It is essential to stop using Chrome.
Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware.
Given Google's overwhelming presence in the browser market, this is unconscionable.
We should all despise the ad-tech business, and have no sympathy for the companies getting whacked by Google's actions. But we should not permit one monopolist to replace them all.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/year-review-googles-corporate-paternalism-browser
I work at a small company - absolutely everything from work macros, accounts and shortcuts are all intertwined in Chrome, they’ve been using it like that for ten years - it’d be faster for me to find a new job then to unclog that mess from the entire office. I still installed firefox for personal use though.
in my previous job we were allowed to install some old version of firefox through the companys own portal. but we couldn’t access internet with it because “firefox is vulnerable”. they use google suite so chrome was the default browser, but edge worked too and even IE…
Most companies now are being shepherded into Microsoft 365’s walled garden by their security teams. Edge is the only “secure” browser now, Teams the only “secure” chat app, Microsoft Authenticator (specifically Microsoft’s app, not DUO or anything else) is the only “secure” way to implement MFA, etc.
It’s genuinely sad how many security professionals have been shanghaied into Microsoft salesmen.
We had IT people in at our shop to migrate us over to 365. They wanted me to install Microsoft Authenticator on my personal phone, so I said no. They were able to bypass MFA to sign me up.
I asked them what would happen if someone didn’t own a smartphone (crazy I know), they had no answer for me. They basically just looked at me like I asked them the square root of pi.
That’s actually a problem where I work. There are people who carry a flip phone because they don’t want a smart phone. IT gives them a hard token for 2FA.
I keep going back and forth with Firefox and Vivaldi. The chrome based browsers just tend to run better. I love firefox on mobile but on desktop it’s tougher for me to stick with. Also Mozilla seems to have a different goal for the future with all the other products and ai weirdness they recently announced.
I’m in the exact same boat. Vivaldi devs are so open about everything they do that they’ve honestly earned my trust in their browser.
No nonsense and very clear options to disable data collection despite being a chromium based browser. I love firefox mobile’s extensions but it just doesn’t have the same consistency between desktop and mobile. For example, Vivaldi mobile let’s you control site permissions to the level of controlling if they’re allowed to play sound or not
I once commented saying something like, except for work, all Linux users should be using Firefox. And this was the reply. Some people are just fucking hopeless:
"Firefox has only ever been a sometime back-up browser for me…ever since Chrome appeared in 2007. Prior to that, I used it because it was the sole usable alternative to Internet Exploder…
The Mozilla devs, for far too long, spent more time stabbing each other in the back than they did writing code and fixing the tons of problems that were always inherent in the code. It’s the only browser I’ve ever used that used to regularly crash & burn at least a dozen times a day. And ya wonder why people flocked to Chrome?"
Serious question. Is it actually better for the typical user? I don’t mean people commenting here. I’m thinking about the majority that don’t care about privacy, blocking ads, quality technology, etc. for those people, I’m guessing that Firefox is equivalent. Just another browser that works fine. So why switch??
I run into compatibility issues and weird bugs with firefox a lot. I’m still using it as my primary browser, but I have to keep a chromium based browser ready for times when a website won’t work in firefox. I can put up with that personally, but I wouldn’t want to set up firefox on family/friend computers because I don’t want to get a call whenever something doesn’t work and they don’t know why.
Chrome based browsers also have some super useful features (like tab groups) that firefox doesn’t have a good alternative for.
Interesting. I’ve heard this many times from people here on Lemmy. I’ve been running Firefox for ~6 months now (previously Brave) and haven’t seen these issues yet. I don’t even have a chromium based browser available on any of my devices.
Regardless, I hear you about not wanting to be personal support for friends and family. That’s annoying
For the overwhelming majority of users, they won’t know the difference between using the two. People here are on a high inhaling the air in this echo chamber.
I’ve used Chrome on every device imaginable since Chrome was a thing. I’ve had a negligible amount of problems, in all my years. I absolutely hate that Google shuts services down when they get bored. And I absolutely hate what they did with Google Music and Google Chats, and Domains.
I move off Google services when they shut down. Besides that, I’ve no problems with the ones I use (minus nitpicks and the above products).
So to anyone here feeling bad and are afraid to comment on here because they don’t want to lose Internet points, fret not. There are millions of us perfectly satisfied using Google, PAYING for their services where we see fit, and generally not worrying at all about any of this.
