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I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

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Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#271

Post by PaulHoule »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #225
PaulHoule wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is a lack of a feedback channel that pushes back against the worst tranche of ads. It is one of these situations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model where you have no "Voice". At home we were talking about food ads on Youtube. Sure, once in a while you see an ad for a meal box that is actual food but I see a lot of ads for things like Huel which float in this strange space…

Years ago, when it was the dominant player, Ad-Block Plus sought to strike a truce with advertisers, where they would dial back the invasiveness of ads, and ABP would sign off on these and whitelist them. This quickly led to a revolt from ABP users, and the ultimate collapse of the plugin. That is when uBlock was born and become the king. What we have is a positive feedback cycle where creators are forced to resort t…

Bad ads just aren't just on the web.

I've had a longtime gym habit which sometimes has me in front of the TV around noon where the ads are all for products for people who don't have any money. I remember seeing a series of ads where my first thought was "anybody except a TV executive or a politician would look at that and say it it's a medicare scam" and watching the ads for a decade before it got in the news that it really was a scam and people are going to jail.

Those ads win an auction to get there, they might be the optimal ads for that slot, but if you want to know why people have low trust in the media and low trust in the government, start there.

I watched Tubi a lot last summer, which is in a wonderful honeymoon period, and was watching saturation advertising for P&G products that featured upbeat black people cleaning up (their own messes) with Dawn and Tide. Great, I say. They've got some awareness that they shouldn't run ads that drive viewers away. Maybe targeted ads will be good for television but the specter of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

haunts the industry.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#272

Post by [deleted] »

segasaturn wrote: post #270
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus & co do not follow, or respect, the values of the FOSS zealots. He actively dislikes the GPLv3, has a good working relationship with Google on Android and ChromeOS, and has criticized attitudes in the Linux desktop community for over a decade. He famously roasted his own distribution's package maintainer for wasting their life. All hats off to him, frankly. The Linux community can be extremely delusional at tim…

All that Facebook money has gone to his head I guess. Thankfully we should still have the ability to fork the kernel if he fully loses the plot to corporate interests.

[deleted]

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#273

Post by dcminter »

soared wrote: post #75
KaiserPro wrote: post #44

I have been using mozilla for _years_ it got shit, then better, then shit, and now its close enough. The thing I _Love_ is container tabs. I can isolate empires by using container tabs to sandbox cookies and other web state. This means that ebay doesn't change my adverts to the last thing I searched on every site, and autoplay embedded youtube doesn't fuck up my video recommendations. It means I can hide my work gmai…

Are autoplay YouTube embeds still a thing?

Not if you run uBlock Origin they aren't.

That said, it's telling that it's so difficult to disable auto-playing video entirely in Firefox. I'm not convinced that a profit motive is NOT the reason behind that (it is possible but requires a bunch of about:config changes; it's not exposed in the settings UI and that smells sinister)

Unfortunately at work I must use Chrome without an adblocker. It's pretty terrible.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#274

Post by snarfy »

LegitShady wrote: post #240
snarfy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the engineers making these decisions. They write the code they are told to write. Some middle manager / VP gets a promotion if they 'increase engagement', 'increase ad-spend', or some other hollow metric they chase. They are the ones deciding to send any 1-3 star ratings to customer support, and 4-5 ratings recorded as an actual rating. It's not about the users at all. It's about gaming the system for some m…

I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics. The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical…

That's privilege talking. Not everyone is in a position to quit their jobs over the morality of implementing a pop-up.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#275

Post by snarfy »

adamc wrote: post #247
LegitShady wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a person who normally moralizes to others, but I can say I have quit jobs where I found the work to be unethical or that company policies required me to bend my ethics. The engineers implement all of the "features" that these management types decide on. I understand there are infinite engineers so eventually the features will get implemented, but I do not blame the managers alone for tasks done by unethical…

This. If you only shoot the crowds when your overlord demands it, that does not make you innocent.

