And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
This isn’t even close to being okay. It’s 100% bullshit.
Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.
A lot of them never had to make a profit before.
Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it’s like buying a lotto scratcher.
The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.
Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.
The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.
And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn’t really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.
With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there’s a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.
Better time than ever to be a FOSS enjoyer, that’s for sure
Honestly, this second half of 2023 for me has been about finding FOSS options for literally everything. And eventually I’ll have a home server I can use for the things I can’t use on the cloud
It’s like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don’t need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately
The enshittification of the internet shall continue.
We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.
We’re on Lemmy. We’re already winning!
We may win a battle or few, but not the war.
Then i’ll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.
All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.
We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… That’s how they’ve been brainwashing us till now.
You’ll finish your enshittification and you’ll like it!
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.
- Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
- Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
- Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Right? I had a subscription for Apollo and am now supporting kbin on Patreon (btw, guys, here’s the link if someone wants to help out).
It wasn’t that hard to offer a product that people would be fine paying for.
That’s a good write up, thanks. I don’t claim it’s coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.
Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven’t heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can’t not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it’s not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it’s a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I’m kinda curious now
Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.
His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?
I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.
DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it’s own crawler.
Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks… I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I’m looking for with DDG. :/
I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.
The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.
I’m using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can’t seem to find sites that aren’t SEO traps.
DuckDuckGo seems, for me anyway, be crappier and crappier by the month. Am I the only one? Are there alternatives?
I used them for a long time before getting tired of appending
!gafter every search because DDG’s results were SEO garbage. I’m trying them again and they seem to be slightly better, but I’m not quite sure. Also it appears that the minus operator doesn’t work on DDG, and when I have to use it, I just do!sto search Google with Startpage (which I don’t use because it’s owned by an ad company and because its website is a little bit slower than DDG).SearXNG and LibreX are both meta search engines, which combine results from several different search engines.
It can be a combo of several objectives:
- make a shitload of money
- stop people from realising we’re making a shitload of money off of their backs
- keep people poor so that even if they do realise there’s nothing they can do about it
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding “reddit” at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
Hello from Kagi. It’s better over here.
Yeah I’ve been a little interested in trying Kagi, but it is quite expensive… Are the results that much better?
They give you a couple searches for free each month (I think it’s 10) - go try it out!
and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).
They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.
Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.
Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.
Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.
Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money
AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.
The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn’t just Google. It’s the entire tech sector.
What do you mean, Google of all companies… It’s a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can’t quit their services.
Plus they’ve already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can’t be actioned for it.
I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.
Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.
For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.
Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.
So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.
I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw
Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.
Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It’s just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they’re cashing in on their investment.
Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.
The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.
Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?
Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.
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This happens when something, in this case the Internet, is a monopoly or oligopoly.
Luckly we still have free platforms like lemmy, browsers like Firefox, networks like tor or i2p, torrents, monetary system like bitcoin.
We can step out of the world of and we are the ones who have the most intruments to do so.
Yes, which works for the few, but they know that the majority are completely oblivious and will just consume whatever they are given.
I literally swapped to Librewolf before the Rossman video was done. I was on Brave Browser before, but it’s based on Chromium. Fuck Chromium and fuck Google. Fuck this shitty amoeba that tries to spread into and control everything.
I will post stupid shit on my federated forum and you will fucking live with it Google. Fuck you. Burn. It’s time to break up the internet monopolies and do some trust busting. Someone pull FDR’s rotten corpse out of the grave and put it back to work.
Wait till they DRM DNS.
I do have some concerns over DoH for this reason. Centralizing it gives it more value to be extracted once it becomes THE standard.
Mind you from a tech stand point DoQ is just awesome on paper, I just wish it was more decentralized.
Teddy was the trust buster. They hated him too.
Then dig his corpse up too and give it cybernetic augmentations with which to kill its enemies
This is exactly the kind of thing that demostrates why DRM shouldn’t be part of the web standards. It’s very existence is abuse and this use even more so.
DRM needs to be illegal.
Laws are written by the rich. Want to stop things like this, eat the rich.
Laws are written by the rich when democracy is dysfunctional.
Democracy is an illusion, especially in places like the US. There are so many abstraction layers that even if you “win” you are really poorly represented.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
That’s if you have a democracy that even remotely works. Which in the US does not. Hell, it’s fragile even in most EU countries.