What about the ad blocker changes they’re making? That’s pretty much the line for me. I use chrome everywhere but when ublock stops working well that’ll be me jumping ship. The web is a fucking unreadable cesspool without a solid adblocker running.
The adblock changes is a shit stain, absolutely agree with you there.
For my household, personally, it won’t make a difference because I have a pihole blocking everything from all devices. So that change isn’t enough to persuade me to make a move.
But yes, anyone who doesn’t have pihole of and uses adblockers, it will be 100% understandable for them to jump ship.
It grinds me a bit, as I did have a Linux version if Firefox installed on my Chromebook, but because the book is just a sofa device and doesn’t get any love (especially from the little shits), it runs dog slow, so I end up just using chrome on it, and suffer the pain of not having things synced between devices. Thankfully the most important thing, bitwarden is syncing, so I can manage the suffering.
Where as,
youtube = googlie
google lens = googlie
and
telegram via web requires chromium api, so = googlie
Hmm, proprietary things that are totally under the control of the corpo in question run slower or not at all on the corpo’s competitor’s browser. I wonder if that isn’t exactly what avoid a monoculture is all about preventing?
You can use a different frontend for YouTube. You’ve got Freetube for pc, Yattee for MacOS and iOS and piped on any platform. These solutions also protect your privacy and block ads.
Yeah invidious (different instance) worked for me a couple weeks and then went down for days. I tried some other mirrors after that and they did not work.
If they were reliable, I could put up with the worse UX, but so far they haven’t been reliable for me
My problem with these is that the quality is always bad. Usually 720p max and only H.264 instead of VP9. YouTube quality is already bad enough as it is and nerfing it even more feels awful.
Some websites load faster in Chrome. But the reason why Chrome is so ubiquitous is because for normal people, Google is still the plucky user friendly company they were in the early 00s.
No lie, I actually had to shift to Chrome from Firefox today. Some websites are straight-up broken on Firefox, while others load painfully slow (e.g. try arc.net on Firefox vs any Chromium-based browser). Not to mention the massive shame of Mozilla leadership treating its own flagship product as a second-class citizen in favour of “AI initiatives” or whatever the fuck those C-suites want to stud into their resumes.
Okay I’m happy to switch, I used to use Firefox years ago until Chrome came along and it’s a great browser, but can I integrate my Google accounts with it?
I want it to sync all my stuff to my Google accounts, and so far I’ve not found another browser that can do this :-(
I’m also not sure if all the plugins I have would have Firefox implementations, maybe they do. I use Darkreader, some password vault stuff, uBlock, SponsorBlock and the other YouTube one they make (I forget the name) are an absolute must, too.
What do you want to integrate with your Google account? Imo that’s something to specifically avoid, not something to seek out. But I may be not understanding what you mean
All my bookmarks, search history, browsing history (so I can type a portion of a URL into my address bar, say a word or so, and have it find the page I want even though my own memory fails me), that sort of thing. Plus it works across all my devices.
And casting pages or my desktop or such to my Chromecast is really handy too, and so is the Chrome Remote Desktop feature that I use sometimes to remote in to my PC. I don’t know how many of those things Firefox has, maybe it casts and stuff too.
But yeah I use all that kinda stuff, and of course it keeps me logged in to all the Google services I use, like my emails, YouTube, Drive, Docs, Maps, etc, and facilitates using that stuff seamlessly without issues, which is great.
I’m deep in the Google ecosystem basically, and I’d be happy to switch browsers just so long as that deep functionality remained, know what I mean?
Some people here really hate Google (like, specifically on Lemmy people seem unusually angry about them existing), but they seem no worse (or better) than any of the other companies that offer all this stuff, so I might as well pick my poison as it were. They’re all evil at the end of the day, haha.
Sure, I could run 20 different individual open source services on a server to do everything I use Google for, albeit without integrations and likely a bit more muddled and less feature complete, requiring ongoing care and upkeep, and that IS kinda appealing, I do get why, I used to do the homelab/home-sysadmin stuff for fun, but I just don’t have the time or patience to do that stuff these days, you know?
I got older, and now I just want a functioning service that I don’t need to fiddle around with these days, and that way of life extends to my browser too. Give me a good browser that lets me do what I want with all the integrations I like, and I’m happy.
Right now I’m not happy with Chrome because of their ad blocker policy, and how locked down plugins are in general. And I want to theme it! Firefox used to let you change everything in a themed all the colours, icons, element sizes and so on, it was dope. I assume they still do that, I’d love that.