Yes because implementing a pop-up is akin to murder.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#276

Post by woolion »

input_sh wrote: post #15
internet_points wrote: post #3

It's the closest we have to a browser not controlled by the corporate giants. Sometimes Mozilla makes unpopular choices and people raise a stink about it, but we do that because we hold them to a higher standard. With Microsoft and Google, we just expect them to Do More Evil, with Mozilla we expect Good and will complain loudly when they fail to uphold our principles, and we recommend Firefox because we feel like it…

More like "we'll complain all the time regardless of what they do by repeating the same talking points over and over again". > How much do they pay the CEO? Why aren't they exploring other funding options? At the same time, why are they "wasting resoures" working on other things!? They should exclusively work on Firefox! > ...and that's why I stick to this Chromium fork with its own digital advertising service and it…

I almost never use Chrome-based browsers, but recently was forced because debug points were simply not working on Firefox. You can strawman all you want, there are unfortunately technical points where Google is abusing its position to force its standards, but the primary architects of Firefox downfall is Mozilla.

For the record, I used a Firefox phone for many years (and yes it did cause me a lot of problems), and remember vividly when they announced a luxury Firefox phone about one week before killing the project.

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#277

Post by shultays »

dismalaf wrote: post #215
asdfasdf1 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing. Banksy said it better: People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and m…

> using an ad blocker is the ONLY option to avoid adds. You can pay evilcorp for a subscription/premium account/whatever and they'll still try to force you to watch 10 minutes of adds for a 1 minute video. Fuck them. We own them nothing. On YouTube? No. I pay for Premium, there's no ads.

There is still embedded ads or promotional content or whatever that you can only block with sponsorblock

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#278

Post by [deleted] »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #62
alexvitkov wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, but I highly doubt that this is how it's used most of the time. And taking 20 screenshots and compositing them in mspaint can be a meditative experience.

I would put money on it being the most common use case. It's certainly the reason I installed a screenshot extension for Chrome. I like the nod towards humour you've added at the end there, but it's probably time to cash out your chips and accept your losses.

[deleted]

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#279

Post by WorldMaker »

ustad wrote: post #23

Currently the main attack facing Firefox is coming from advertising companies such as YouTube. It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers. The mentality here is pretty disturbing: it’s almost like punishing users for making the choice to browse the web without ads, or without the surveillance mechanisms th…

> It’s crazy to think that some software engineers might actually intentionally degrade user experience on non-Google browsers or for people using adblockers.

It's also crazy that we've let ad companies tell us that using a non-Google browser is the same thing as using an adblocker. It is not the same and it never was.

I use Firefox with no adblocker installed. I don't mind ads to an extent. I do mind tracking and find micro-targeting disgusting and creepy and evil, so I use Firefox, and I use its Enhanced Tracking Protection, and I only log in to the major Ad Companies like Google/YouTube, Amazon, Meta, others in dedicated containers that only are for their sites themselves. It's sad and annoying how many ad networks accuse me of having an adblocker just for using Firefox (or Safari) with relatively cleaner than average cookies.

Show me the old school of ads, the "Superbowl" broadest audience ads, the stuff that advertising companies "knew" for centuries of their existence as "common sense" that was the most useful way to make and sell ads before tech companies got involved and decided that user privacy was up for auction to the highest bidder. The way I see it: If an ad network can't do that and sees this as "adblocking", it deserves to die and something better needs to step up and eat their lunch. That includes Google and Meta's ad networks. That includes "Admiral" and any other network that buys ads from creepy "Temu".

Re: I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back

#280

Post by samuellavoie90 »

ethbr1 wrote: post #125
theshrike79 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers (still) only develop and test with Chrome I've heard this before... Oh yeah, replace Chrome with IE and you've got the same thing happening again.

Developers will always be time crunched / lazy. Why target multiple platforms when you can just support one?

The goal of a standard is to not be forced to code specific things for each implementation out there. This is failure of the web standards that the google implementation has become the standard.
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