FPTP is inherently less stable that other voting systems. The more parties involved having to compromise, the more stable. Two parties ends up with red vs blue. Literally. And it’s terrible.
I think we in the UK will escape it before the US.
I feel that rather than DRM being illegal, Google and Chromium browsers having monopoly on the web is what allows these crazy ideas to have any room.
If the browser market was more evenly spread and there were more parties involved, these ideas woldn’t fly so easily.
The push/money/dark-force behind this was more Disney and co. Tech only really cared about killing Flash and all the other extensions used to do DRM. If DRM wasn’t allowed in the first place, none of would have existed.
Companies like google should really not have so much power. I have stopped using chrome 1 year ago, and i am thinking about switching to a browser that doesn´t use chromium.
I switched to Firefox years ago and don’t regret it. There are some sites that don’t play nice with FF, but for the most part it works better than chrome.
And it’s 100% not firefox’s fault that some sites don’t work on it. It’s the fault of google coming up with propietary shit and lazy devs not bothering to test and optimize it for Firefox.
Nows a pretty good time to do it. I think once you switch you’ll realize that it’s actually not that different
I made the switch a couple of years back from regular Chrome to Librewolf. I have for the most part been very happy, and was actually surprised at how well it worked despite the privacy measures implemented.
One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.
I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.
Obligatory use Firefox
Let’s hope there’s already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don’t like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.
I was just thinking that I’m sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.
It is imperative to make as many people as possible aware
Since this is something that can be used as a DRM solution, hacking it might be already illegal under the DMCA. IANAL though.
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore in light of not only this, but everything that they’ve done in the 21st century? Why do we keep listening to them? Why don’t we build our own networks and design our own chips?
because that would cost a rather large amount of money, which us working-class peasants famously don’t have
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore
The Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court.
Why do we keep listening to them?
Democracy, loyalty, nationalism, trillions of dollars, global power, the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, FBI, CIA, local and federal police, the largest surveillance network in the world, thousands of prisons, and a million other reasons.
use Firefox
been doing that since I left Internet Explorer, aeons ago
The EU is rapidly becoming a neoliberal hellehole resembling the US. I no longer have any hope for existing institutions resisting corporate encroachment. Best that can be done is the support of initiatives like the fediverse and foss in general but if the current trend continues even that is in a precarious position.
The EU is so utterly out of whack right now.
You got the proposal of chat control on one hand, and stuff like replaceable batteries on the other.
Like, make up your mind already, do you want to help your citizens or not? It’s almost like they do it on purpose to keep our expectations in check.
With how shittily Chrome has been running for me lately, I’m feeling like making the switch to Firefox sooner and sooner.
I guess now is one of those famous best times to do it. If you want even more privacy and security ootb, you can try Librewolf. Recently released Mullvad Browser seems to be pretty up there too, at least from what I’ve read so far.
And if you’re on Android, Mull is pretty much for Smartphones what Librewolf is for Desktops.
What additions does Librewolf have over stock Firefox? I haven’t been using FF for a week now with Ublock Origin and it has been great.
It pretty much has all the possible settings (on and under the hood) for more privacy and security applied ootb, and comes with uBlock Origin.
Technically, you can achieve the same result by configuring base Firefox yourself, but why do that if someone else already did the work for you
Obligatory use Firefox
No way. Why should I feel obligated to use something I feel has inferior UX and UI than the browser I’m using now? For Mozilla’s CEO to rais her wage (again): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html ?
You people are really delusional if you really think that Mozilla are the only good guys (or good guys at all, for that matters).
Inb4, unimaginative people downvoting just because they can’t stand different opinions.
What’s your alternative?
EDIT: Oh I just found in the profile. It’s Brave. I used it for half a year before I got tired of the crypto ads sneaking into my home page’s links no matter how many times I deleted them and of some other stuff. I prefer Firefox’s UI. Also I don’t expect any browser to be 100% ethical but Brave is below Firefox in that list for me
If you truly cared about the state of the internet youd only browse websites with wget and text editors
Or something
https://lynx.invisible-island.net/ come now, we don’t have to be barbarians, there’s text browsers out there
Nice detective skills. I have the opposite view about Brave/Mozilla. But fine, we can agree to disagree and still be (virtual) friends.
We don’t wanna be friends with crypto-bros here.
Cool. On my part I, as a non crypto-bro, don’t want to be friends with stupid people. So, I’ll ignore you from now on.