Anyway, I hope that answers your question :-) Sorry if it is a bit muddled, I blame ADHD brain :-P
Firefox has Firefox Accounts which will do just the same. All those extensions are also available. You may find the odd extension is missing but there is usually a decent replacement about.
While you can’t use Google password-manager easily on Firefox (probably there is a plugin for that) the Firefox password-manager is better in my opinion.
The Google account stuff works mostly, but I don’t know what you exactly want to do. You should try it out.
Firefox is not the better browser in anything but privacy. Maybe it could win in customisability, but that’s something only a few percent of users care about.
It has longer load times and sometimes breaks sites entirely while using about the same resources. Yes, the reason for that is that website creators don’t deliberately support it, but the normal user only cares about functionality.
I still use it and recommend it to anyone that asks, but saying that it’s the better browser is just delusional.
Chrome’s developer tools are better, and having two browsers open at the same time while programming is a strain on RAM resources, especially since Visual Studio Code needs to run in its own Chromium.
Idk, twenty twenty-something. But Chromium with the YouTube homepage takes less RAM than GNOME Software and GNOME Shell, which either says I should move to Xfce or that Chromium has improved. Can’t speak on VS Code though since I run that in a distrobox and podman is broken for me rn.
I have no idea what people are talking about. My M2 MacBook with 8 GB handles pretty much all programming I do on it (biggest thing I’ve worked on on it was probably a 500k line C++ project). And I do use CLion usually which is one of the big IDEs. I’d go for more disk space before more RAM honestly. (Sure, my main machine has 64 GB but that’s because I run huge compilation jobs testing distro packages, games, VMs, and a bunch of other stuff on it sometimes in parallel and especially the compilation jobs can easily take up 40 GB sometimes but I’d say that is not a usual use case.)
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I work at a small company - absolutely everything from work macros, accounts and shortcuts are all intertwined in Chrome, they’ve been using it like that for ten years - it’d be faster for me to find a new job then to unclog that mess from the entire office. I still installed firefox for personal use though.
in my previous job we were allowed to install some old version of firefox through the companys own portal. but we couldn’t access internet with it because “firefox is vulnerable”. they use google suite so chrome was the default browser, but edge worked too and even IE…
Most companies now are being shepherded into Microsoft 365’s walled garden by their security teams. Edge is the only “secure” browser now, Teams the only “secure” chat app, Microsoft Authenticator (specifically Microsoft’s app, not DUO or anything else) is the only “secure” way to implement MFA, etc.
It’s genuinely sad how many security professionals have been shanghaied into Microsoft salesmen.
By secure they mean “the only way we can easily see everything you do”
We had IT people in at our shop to migrate us over to 365. They wanted me to install Microsoft Authenticator on my personal phone, so I said no. They were able to bypass MFA to sign me up.
I asked them what would happen if someone didn’t own a smartphone (crazy I know), they had no answer for me. They basically just looked at me like I asked them the square root of pi.
That’s actually a problem where I work. There are people who carry a flip phone because they don’t want a smart phone. IT gives them a hard token for 2FA.
I was in the same boat. Selenium with gecko driver was a pretty simple swap, just needed to Ctrl f replace a few things.
I keep going back and forth with Firefox and Vivaldi. The chrome based browsers just tend to run better. I love firefox on mobile but on desktop it’s tougher for me to stick with. Also Mozilla seems to have a different goal for the future with all the other products and ai weirdness they recently announced.
All chromium browsers are supporting Google’s grip on the internet.
This is true. Which is why Mozilla needs to focus on making a better browser instead of adding their own ai bullshit.
Mozilla has frequently pointed their efforts into the wrong direction. We need to politely encourage them to focus on the things that matter.
I’m in the exact same boat. Vivaldi devs are so open about everything they do that they’ve honestly earned my trust in their browser.
No nonsense and very clear options to disable data collection despite being a chromium based browser. I love firefox mobile’s extensions but it just doesn’t have the same consistency between desktop and mobile. For example, Vivaldi mobile let’s you control site permissions to the level of controlling if they’re allowed to play sound or not
Are those fractions of a second really worth your privacy?
I once commented saying something like, except for work, all Linux users should be using Firefox. And this was the reply. Some people are just fucking hopeless:
"Firefox has only ever been a sometime back-up browser for me…ever since Chrome appeared in 2007. Prior to that, I used it because it was the sole usable alternative to Internet Exploder…
The Mozilla devs, for far too long, spent more time stabbing each other in the back than they did writing code and fixing the tons of problems that were always inherent in the code. It’s the only browser I’ve ever used that used to regularly crash & burn at least a dozen times a day. And ya wonder why people flocked to Chrome?"
