ads…
Consider ungoogled chromium instead. Brave is not great, it just has the advantage of being heavily promoted by the middle part of the (privacy nerds) and (want privacy because their beliefs are rejected by most of human society) venn diagram.
I use that on my personal computer, but at work I’ll occasionally hit sites other than what I’m debugging, and Chromium has ineffective ad-block, whereas Brave has reasonable ad-block. I can’t control the network at work like I can at home, so I can’t really rely on something like a pi-hole or whatever.
As a web browser with an embedded ad-blocker, it works fine. I’m not going to stop using something because someone distasteful is using it, I’ll stop using it if it no longer meets my needs. It blocks ads and renders as Chrome would, so it works well enough for me.
I disable the crypto nonsense and pretty much only use it for debugging work stuff. Sometimes that means I need a JSON formatter or something, and those sites are riddled with ads w/o an ad-blocker.
oh, hrm. Im not sure what specific build you’re using, but the one I’m using has mechanisms for installing normal adblockers like ublockorigin. note: afaik, this doesn’t solve the problem indicated in this thread – I’m operating on the basis that the blocking functionality will be nerfed. However for me, I use it purely for (stuff that doesnt work in firefox) and my jellyfin server (since firefox is kinda particular about hevc videos…you can kinda get them to work in windows, but in many cases I dont fully understand jellyfin still tries to transcode to 264).
worth stating that “because someone distasteful is using it” is a reasonable misunderstanding due to me assuming some knowledge. Brave was created because firefox kicked a homophobe out and he wanted to make a browser. Said person is also clearly a cryptonut, which makes him a yet more negative person in my book. Now, unrelated to that base, you have a lot of people out there who are promoting it by my personal experience in more privacy centric groups is that these promoters are often quite…unsavory. Is that enough to stop using software? not necessarily. Is it enough when there are far better options out there? to me, absolutely.
At home, it’s whatever ships with my Linux distribution. I use it mostly for web dev testing (I dev on Firefox, test on chromium) for personal projects, and for my kids to play certain games (Firefox works most of the time for that).
Brave was created because firefox kicked a homophobe out and he wanted to make a browser.
Sort of, but I don’t think that’s really telling the whole story.
Brendan Eich was the CEO of Mozilla for many years and was the initial creator of JavaScript. He was ousted because he made a private donation to block gay marriage legalization in California. There is no evidence that he was or is a homophobe, just that he didn’t believe that gay marriage was something that state should legally recognize. By all counts, he was pleasant to work with regardless of sexual orientation, the issue was that someone found out about his donation. He didn’t harm anyone and wasn’t unfair, he just made a private donation.
I think he was a great CEO, and Mozilla needs a technical CEO imo (in fact, everything started going downhill around when he left). I disagree with him politically, but if I avoided every product where I disagreed with the executive team politically, I’d have to avoid pretty much every product (and quit my job).
So I need a better reason to avoid Brave. I’m not sure what the plan is for their cryptocurrency, and I honestly see it as more of a gimmick than anything. It’s easy to disable, so whatever, it existing doesn’t impact me.
I also don’t actively recommend it to anyone, I always recommend Firefox or a Firefox derivative. The only time I recommend it is if someone needs a Chromium-based browser and wants ad-blocking, and Brave works well for that. If they just need Chromium and don’t need ad blocking, I recommend Chromium.
If you have a better alternative, I’m interested. I literally just need a Chromium-based browser that works on macOS (what I use for work) with proper ad blocking. I don’t need to sync anything, it’ll only ever exist on that one device. I also need something for Linux, and open source is more important than ad blocking there.
I’m also interested in Brave Search since it uses its own index. I currently use DDG, but search results are kinda crappy so I’m looking for alternatives.
I use Firefox and Brave at work. I need a Chromium-based browser, and Brave’s ad-blocker works, otherwise I would be Firefox only.
