751–760 of 1001 posts
Consider discontinuing the use of Google, AWS/Amazon, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and ChatGPT if you value freedom. There are numerous excellent alternatives available.
Out of the loop. What's the story with WhatsApp? Backdoors?
After 10+ years as a primary browser, I've been 100% off of Chrome for about 1.5 years now as part of a broader effort to de-Google my life, and things have been going well. It's interesting to notice how much my internal feelings have shifted over the years. There have been a few rare occasions where I had to use a Chromium-based browser, and I felt the same "ick" I used to feel when forced to use Internet Explorer…
> The water is warm. Mostly because they're peeing in the pool. Mozilla deleted their promise to never sell its users' personal data.
Mozilla has done plenty of bad things and they rightly deserve criticism, but options in the browser space are few and Mozilla is considerably less bad than Google. And other Chromium browsers perpetuate Google's control over the web. If you're going to complain about Mozilla when someone recommends Firefox, at least offer a non-Chromium alternative like LibreWolf (or maybe Ladybird someday).
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The vast majority of Chrome extensions work on Firefox. Up until Manifest V2 being deprecated, the reverse was true, too.
Yes but Chrome has many niche extensions that prevents me from migrating, I've tried since the manifest v2 news.
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Also true. But it’s a charitable way of putting a fundamentally broken contract on the open web since it was invented: you are in control of your browser. If you want reading mode, large text, anti-fingerprinting, disable autoplaying video, heck even banning popups, the browser is your tool and does what you tell it to. If Google or any other company comes between you and your browser then one part of the open web is…
Sure. You are free to modify your browser. But chrome is free to choose not to distribute that plugin. If you want you can download it elsewhere.
Nobody could have possibly seen it coming that Google would abuse its market position to their own benefit... I migrated off Chrome as soon as this BS story about improving privacy, a joke coming from Google. Then the excuse was "well it improves performance", which they could easily do by marking extensions as low performance. If Google wanted to improve this they have an entire search engine where they could re-ran…
Been using uBlock Origin for so long I forgot what the raw internet actually looks like. Spent 3 minutes without an ad blocker last week when setting up a new machine and nearly lost my mind. Google knows exactly what they're taking away from us - a usable web. They've just decided that our sanity is less valuable than their ad revenue. https://programmerhumor.io/programming-memes/browsing-withou... I feel really bad…
I have the same experience as you, every time I set up a new machine or watch friends/relatives browse the web, it just blows my mind how bad the unfiltered internet is.
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It's a revenue share deal where Google pays Apple 36% of the search revenue they get from Safari users [1]. In other words, Google pays Apple ~$20B per year to be default search engine because they make ~$53B in revenue from those searches. This is profitable for both Apple and Google -- no "wildly illegal under-the-table measures" required. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/apple-gets-36percent-of-goog...
How much would Google even lose if Apple didn't make Google the default search engine? People would almost certainly just use Google anyway. If Apple switched to Bing most people would use it once, get pissed off, and then switch it back to Google. It's not that weird that people are a bit suspicious that it's really worth Google $20B/year.
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Suggest using a service like NextDNS or Pi-hole for DYI ad blocking at the DNS/network level. I started with pi-hole but the hassle of updates and most importantly not having it available outside of my home network pushed me to a service like NextDNS which works on any network (5G, work, etc)
to get any actual work done with DNS based blocking (ie. visiting Google ads, or their other dashboards) you quickly have to start whitelisting a ton of sites, which applies everywhere.
You're telling me you block ads, but have to unblock ads to view your ad sales?
Is this in the DSM-V?
I haven't used Chrome itself in years, but have had a hard time giving up Chromium-based browsers due to the rendering performance. It's always felt weird that the only way of getting extensions on these browsers was via the Chrome Web Store.
If there are viable alternatives I've not heard of, I hope folks let me know.
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If you have fast internet you will probably not really notice the difference The difference between v2 and v3 is that v3 will no longer allow uBlock to modify network calls. Previously one of the big savings of a adblocker is they can stop the calls from being made AT ALL. That means less tracking AND less of your internet bandwidth being used Both v2 and v3 can block the actual elements from your screen so you will…
it's easy to see how people might say v3 is an adtech conspiracy. Ads are always served to the user now, expect a noticeable revenue increase by almost every adtech company.
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Only the Android version has uBlock just fyi. Also, I've never been able to watch movies on a plane with Firefox mobile.
AbBlockers work on iOS too. Safari/WebKit has no plans to deprecate Manifest V2