But it’s true.
Serious question. Is it actually better for the typical user? I don’t mean people commenting here. I’m thinking about the majority that don’t care about privacy, blocking ads, quality technology, etc. for those people, I’m guessing that Firefox is equivalent. Just another browser that works fine. So why switch??
I run into compatibility issues and weird bugs with firefox a lot. I’m still using it as my primary browser, but I have to keep a chromium based browser ready for times when a website won’t work in firefox. I can put up with that personally, but I wouldn’t want to set up firefox on family/friend computers because I don’t want to get a call whenever something doesn’t work and they don’t know why.
Chrome based browsers also have some super useful features (like tab groups) that firefox doesn’t have a good alternative for.
Interesting. I’ve heard this many times from people here on Lemmy. I’ve been running Firefox for ~6 months now (previously Brave) and haven’t seen these issues yet. I don’t even have a chromium based browser available on any of my devices.
Regardless, I hear you about not wanting to be personal support for friends and family. That’s annoying
People inevitably bring up compatibility issues in Firefox when this subject comes up, and nobody ever has specific examples.
Proxmox virtual machine server, v8.x the UI is funky and the console doesn’t display properly.
That’s… an example for sure. Maybe an example a regular person would run into?
This was the case back when Chrome was starting out too. Everything was made for IE and you’d have to keep it around for the odd time you needed it.
Eventually those old sites were replaced and now Chrome is the new de facto standard.
For the overwhelming majority of users, they won’t know the difference between using the two. People here are on a high inhaling the air in this echo chamber.
I’ve used Chrome on every device imaginable since Chrome was a thing. I’ve had a negligible amount of problems, in all my years. I absolutely hate that Google shuts services down when they get bored. And I absolutely hate what they did with Google Music and Google Chats, and Domains.
I move off Google services when they shut down. Besides that, I’ve no problems with the ones I use (minus nitpicks and the above products).
So to anyone here feeling bad and are afraid to comment on here because they don’t want to lose Internet points, fret not. There are millions of us perfectly satisfied using Google, PAYING for their services where we see fit, and generally not worrying at all about any of this.
What about the ad blocker changes they’re making? That’s pretty much the line for me. I use chrome everywhere but when ublock stops working well that’ll be me jumping ship. The web is a fucking unreadable cesspool without a solid adblocker running.
The adblock changes is a shit stain, absolutely agree with you there.
For my household, personally, it won’t make a difference because I have a pihole blocking everything from all devices. So that change isn’t enough to persuade me to make a move.
But yes, anyone who doesn’t have pihole of and uses adblockers, it will be 100% understandable for them to jump ship.
To be fair, chromebooks are great devices for kids, and the family link platform makes keeping them “secure”, easier… a lot easier!!!
Even on Chromebooks you can install Firefox.
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It grinds me a bit, as I did have a Linux version if Firefox installed on my Chromebook, but because the book is just a sofa device and doesn’t get any love (especially from the little shits), it runs dog slow, so I end up just using chrome on it, and suffer the pain of not having things synced between devices. Thankfully the most important thing, bitwarden is syncing, so I can manage the suffering.
some small problems i face is that
while i use youtube it runs slower.
and the quick image search feature using google lens is not present.
and telegram voice call does not work.
Where as,
youtube = googlie
google lens = googlie
and
telegram via web requires chromium api, so = googlie
Hmm, proprietary things that are totally under the control of the corpo in question run slower or not at all on the corpo’s competitor’s browser. I wonder if that isn’t exactly what avoid a monoculture is all about preventing?
Ah yes, google nerfing its own services under another browser for its own gain definitely isn’t the issue here.
You can use a different frontend for YouTube. You’ve got Freetube for pc, Yattee for MacOS and iOS and piped on any platform. These solutions also protect your privacy and block ads.
If only they actually worked. Never understand how they get recommended constantly and yet repeatedly I try to use them and they don’t work.
I’m using Freetube on Windows, it works like a charm. Feel free to dm me if you need help.
Is that one a desktop app? I primarily use pop_OS and would prefer a web solution. I’ve tried piped, invidious, peertube, and libretube iirc
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Yeah invidious (different instance) worked for me a couple weeks and then went down for days. I tried some other mirrors after that and they did not work.