Nice one mate. Looks like your personality is well-received here. Maybe going back to Reddit might suit you better.
Opposite view of what? Brave is peddling crypto bullshit
It doesn’t matter and it’s irrelevant here. I just despise Mozilla and their false morality. Use whatever you want.
I just despise Mozilla and their false morality.
What about Brave CEO’s inhuman immorality towards transgender people, since you do use Brave? You want to try being ethical?
“inhuman immorality” LOL
Listen, man… I’m all for LBGT+ people rights, but let’s be real donating few thousands on a campaign is far from “inhuman immorality”.
So now you have double standards on morality, just to bash Mozilla? Please demonstrate more mental gymnastics.
It’s not irrelevant since you stated Firefox is less good than what you are using now. Of course people are interested in a feasible alternative. So, since you introduced it, what are you using instead?
I said that I feel it’s less good. I’m not going to tell people what they should use and I surely won’t tell them to use the same browser I use. People should simply use whatever they prefer/suits them best.
So you’ll rather give in to blatant corporate greed?
What kind of Alt-Right logic is this?
I didn’t know I was so evil that I’m doing the world a worse place just because I prefer a different browser. And I’m ideologically far form alt-right, btw.
OTOH, talking about corporate greed:
that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.
Also it does not have any information on source of the data, methodology, definition of the terms etc. So it is pretty much worthless as an argument.
that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.
Fine, so on the same basis we can also reject the “chromium dominance” argument, which is the main selling point of Mozilla.
There is a huge difference between mozilla and google. That’s quite obvious to most. The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you, and you prefer Google, where they have enormous salaries and incomes? It’s one of the richest companies in the world.
Firefox doesn’t have inferior UX at all. It has more functions and features than chrome. It also has very good default privacy and the plugin system is amazing.
And it just became faster than chrome as well.
The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you
It’s not for me (anymore). It should be for you. She was raising her salary while firing devs… But whatever. Mozillians are seldom rational.
Keep being delusional, It’s free, after all.
UX is not worse than Chrome, please shut up.
I downvoted you because you made a terrible case for yourself. Learn to make a salient point, or learn to love being “edgy”. the choice is up to you, but the internet already has plenty of the latter, why not become the former?
Nice to know that you downvoted me for no actual reason, as I didn’t make any “case”. Have a candy.
??? What’s your point even? Usually when someone attempts an argument they have some information.
Mozilla is not good, but they are the lesser evil of the two, considering Google is known as being:
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NSA partner and collecting data and spy on users in googolplex capacity
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AI used by US military for drone bombing in foreign countries based on metadata Google collects on smartphones (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/google-project-maven-drone-warfare-artificial-intelligence)
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use dark patterns in their software to make users accept their TOS to spy
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repeated lies about how their data collection works claiming anonymity
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forcing users to use their Play Services which is spyware and scareware
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monopolising the web and internet via AMP, FLOC and now DRM proposal
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use of non standard web browser libraries and known attempts to cripple lone standing ethical competitors like Firefox and Gecko web engine (now with Microsoft making their default Edge Chromium-based too)
Moreover, Firefox’s UI is incomparably superior to that of Chrome, even without considering the infinite userchrome.css customisations. The fact that you can have a dedicated search box, extensions movable and a download list button on the toolbar makes Firefox incomparable.
That’s just how it goes now it seems, we just have to go with the lesser of the evils for everything. Sure there is FOSS for some stuff but even then FOSS has its fair share of issues
Are there any independent OSes for Android phones you can install?
LineageOS, Pixel Experience, Paranoid Android, Evolution X, ArrowOS, Xiaomi.EU, AOSiP/Derpfest, HavocOS, Pixel Extended, POSP (Potato Open Sauce Project), Corvus OS, Syberia Project, MSM-Xtended
Moreover, Firefox’s UI is incomparably superior to that of Chrome.
No. It’s crap. Utter crap.
without considering the infinite userchrome.css customisations.
“Unsupported” and surely an incentive for less tech-savvy people to look elewhere. But whatever. I’ won’t bother to reply to anything else, as you’re statistically one of these persons that spend their life watching crappy youtube videos and buying shit on Amazon.
No. It’s crap. Utter crap.
