It’s time for Firefox and others to sue Google for antitrust. When you’re using your monopoly to force web “standards” (instead of having an independent third party set standards) that cause developers to stop supporting your rival browser is clearly illegal monopoly actions.
Puh. Mozilla is Google’s pet that keeps them out of anti-trust court.
Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it’s always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.
But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you’re right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.
The Servo fork? Oh I’ve never heard of that. I’ll have to look into it.
Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.
Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.
Oh wow. Thanks for that explanation. It only has made me angrier at Mozilla. They have completely lost their way and forgotten their original mission.
I wonder why Mozilla didn’t want their own rendering engine to compete with Blink…
I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people’s GPUs more).
And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/
And there’s just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that’s janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.
From what you’ve said though there seem to be benefits from cleaning up Gecko in order to make it feasible to turn it into something similar to Electron.
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God damn it. *crumbles in embarrassment.
Wouldn’t need to take their money if donations were to get high enough (though it might be easier to have a collective org that all kinds of open internet groups could join and donate to). At the moment FF is the only browser that isn’t relying on Google’s Chromium while also being a real player that isn’t OS specific like Safari is. All the FF alts may have their own very good points for making their forks, but they aren’t building anything from the ground up. Which puts them in the same spot as all the Chromium based forks with regards to relying on base code needing to stay current. It is of course possible for the Chromium forks to join with FF (and any of its forks that can put their issues with Mozilla aside on this issue) to call for protections.
IE/Microsoft was pulling the same kinds of shit before Chrome, Firefox, and Safari were able to show what could be possible with both actual demands for standards to be followed and that the internet should be open. The open standards are what allowed so many devs of all classes/nationalities/ages/etc to create so many cool things when barriers like money and copyright are removed. Now Google is the Microsoft of the internet and they only respect the rights of corps and rich fucks that don’t create anything. Just digital rights versions of landlords. We wouldn’t have the options we have now if we waited for those copyrights holders to stop us from just doing shit with technology.
The sad part is that you can’t donate to Firefox directly. Only to the Mozilla Foundation, which, I think misguidedly, is trying to become a political advocacy entity. They want to talk about “hate speech” online. They want to make their own AI thing… ugh. I would never deny that society and the internet has big problems. But it seems the organization has been overtaken by people who want to play political games rather than just making free software.
If they focused solely on making a killer browser they might actually be able to dethrown Chromium or at least become more than a niche player.
Wouldn’t need to take their money if donations were to get high enough
You can’t even donate to Firefox directly. Donation money goes to the corp., which means it goes to CEO pay raises.
Sigh. Whoever they have working in their DRM department has been an asshole for a long time now.
This is what the third or fourth - minimum - thing like this they’ve tried to pass in a few years? I actually like Google as a product family but every time they do this it hits me right in the “maybe I should reconsider” department. Its also usually met with a hard resounding no from everyone. Maybe its that they have a task force that is paid well to protect their ad interests and recover some sort of deficit they see in their ad product.
I donate to the EFF to fight things like this at a professional level…also good to point out though that its not just google’s fault. If they build a moat for businesses and everyone installs one, that is everyone’s fault.
I end up switching more and more of my stuff away from Google every time something like this comes out.
In every comment thread about the importance of supporting Firefox, there’s always at least one comment claiming Firefox is slow, even while I repeatedly see the data say otherwise.
Anecdotally, I’ve used Firefox, Waterfox, and Librewolf on PC, and none have been slow.
I’ve used Firefox, Firefox Beta, and Fennec on Android, and if anything they seem faster and easier to use than Chrome (and they actually tend to work like an actual internet browser).
I’m not saying these commenters are all Google sockpuppets, but maybe they’re parroting misinformation, or maybe they’re using
an Apple OSiOS, where Firefox is basically Safari.It’s just really perplexing to me.
I have suspected for a while it is astroturfing. Same as with GIMP and Libre Office where inevitably someone will trash the UI as it’s “soooo bad”. If you say a lie, and repeat it enough, people start to believe it.
I’m a huge fan of open source but saying the only people saying Gimps UI is bad are astroturfing is insane.
It’s famously controversial and uses UI paradigms that don’t exist in any modern desktop environments.
I’m not, but it’s not like it’s an occasional thing. Every time it’s brought up, it’s trashed. Free software that does a better job than anything else free, and folk bash it. Either they like and are motivated by Adobe dominance, or they’re useful idiots.