I’ve long ago stopped using Chrome on my computer because it was getting too bloated.
Now we gotta have websites developing for all web browsers instead of Google Chrome like it’s Internet Explorer 2.0.
There are effectively only two web browsers: Chrome and Firefox. Literally everything else, aside from some really niche things that can’t render modern webpages, is a fork of one of those two that uses the same rendering engine.
What about Apple’s WebKit? Does it count?
Nope, it doesn’t count. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I’m sure they’ve diverged enough for it to be pretty significant compared to the Chromium browsers
So it wasn’t, like, forked hard enough that now after the years it counts as a different browser? Expect it to render pages ‘n’ stuff pretty much like Chrome?
I admit, I haven’t really looked into it. It’s possible Apple implemented new HTML/CSS/JS standards independently, but it’s also possible that Apple continued to backport Google’s changes. Unless they had a business goal of being independent (or NIH syndrome) I would guess that they’d do mostly the latter, but you’d have to go read the code to know for sure.
They are definitely still more related to each other than either is to Gecko (which is to say, not related at all), though.
They’ve been separate for over a decade, and even before that they were heavily customizing it. They’re cousins, but absolutely not close enough at this point to be considered the same.
You mean KHMTL, born in KDE’s Konqueror. That spawned WebKit (Safari), that spawned Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc). The whole thing then finally came full-circle when Konqueror dropped KHTML due to lack of development, now you have the choice between WebKit and Blink (via Qt WebEngine).
Then there’s Gecko (Firefox) and Servo which had a near-death experience after Mozilla integrated half of it into Gecko but by now development is alive and kicking again. Oh and then there’s lynx, using libwww, tracing its lineage back straight to Tim Berners Lee.
No, they don’t mean KHTML. KHTML is an ancestor of WebKit and Blink, but WebKit forked from it over 2 decades ago. They meant WebKit.
They also didn’t mean lynx and yet I mentioned it. How come? Might the distinct possibility exist that I used the opportunity to draw a wider picture, and “you mean X” has to be understood as internet brain-rot rhetorics, not literally?
Just a suggestion.
Not to toot the kagi Horn, but they are talking about releasing thier webkit based Orion Browser on Linux. Ive been following that one closely since it has firefox extension support.
I’ve become very skeptical of anything Kagi, wishing they’d just focused on making one thing good instead of getting distracted by mediocre AI and a browser they can’t realistically support while their search is still subpar. Illusions of grandeur.
Subpar Search?
Yeah, wtf is he/she talking about there :)
Iirc the browser is older than their search engine. If anything that is their og product
I mean, if folks really want something like that, I’d say they shouldn’t have let KDE’s KHTML (which is what WebKit was forked from) die. But as I’ve said elsewhere in this thread, KHTML→WebKit→Blink are related and thus fail to combat Google’s web hegemony the way that Gecko (Firefox) does.
And safari, although it’s a cousin/uncle to Chrome at this point.
Not that I use it, but still.
haha Safari would like a word.
What word? I spoke the truth: there are only two rendering engines. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I deleted my original comment before you replied because I am not really in the mood to defend this but the OP was talking about the pain of developing for different browsers and I don’t care what is a fork of what, this is a fact: Chrome, Firefox and Safari all render differently and have to be catered to individually.
Also, Safari, between desktop and mobile, has 30% of the market to Firefox’s 8%.
I don’t LIKE it, but there are “effectively” three, not two, rendering engines.
It’s about browser architecture and not silly names (“Safari”, “Firefox”, “Chrome”). The point is that there are only two actual variants.
That’s…not true at all.
Not when you have to make a web app render identically in them, which is what the OP was about.
No, you still have three rendering engines. WebKit and Blink are different. Since the second is an (old) fork of the other one, they are similar but far from being the same. They are pages that work in one but not the other, even if you change the user agent.
firefox extensions are the best patches i have for enshittification
Thank fuck I switched to mozilla