I see no reasoning from you on why Firefox’s customisable UI is crappier than Chrome based browsers’ UI, or on double standards of morality regarding Brave CEO’s anti LGBT right funding, or on all the other stuff you are saying. Nothing sounds coherent or reasonable. I am not your r/privacy mod who uses iPhone and Google Chrome on Windows, I daily Debian and write guides.
“Unsupported” and surely an incentive for less tech-savvy people to look elewhere
How is userchrome.css unsupported on Firefox? And where is this customisability on Chrome based browsers?
spend their life watching crappy youtube videos and buying shit on Amazon
Interesting approach to convince people.
I have received about a dozen reports against you for trolling. If you want to be Brave™ here, will you take the L and move on, or do you need the hammer? I will not hesitate in the future, unlike now.
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I feel obligated to raise awareness about these topics. I won’t prevent anyone from choosing Chrome, but at the very least it’s important for people to know what their choice can entail, and base their decision on that.
I won’t prevent anyone from using FF, either. I just think that the “obligatory use Firefox” is quite arrogant, to say the least. And, to be honest, I’m quite happy it’s not going to happen until FF is managed by Mozilla and their poor choices.
They’re not saying you should feel obligated to use Firefox. It’s a tongue-in-cheek joke about how everything FLOSS, Privacy or GDPR related always includes a comment thread about using Firefox. I use Brave too but you gotta read the room. Lemmy users in general are going to be much more pro-Firefox than anything else.
I understand. I just feel it’s quite arrogant ans annoying to be (indirectly) schooled by strangers on the internet who think they know better.
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I don’t have to point anybody in the direction of anything. Make your choices as I did mines.
What do you use?
Not Firefox.
I think they probably use Netscape
Indeed, I’d love Seamonkey to be a viable alternative, for instance.
You criticize but don’t even have the balls to name your browser? To back up your claims?
That is pathetic.
It’s Brave, as evidenced in their history. The browser that peddles crypto ads, has a transphobe CEO, and has been accused of selling copyrighted data
You forgot to list autocompleting urls with affiliate code without the user consent
I surely deserve death for using a browser you don’t like. Jeez, people can be so obtuse sometimes…
I surely deserve death for using a browser you don’t like.
I’m not sure how you managed to come to that conclusion. You claimed Firefox is a poor choice, I’m demonstrating why I believe your alternative choice is worse. Nevermind the fact that use of Chromium is effectively an acceptance of Google’s monopoly over the web standards, which is the point we’re all arguing here. If you can’t handle criticism you should reconsider making such hyperbolic remarks.
Someone just insulted me and called me “alt-right” person or “crypto bro” (I’m neither of both). So, do you really think that I’m the pathetic one?
And… Which “claims”, by the way? I just said that I’m annoyed by people telling me “I should” do something and that I’ll decide by myself. Full stop. Coherently, I’m not giving you alternatives nor have I to disclose anything.
Sometimes it looks like one has to apologize for using Brave or Vivaldi or any other shit that didn’t come out from Mozilla’s ass. Keep using FF if this makes you happy. It made me happy for 20 years, but then I got fed up by 1) Mozilla, 2) Mozilla’s community 3) The browser itself.
Don’t worry. One day Mozillians will receive a reality bath and realise the farce they have supported.
People should be attacking your idea, not their perception of you based on your choice in browser.
My objection with Brave, Vivaldi, and other other browser that is just Chrome with a different skin of paint is they are all signalling an acceptance of Google’s monopoly over the web standards ecosystem.
Mozilla is a shit organization run by a shit CEO, but they’re the only alternative we have to the megalith that is the advertising company known as Google. It really shouldn’t be a hard argument to understand that putting an advertising company at the head of the web standards process is a really bad idea if you care about anything other than Google’s revenue streams, ie a free and open web.
Chromium only exists as a way for Google to keep antitrust regulators from coming after them like they did to Microsoft when IE had a monopoly. It’s source-available, not open source, they don’t accept commits from non-Googlers. The moment they feel safe closing down the Chromium repos without having to lose too much money in fines or blowback, they absolutely will.
We’re literally watching this happen right now with Android, another formally open source project from Google that is slowly having all of its open source components clawed back so that they can maintain their control over the ecosystem and protect the revenue stream that is their data collection and app store.