It’s balanced to say “great program, but could do with a UI improvement”. It isn’t to say it’s unusable because of UI. I cannot imagine any free software advocate should be proud of taking that line.
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Tenacity, not audacity. Audacity got took over by a company with questionable record and tried to add telemetry into it. Tenacity was the OS fork which stayed true to principles.
GIMP may not be your bag, but it’s highly used and many find it has much higher quality features than the alternatives. UI may not be popular, but it doesn’t prevent it being a solid bit of open source software.
Btw, what steps have you taken to improve open source graphics software? It’s easy to bash, it’s harder to learn and contribute.
Open source contributors > open source advocates > grateful open source users > almost everyone else > open source critics
One doesn’t need to be a dev to have opinions about ease of use of a piece of software, don’t be dense.
That is true, but to get free software made by people in their free time and say “this is rubbish” is a little ungrateful.
“Here, have this free food…”. " ewww gross, that is so bad".
Every time I introduce someone to LibreOffice I half expect them to hate it, and that I’ll have to go through the alternative interfaces and try to make them accept it and potentially install OnlyOffice instead if that doesn’t help.
Instead, I’m generally met with an “oh, this is nice”, before they start typing away.
I get that some of the bigger nerds would prefer something different (I would personally love the power of LibreOffice inside a modern minimalist GTK app), but LibreOffice is working great for most users. Those passionate enough to see an issue with it probably prefer markdown or latex anyway.
I’ve only introduced LibreOffice to one person in recent memory, and her reaction was basically, “This is free?! I wish I knew about this years ago.”
I honestly prefer LibreOffice to what Microsoft Office has become.
When I went to grad school, I was told MS Office was required, so I purchased it, but turned out we just used basic word processing and a handful of simple presentations, so I ended up using LibreOffice for everything instead.
Same here. I found the Microsoft ribbon they introduced in 2007 to be a major anti pattern. It didn’t make things easier, it made things way harder. Our IT department tried to bust me for not using the official Microsoft software (outlook, excel, word, etc) so I outright uninstalled windows and put fedora on there. Granted, I was trying to do partitions and fucked it up, but whatever. The point is I wanted to get away from their “antivirus” spyware so I could use what worked for me. I got the idea when I saw the Dean of academics was using i3 as her window manager
I love GIMP’s UI. It’s clean, it’s to the point, and it’s stayed basically the same for ages!
Damn, this positivity isn’t welcome in free software circles! How can I respect you? (Kidding, I think you and your positivity is awesome.)
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I’m involved in open source software, and of the artists I’m aware of, most use GIMP, not Krita, because it has better features. Krita is a great option, but it doesn’t quite have the same features for producing quality art.
“Other people who have bad experience ces with something just be asteoturfing.”
Ivw consistently had an issue with Firefox that I described in a thread a few days ago that I can’t seem to identify or fix. Am I just not allowed to mention it?
Maybe their issue tracker is the best bet, or in a separate question thread about the issues. Raising it in every thread it comes up when people recommending it isn’t going to solve the issue or help anything, is it?
No, it won’t. I bring it up in this particular thread for 2 reasons.
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I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots. I don’t think that’s at all true, since I’ve run into multiple problems with the browser myself that I haven’t been able to solve.
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I brought it up in the previous thread because I think that if people are considering switching, knowing what problems exist is useful. It isn’t meant to dissuade anyone, in fact I regularly recommend Firefox to my friends and family. But I don’t personally use it because of a pretty major problem, and I don’t think it’s bad to mention it when the topic comes up.
“I don’t like the insinuation that anyone who claims to have problems with Firefox must be bots.”
I did not say this, multiple people have interpreted it this way. It’s a little defensive. I said there is a targetted campaign against it where every time it is brought up it is trashed. You may be be a genuine person who is also trashing it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a targetted campaign at play. I just find it hard to believe that some folk hate FOSS projects so much they have to smash it every time it’s brought up. Sounds exhausting.
There is a difference between “it’s great software, but i’ve notice a few issues” and “this project is trash”. The second is posted purely with the intent of trying to dissuade people from using it, and all they do is keep people using Chrome, which I think we can all agree has bigger issues.
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On top of that, Firefox was recently found to be faster than Chrome.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Google.
Firefox is not “basically Safari” on macOS, that is only true on mobile.
People seem to be unaware that Firefox on Android (not IOS unfortunately) has support for several useful extensions. Ad blocking is the obvious benefit, but I use a Text-to-speech extension every day.
This was true when Chrome first came up, they even made those ridiculous ads, which Opera (before they stopped developing their own engine) was ridiculing: https://youtu.be/zaT7thTxyq8
Firefox after they they rewrote their engine to be multithreaded (I think it was called project electron?) is faster than chrome that is currently very bloated.
What saddens me the most that, while there are ignorant people who don’t know better and use what are they familiar with, there are also self proclaimed techno geeks, who are equally ignorant and don’t seem to remember the times of Internet Explorer.
Edit: here are the chrome ads: https://youtu.be/nCgQDjiotG0
Tbf we’re in a new generation of techno geeks who weren’t around for a lot of things and lack the full context. I think about that every time a young person chides me for “stealing” from YouTubers or even Google itself by blocking ads.
Yeah I’ve noticed the same thing. I’ve been deliberately trying to do a bit of Firefox advocacy for a while (cos I honestly believe increasing its userbase is our only chance to avoid google ruining the internet). But yes every time there’s a bunch of people confidently complaining about how bad/slow Firefox is and advocating for brave or chrome.
Initially I thought it was just a bit of historical baggage but it happens very consistently and aggressively so I’ve had the same thought.
Meanwhile, I’ve been using Firefox for ages and have never experienced the problems these people keep complaining about.
There was a brief time when Chrome ran better than Firefox on an old 512MB laptop I had, but Chrome has since become an infamous RAM hog. Firefox is the lightweight one now, and has been for quite a few years.
I think it depends on the website. There are some websites where chrome will work better either because chrome works better with certain libraries/technologies or because the developers put more time into optimizing for chrome.
On the other hand Firefox might have less bloat around telemetry that gives it an advantage too.
Oh absolutely true, and one would probably notice it more if one uses a lot of Google’s services (though Microsoft is even worse in my experience, with nerfing its services if you don’t use Edge), but this still doesn’t explain why just a normal user would proclaim Firefox is “slow as fuck” without anything to support this, and that’s what I’m seeing in nearly every thread that mentions Firefox.
If you want to online shop or research something to buy, or spend money in some way, Chrome and Google search is superior. If you are looking for information, news, anything not requiring payment, Firehox and duck duck go are the best
I’m going to have to strongly disagree here. Trying to research a potential purchase on Google or Bing will net you page after page of Amazaon Affiliate sites peddling junk. I’m into longboarding, and most of the results you’ll find trying to Google a decent longboard would result in wasting your money at best, severe injury or death at worst.
It’s not just longboards, either. I’ve noticed these promoted results trying to search PC parts, appliances, dog food, tools, and anything else you might be looking to buy.
There’s a reason people started appending searches with “reddit,” but honestly it’s better just to use a search engine that doesn’t net you these results, or ask somewhere else entirely like a community forum. Sadly, most people rely on results from search engines and will end up spending money on junk.
I’m also not sure why using Chrome would make online shopping easier. I literally make all my online purchases through either Firefox proper or Fennec, and I’ve never had a problem.
By some metrics, Firefox surpasses Chrome now.
Chrome is a memory hog compared to Firefox lol
Worth mentioning that, as much as it pains me to back Apple, Safari is also a good alternative for those it’s available for (at least in this regard). It’s one of the only browsers other than Firefox not using Chromium. And WebKit, it’s renderer, is a pretty badass project.
Chromium and its forks actually all use WebKit as well: https://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/displaying-a-web-page-in-chrome/
WebKit: Rendering engine shared between Safari, Chromium, and all other WebKit-based browsers.
Blink and WebKit completely diverged in 2013 after the fork. That document is virtually identical to its 2012 version and is marked as outdated in several places.
I think some people also just haven’t used Firefox in a while, and it’s gotten better since the last time they used it. I’ve never had issues on Firefox, however I only became a Firefox user a few years ago. Meanwhile my girlfriend insists it’s buggy and slow, but she hasn’t used it in many years.