When Google inevitably decides to pull the plug on Chromium the collective of forked browser developers is not going to be able to keep up with the massive engineering effort required to keep a modern browser going. Especially when a corporation like Google can and will push forward complex and difficult to implement standards expressly for the purpose of making those forks obsolete. They have the manpower, capital, and control over massive web properties to effectively push out anyone they don’t want.
All it takes is them making a change to Youtube that hinders alternative browsers and that will be the death of that open source ecosystem. They’ve literally pulled this exact move before with Youtube by hindering Firefox’s performance by pushing through the implementation of shadow DOM.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. Trusting an advertising company with control of the open web is the nerd equivalent of leopards ate my face
I hate the fact that one of the biggest and richest corporations in the world, is just a massive ad spamming dumpster fire. Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do, if 90% of their effort wasn’t put into cramming ever more ads into people’s eyeballs.
Imagine the good a powerful company like this could do
That’s not how capitalism works.
They just make me think of the part of ready player one where the douchebag corporate dude is talking about how much of the VR display they can make adspace before people have seizures…
to me, that’s one of the biggest tragedies of our time. there are several catastrophic problems to be fixed worldwide and yet we send some of our most brilliant engineers to silicon valley to work on advertising companies
Welcome to capitalism. Where the rules are made up and everything is an advertisement.
Something like 80% of Google’s revenue is from ads, even with that 30% cut they get from everything on their app store. So their core existence deeply conflicts with a free and open web. And it’s particularly unsettling because their web browser dominates the market, so they have the leverage to force us into their vision of the future. And this domination would be very difficult to counter. It’s the default browser on Android phones, and it is constantly flogged on Google.com, which is one of the most popular web portals in the world.
They wouldn’t be among the biggest and richest corporations in the world if that was the case.
This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet
Given that Firefox is now faster than Chrome I see no reason to remain.
Momentum. And it’s likely most people won’t be about to tell, or regularly run comparisons to find out for themselves. Theres enough value added to Chrome that people kind of assume it’s “the best” … It took me years to convince my boss to switch, but the one thing that did it for him was just that the PDF viewer is better in Firefox.
People have weird preferences that don’t always line up with what software developers expect.
but isn’t Firefox itself basically paid by Google? I can’t see it as a threat to Google full control of the web
Google is their biggest donor. They pay $$$ to be the default search engine in Firefox.
But Microsoft would happily give a not-insignificant amount to have Bing be the default search engine, and everyone knows it.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. Google sorta need to pay up. Firefox needs the funding.
Google does not control the running of Firefox.
I thought Google funding Firefox was the cheapest way to fend off an antitrust issue?
And we saw this was going to happen at least 5 years ago. But since the majority don’t care, we get what we deserve I guess.
Let’s just hope this doesn’t go through.
Wait, is Google in the process of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on the free internet?
Always have been, and they’re in it for the long game. They’ve already acquired a stupid amount of control on the web and web standards with everything from Chromium to Youtube, not to mention it doesn’t help that they basically control the world’s most popular mobile OS. Google wants it all if we let them.
i’m not really a tech-savvy guy here, so can someone explain if having DRMs like this would make ad-blocking near impossible for other chromium-based browsers too?
It would also mean that you can’t use extension that modify the page, not only affects ad blocks but things like blocking Facebook “like” buttons or Google trackers. Right now we need more people to use non-chromium browsers, like Firefox, so hopefully Chrome looses market share and with it Google starts loosing control over the internet.
As I understand, if implemented, websites would basically be able to force you to see the page however it wants.
So if you view the page in Chrome, it might force you to not have any adblock.
If you view it in another chromium browser, like Arc, it could just force you to view it in Chrome.
Just this week or was it last week, I made a comment on some post that putting privacy aside, we should still be encouraging people to use Firefox instead of any chromium browsers to break control. It is good to see that right now I am just given a very good example why Chromium being a monopoly allows Google to control the spec (even if other companies are on board)
This PR nails it
I didn’t start using Firefox again because of privacy, but because extensions doesn’t exist on chrome on Android (and I can’t live without uBlock Origin). So I switched to Firefox on both Android and PC. Later it starts with forcing this Manifest v3 or something like that for extensions, and I was really happy I already switched to Firefox. And now even this stupid thing. I am pretty sure I will not look back at chrome again. The only downside is that Firefox on desktop doesn’t support PWA out of the box (especially when I am developing PWA app on my own), but there is an extension and an app that adds support for PWA even on the desktop. And also, PWA is supported on firefox on Android, but I don’t get notifications on my own PWA app, while on Chrome I am getting it every time. Notifications are on for Firefox.