I’ve noticed a lot of people not wanting to ever revisit older paradigms. Like when the Reddit protests started a lot of people were adament that going back to forum type software would be a disaster and I felt taken aback. I loved that shit. The only reason I saw to do that with Reddit instead of a dedicated forum was because Reddit already had users that could wander into your community and slowly onramp. Here on the fediverse we get the best of both worlds, but there are people who hate the idea that !news@ttrpg.net and !news@lemmy.world don’t aggregate together even though they might actually be about completely different subject matter because “we don’t want to go back to the phpbb days”
Well y know what? Maybe there are parts of the phpbb days that were worthwhile and good. Maybe hosting dedicated servers that are specifically about something is a positive thing as it makes there be more people excited to host a small part of the internet that people can make use of. Maybe what we needed was the easier on ramping, not the centralizes forums.
ELI5: what is DRM?
Drm- Digital “rights” management, more like digital restrictions management is a thing that tries to make sure the things you own are restricted by someone else. It s the reason some singleplayer games dont work offline, some apps wont let you record them or Blu Ray discs try to stop you from copying them. things that you own. Thwy are controlled by corporations that can say who can use the media. Even if a device is perfectly able to play a movie, Google can not allow it so Neflix would not trust the device. Examples are Denuvo and Widevine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
ELI5 please?
Will using Firefox fix it?
What can we do to make them fail?
It’s a long video with many points and better if you watch it. However, here’s a break down of key points, made to be as simple as possible - there’s a lot more technical stuff, but I’ll try to keep it concise and less technical.
This is probably about a 10 minute read if these concepts are not familiar to you:
- Google owns Chrome (not Chromium), and they dominate the market ever since they won the internet browser wars.
- As an amoral corporation (not evil, simply lacking morals), their business runs on advertisements.
- They’re revealing a new feature called Manifest v3 which is a locked down version of the browser that’s built around what they feel is security and trust.
- Under their proposal for Manivest v3, your browser will have to be “verified” in an attempt to keep you “safe”. Are you a human or a bot? They’re making a more trusted internet with trusted software.
- Companies like Netflix, news web sites, etc. will eat this up and implement the proper protocols to use Manifest v3. To visit your bank’s web site which has this protocol, you’ll need to use Chrome’s browser.
- Using Chrome’s browser, you’ll need to authenticate yourself and become a “trusted” user. With this enabled, you can then visit your bank’s web site.
- If you use an alternative browser that isn’t approved, you won’t be able to use that web site.
- Eventually other corporations will implement these protocols, too, and you’ll be locked out from participating in the internet.
- Google, an ad company, gets to control advertisements better, gets to learn more about their users, and now gets to mark them as “trusted”. In other words, you get the North Korean version of the internet, “Mommy and Daddy’s Safe and Approved Internet”. Meanwhile, North Korea and Mom/Dad get to spy on you, see what you’re up to, monitor you, control you, and shape you. The benefit is they also make money off you by selling the information they learn about you.
Why is this bad:
- It’s censorship. It’s like your mom and dad grabbing your phone, computer, enabling severe parental controls, giving it back to you, and they get to see and approve what you’re allowed to do and say at any time. Apply that same protocol to your money, too. Want to send money through the internet using PayPal? Even more censorship. Want to watch Netflix? Your parents lock it down so only certain things can be watched, at certain times, and certainly under their permission.
- It buries competition and makes Google even more of a monopoly. We already know Google Search is bad (advertisements, phishing web sites, auto-generated content web sites are always the first results in Google.
- Digital Rights Management. Just a bit north of 20 years ago, when you purchased a digital product, you could own it. Streaming didn’t exist. In an age where “buying” no longer means “owning”, this new protocol will further enforce DRM. Pay for Netflix and want to watch it? You’ll have to be a Trusted User that uses Chrome. Bought a new video game you’re excited to play on Steam? You’ll need to be a Trusted User. Don’t want to stream music through Spotify and instead use something like Bandcamp? To make a purchase at Bandcamp, you’ll need to be a Trusted User. Don’t want to buy something through Bandcamp and instead just download what you already paid for? You guessed right - you’ll need to be a trusted user to even login and reach your downloads. Don’t forget your downloads are hosted on servers that are run by Google and Amazon - you’ll have to be a trusted user in order to download from that server.
Can I use Firefox and stop using any Chromium browser
- Most browsers are Chromium: Chrome, Brave, Ungoogled Chromium to name a few. They will all eventually implement Manifest v3, and if they don’t, they will disappear.
- Firefox is not Chromium, but think about how many users use Firefox now. Google Chrome has the overwhelming market share and has captured users into their platform.
- Because the majority of users use Chrome, corporations have to evolve to adopt Manifest v3: banking web sites, governments, job applications, benefits, healthcare, personal emergency, etc. All of these will be forced to adopt it because that’s where the users are, and Google will force corporations to participate. After all, banking web sites will face less downtime through Manifest v3, because bots won’t be able to spam them and try to get in. Netflix will have to spend less money on security, because only trusted users will be able to even reach Netflix. Your “free” email service through Gmail now stops all spam because it only accepts incoming messages from trusted users. Of course everyone will adopt it - Google is safe, secure, and trusted. And best of all it’s “free”!
- If you use Firefox now and continue to use it, you’ll be safe for several years. For now.
What can we do?
- Right now, you can opt out of using Chrome by using Firefox and other decentralized tools.
- In the not too distant future, there’s not much that you can do. Educating users to switch from Chrome, use Linux, use stock Android (e.g., Graphene OS), will not help.
- Eventually, the users that use Firefox, Linux, stock de-googled Android will get locked out. An average user isn’t going to invest their time to learn these platforms. They’ll stick with what works: “I can login to Chrome and watch my Netflix and pay my bills. You’re telling me that this Linux thing doesn’t let me do that? Screw that, I’ll use Chrome OS - at least my shit works! What’s wrong with these Linux developers, they can’t get anything right! They should take a lesson from Google and fix their shit.”
- Write your politicians and hope that some governments will help restrict this rollout. Keep in mind though that some version of this will get passed and approved. Also don’t forget that corrupt regulators and politicians are captured and owned by corporations. This will get passed, there’s no doubt about it.
What will happen 20 years from now?
- Humans have tenacity. You can only frustrate humans so much before they break. Take away too many of their freedoms, impose many restrictions, and eventually they will break.
- The trick for all of time, seen throughout history by all our overlords, kings, emperors, etc. is to find a careful balance. Take away “just enough” freedoms. Give them “just enough”. Work them until they’re tired, but don’t let them break. And of course, give them a few handouts here and there, but not enough to make their lives easy.
- Manifest v3 (or its derivative) will be implemented. There’s no doubt about that at all.
- The 99% of the population will continue to use these services because they want to be able to participate: They have to pay bills, access money, access healthcare, use government systems, do education, have entertainment, etc.
- The 99% will continue to use this because they won’t care. So long as they can be happy enough, they will persist.
- Eventually, an infinitesimally small minority will be affected by something. Something will break and cause them to snap, and they will do the only thing that an individual human can do: opt out.
- That small minority will leave, opt out, and refuse to participate in the system. Those clusters will grow at an extremely small rate because they’re able to recognize the whole picture and see that personal freedoms are so restricted. They’ll remember their history and learn from it.
- Enter decentralization - the removal of power from centralized authority.
- Those who recognize decentralization will build new platforms, and others will eventually follow. This is why the Fediverse and Bitcoin exist. They recognize the problem of centralization and are full of users who decided to opt out. The Fediverse adoption exploded with the 2023 Reddit API problem, and the constant Twitter issues under Elon Musk. Bitcoin happened in 2009 out of anger from the 2008 global financial crisis when “Satoshi Nakomoto” gave, as a gift to the world, a permissionless peer-to-peer decentralized economy of money that had “rules, but without rulers”.
What happens 20+ years from now?
- In 30 years when more of the population realizes their freedoms are under attack, they’ll consult the ones who left 10 years previously.
- In 40 years, you might have choice. There may be a “new Firefox” that pops up after the old Firefox was wiped out 10 years ago, and let’s you use the internet, your IP, and your content in a different way.
- The trick is to train yourself to see the big picture. You’ll never defeat your overlords - they’re behind tall walls and they control the money. However, you can opt out. You can refuse to participate. But by doing so, remember that you will be locked out. That’s not an easy choice to make.
- But those users that do opt out, they will be the ones that were pushed too far. This is why refugees leave their homes - they just want to be safe, they want to be alright, they want their freedom from their opressors.
- We will have “Google Internet” (Manifest v3) refugees one day.