Yeah, this is Google finally revealing their “open source browser” strategy endgame…
That is dark as hell
Well what do you expect when all of a sudden they started making their own browser over contributing to Firefox.
The entire reason why Chrome was created was for Google to push the web forward at their own pace. Away from the previous iteration that heavily relied on browser helper objects (plugins).
Here we are though, Google having a huge influence over the spec. Mainly because the competition weeded out to only Firefox remaining.
Sure, Edge might be considered competition for Google, but at the end of the day, Edge, Opera (unfortunately), Vivaldi, Brave, and similar browsers are essentially Chrome reskins.
PS: I am considering Edge as a competition for Google as Microsoft is well known for being EEE (Extend, embrace, extinguish). But more importantly, they have the man power to maintain their own fork if things do get out of hand.
stop using their services
Yeah, I’m about to the point where I’m just going to buy a domain and host my own email server.
Buy a domain sure, but just use paid protonmail and use it with the domain you bought. It takes a few minutes to set up, and if protonmail ever goes to shit, you still own the email address. Maintaining your own email server just isn’t worth it imo.
NextCloud might be worth looking up. You own the server.
Me omw to Firefox
It’s honestly a better browser imo.
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It’s truly this simple and very liberating to be reminded of this.
How about we go a step further and save them the labor; just announce to me your intent on implementing DRM on websites, out of all things, and I’d just block my devices from visiting that entire site because why waste my time.
Many of these tech or media companies need us more than we need them.
There’s a horde of people that doesn’t give a shit though. If they introduce this without overdoing the ads, it might get traction. And then they ramp up the ads and tracking in 10 yrs. Pretty scary, I hope its DOA.
Then again, if you wrap the whole page in webassembly, there’s not a lot you can do with current ad blocking technologies. May need to have machine learning based blocking or something
Why would wrapping the page in WA block ad blocking?
I was thinking about the possibility of rendering UI with webgl/webgpu, but I now realized that it does not require webassembly. Can already be done from JS
if it’s baked into the browser - then that’s all sites
pretty funny though that maybe all those people in the 80s / early 90s were right - the internet is just a passing fad, but only because they ruined it with ads.
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This comment is hilarious: https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/51
I ditched Chrome about a year ago for Edge and just recently switched to Firefox, shouldn’t really be concerning as long as there are alternatives.
If they overcome / disable ad blocking, they will lose browser market share - and people don’t design websites for marginal browsers with exotic features.
You underestimate the massive avarage userbase who doesn’t even know what an adblocker is.
You will be surprised by how many people don’t know that blocking ads is even a thing
I’m using a VPN right now and Google keeps doing the captcha request thing and loops as if it’s broken. Never had this problem before.
This means the IP you got from the VPN has been flagged for abuse. Likely bots, DDOS, or other negative activity, from before you got the IP.
It can also happen if google can’t obtain/verify an id with their normal means (e.g. ip + browser type/settings + cookies + …).
I get challenged all the time and I’ve been on the same static consumer ip, but I go through some precautions to make it more difficult to id me (dump all browser state on restart, disable js except for trusted sources, ad blocker plugin, privacy conscious browser + settings, etc.). I still use a vpn in certain scenarios, but still get captchas either way.
I get these almost every time when behind mullvad.
That happens sometimes. Just have to pick another server.
Try other search engines like duckdzckgo. I pretty much replaced google and I’m only using it here and there when the search results are not adequate
Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds
And they went ahead and blocked comments now - “An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.”
Fucking cowards
EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don’t pay the big tech you can’t access anything.
Welp, time for Internet2.
Internet 4.0 actually
What are the 3 internets?
- Original open internet mainly for military and university use?
- AOL eternal September? (internet goes public)
- Web 2.0 is actually the third iteration because user created content takes off?
Given how much I miss earlier versions of the internet, when almost all content was created and maintained by early-adopting pioneers, I would personally encourage a clear split from site-powered corporate shenanigans.
Mountains of objective, factual resources have found themselves drowned out of public mindshare by an endless firehose of intellectual junk food produced by SEOs, bots, AIs, and anyone else on the hunt for their daily clicks. I have trouble even finding good examples anymore thanks to today’s endlessly-manipulatable search algorithms.