“We no longer have choice. We no longer have voice. And what is left when you have no choice and no voice? Exit.” - Andreas Antonopoulos
You wrote all this but you failed to mention that Google’s using it’s monopoly market position to force web “standards” unilaterally (without an independent/conglomerate web specification standards where Google is only one of many voices) that will disadvantage its competitors and force people to leave its competitors. The competitors need to sue.
Fair point you raise. Competitors can certainly sue where warranted.
And we can certainly start public outcry. It will be a difficult, uphill battle for those that understand the implications of this motive.
So basically, we’re going to have to build a separate internet that rejects this new protocol and allows for alternate browsers. That tactic, combined with piracy and offering everything the big guys charge money for for free, might be enough to draw at least a chunk of the people away from it.
You’ve got it right. the thing is that corporations will have to adopt to these standards, but that doesn’t stop us from opting out via decentralized methods and, if you favor it, piracy.
You can spin up your own media server like Jellyfin and serve content to users in your own enclave. Open it to the public and it’s ripe for DMCA takedown.
We can spin up our own social media places and collaborate together. There’s lots of options out there to meet every need. Maybe over time as storage gets cheaper, we’ll figure out how to decentralize large media like movies and tv shows over some kind of distributed service like an open blockchain, and then we can say goodbye to YouTube. Or the YouTube alternatives (not the front ends) will become easier with less friction, and user-supported server costs.
The one thing we couldn’t spin up though are core services that I mentioned - banking, healthcare, government sites, etc.
The one thing we couldn’t spin up though are core services that I mentioned - banking, healthcare, government sites, etc.
🤔 Actually, if we banded together and had enough people with the know-how and willpower, we could in principle open up our own credit union. Credit unions are alternatives to banks and are specifically designed for shit like this. Just as there are teachers’ and firefighters’ credit unions, so too could there be one for, say, us Lemmonades.
We can create a community of people that care about those things & shun people that don’t care
Why shun them? Shouldn’t we welcome them when they decide to join us?
No one likes an evangelist, so I think it’s best to not try to recruit people; Rather, we can make others aware of this problem by making announcements that state facts about what’s going on. Then we leave the 99% to figure it out and decide for themselves.
I never heard of Lemmy, but I’ve been disenfranchised by other social medias and simply walked away. After the Reddit API scandal, I discovered the Fediverse (after hearing vaguely about Mastodon years ago). Let them come on their own. We should welcome all refugees.
If they want to join it’s ok, but if they leave or they don’t want to join we shun them, because making average people aware doesn’t work, they simply don’t care
If I could save up my votes to upvote this 5 or 6 times, I would. Great write-up! I’m “stealing” it (with attribution).
I thought Brave doesn’t have to implement manifest v3 because they’re a fork. They can just rip it out.
Thank you for the informative comment
Happy to help. As I sat here and reflected on my post I figured out a good way I can satisfy the “Explain Like I’m Five” better. So I’ll share this for posterity:
- Google and Chrome is like mom and dad. You live in your house in a nice neighborhood. You use the internet, watch tv, and go to your friends’ houses to play with them.
- One day mom and dad want to make sure that you’re safe since they don’t know what you’re up to. So they now request you to ask them for permission before you can go to your friends. You also now have to let them know what you’re doing. It goes well, your mom and dad are happy.
- Other moms and dads notice how nice and respectful you are, and they decide they’ll be like your parents since they can trust them.
- Over time, other parents also enable these same rules so they can keep the kids safe while knowing what they’re up to.
- Moms and dads monitor your sleepovers. They press their ears against your closed door while you hang out with your friends.
- They didn’t like that show you were laughing at, so they decided you shouldn’t watch it any more and stopped it. Now, you have to ask permission for some things you want to watch, and some shows you really loved because they were more adult and had bad language are… not there anymore. I guess mom and dad hid them from you. Oh well.
- Eventually your mom and dad decide you don’t need your computer and phone, and they give you new ones that are so much easier to use but require their permission to use. You can still visit your friends and message them, but you have to do it on that computer or phone, else you won’t be able to talk to them.
- Other moms and dads do the same, seeing that they can now trust everyone.
- The neighborhood is now safer. All the parents know what the kids are up to.
- You on the other hand, miss what it was like before. It makes you a little sad that you have to get all this permission and you feel like you’re being watched. But, you guess it’s okay. At least you can see your friends. But it just feels different for some reason and you can’t really explain why.
- The kids aren’t alright.
Wow, awesome ELI5 thanks!
Getting more people to start using Firefox instead of Chrome would be the best way to “vote with our wallets” in this case. Though some of the Chromium forks do make easier sells, but they are much much more likely to just go with whatever Google does by using the same base. So if Google forces something into Chromium in order to keep being able to functioning and being compatible (in web standards, security updates, and the massive extension library). It will just force the use of whatever Google wants, and make Google the de facto boss of how we are “allowed” to use the internet.
What about a small TL;DR?
A quick, non-technical explanation:
- Google is working toward implementing a new protocol in Google Chrome, “Manifest v3”, that will be intrusive and help enforce Digital Rights Management, as well as stopping ad blockers.
- Under the guise of this being safe, secure, and to curb bots, Mv3 will require users to become Trusted by using the Chrome browser.
- Since the majority of users are using Google Chrome, this will heavily influence corporations to adopt this protocol in their service.
- A Trusted user can access Netflix in the browser. If you’re using Firefox or are an untrusted user, you will not be able to access Netflix in your browser.
- This protocol will appear one day in some form, and it will greatly shift the internet and force more users into Google’s ecosystem.
- This will spread to all areas of the internet - Banking web sites, government web sites, healthcare, entertainment, education, etc.
- The internet will become less “free” over time. More censorship, less rights.
- Lots of ads can contain malware. Considering that Google allows phishing sites to pay for an ad to appear directly in Google search results, there is no confidence that Mv3 will be safe or secure.
See my other comments in this Post for more details.
WTF?!!! Monopoly is always a bad thing, we must remember it!
The day adverts are forced on me is the day I quit using the internet for anything other than gaming. I fucking hate adverts.
I’ve lost interest in multiplayer games too with all the battle passes and loot boxes.
Try BattleBit
Can confirm, one of the best multiplayer games we have seen in years.
Except they’re planning on implementing FaceIT, which is an extremely invasive anticheat. Great game though, play it while you can
They cancelled adding it for the time being
Have been using Firefox forever basically, with a brief departure when Chrome was fairly new, but later returned.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
People have been very vocal about this in the issues for that repo. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues?q=is%3Aissue
Honest comment with a bit of a question buried in here this novella… I use Google devices; Pixel Pro’s, Pixel watches, Nest hubs, Nest thermostats, etc. This is a understood agreement (not symbiotic) between me and the behemoth that is Alphabet: I pay them for hardware, and use their “free services” that are heavily subsidized by pillaging my data. I know the hardware does it too, and I’m paying.
I’ve switched most of my networking and cameras to UniFi, my browsers are all Firefox… The question is what’s next? I dislike Apple iPhones but like my wife’s MacBook, but I’m a nerd. All of my devices need to “play nice” in their respective ecosystem. I’m tired of having the inbox app, hangouts, etc only to find Google has grown tired or doesn’t care and scraps them.
When the iPhone 15 comes out, I was getting the wife that and myself the Pixel 8P. Now I struggle. The “ultra” premium phones (we both care most about camera) are few and defined. I don’t want to jump to Apple, it’s the same thing, just packaged differently. Ugh.
I’d consider installing graphene OS…
Or CalyxOS. Both are totally reliable as daily drivers on pixels. Installation is super easy via web installer and you can still use the original Google cam app that makes your images look as nice as you are used too. Join their respective Matrix chats to get things going and ask the noon questions.
If the last 5 years are any indication, they’ll shelve it on their own within a month.
There is no ecosystem as mature, polished and integrated as Apple’s. I am all in with them and the way all their devices and services work together is just marvellous.
But the answer to your general question is you will need to go all in on a single company. And TBH, you should. They are all bad to some degree. But cobbling together a pipeline of various manufacturers will always result in a terrible experience, and you’ll be generally paying the same for it anyway.
@uthredii It’s kind of interesting that this is coming out after Ai stuff like chatgpt and dall-e came out. iirc, those tools scrap a lot of data from the internet from all places [main reason why twitter had it’s rate-limiting, if it’s true and not bullshit].
I get that scraping is pretty bad, but putting drm on everything just isn’t the right way to go about it. It’s like nuking all forests to destroy mosquitos; the mosquitos will die, but so will everything.