If they were reliable, I could put up with the worse UX, but so far they haven’t been reliable for me
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Thanks. I’ll give it a shot
My problem with these is that the quality is always bad. Usually 720p max and only H.264 instead of VP9. YouTube quality is already bad enough as it is and nerfing it even more feels awful.
That’s because YouTube detects the browser you are using, and slows it down for browsers that aren’t their own.
Would changing the user_agent be helpful here?
I’ve seen mixed reviews on whether or not that’s effective.
There’s an addon that not only adds that back into the right click menu but also adds support for other image searching services!
Its called “search by image” and it works very well ime
You use TG in a browser?
Horses and water
Chrome is great at multi-user switching. FF in comparison is @$$ in that respect… I went back to FF around a month ago after a decade long hiatus.
Some websites load faster in Chrome. But the reason why Chrome is so ubiquitous is because for normal people, Google is still the plucky user friendly company they were in the early 00s.
Firefox is better on desktop, but on mobile it still sucks, sometimes it is even refusing to load websites.
Because normies were using IE, then enough of them had their “tech enthusiast” grandson show them Chrome in 2010 and now that’s all they use.
I used to use mozilla by Mozilla, too. THAT’s why.
No lie, I actually had to shift to Chrome from Firefox today. Some websites are straight-up broken on Firefox, while others load painfully slow (e.g. try arc.net on Firefox vs any Chromium-based browser). Not to mention the massive shame of Mozilla leadership treating its own flagship product as a second-class citizen in favour of “AI initiatives” or whatever the fuck those C-suites want to stud into their resumes.
Okay I’m happy to switch, I used to use Firefox years ago until Chrome came along and it’s a great browser, but can I integrate my Google accounts with it?
I want it to sync all my stuff to my Google accounts, and so far I’ve not found another browser that can do this :-(
I’m also not sure if all the plugins I have would have Firefox implementations, maybe they do. I use Darkreader, some password vault stuff, uBlock, SponsorBlock and the other YouTube one they make (I forget the name) are an absolute must, too.
Firefox sync will do the same without spying on you.
What do you want to integrate with your Google account? Imo that’s something to specifically avoid, not something to seek out. But I may be not understanding what you mean
All my bookmarks, search history, browsing history (so I can type a portion of a URL into my address bar, say a word or so, and have it find the page I want even though my own memory fails me), that sort of thing. Plus it works across all my devices.
And casting pages or my desktop or such to my Chromecast is really handy too, and so is the Chrome Remote Desktop feature that I use sometimes to remote in to my PC. I don’t know how many of those things Firefox has, maybe it casts and stuff too.
But yeah I use all that kinda stuff, and of course it keeps me logged in to all the Google services I use, like my emails, YouTube, Drive, Docs, Maps, etc, and facilitates using that stuff seamlessly without issues, which is great.
I’m deep in the Google ecosystem basically, and I’d be happy to switch browsers just so long as that deep functionality remained, know what I mean?
Some people here really hate Google (like, specifically on Lemmy people seem unusually angry about them existing), but they seem no worse (or better) than any of the other companies that offer all this stuff, so I might as well pick my poison as it were. They’re all evil at the end of the day, haha.
Sure, I could run 20 different individual open source services on a server to do everything I use Google for, albeit without integrations and likely a bit more muddled and less feature complete, requiring ongoing care and upkeep, and that IS kinda appealing, I do get why, I used to do the homelab/home-sysadmin stuff for fun, but I just don’t have the time or patience to do that stuff these days, you know?
I got older, and now I just want a functioning service that I don’t need to fiddle around with these days, and that way of life extends to my browser too. Give me a good browser that lets me do what I want with all the integrations I like, and I’m happy.
Right now I’m not happy with Chrome because of their ad blocker policy, and how locked down plugins are in general. And I want to theme it! Firefox used to let you change everything in a themed all the colours, icons, element sizes and so on, it was dope. I assume they still do that, I’d love that.
Anyway, I hope that answers your question :-) Sorry if it is a bit muddled, I blame ADHD brain :-P
Damn, no replies. I’m in the same boat. I’m kinda waiting for Google to break adblock so I finally have the push to make the switch.
Firefox has Firefox Accounts which will do just the same. All those extensions are also available. You may find the odd extension is missing but there is usually a decent replacement about.
All work on Firefox.
While you can’t use Google password-manager easily on Firefox (probably there is a plugin for that) the Firefox password-manager is better in my opinion.
The Google account stuff works mostly, but I don’t know what you exactly want to do. You should try it out.
Firefox is not the better browser in anything but privacy. Maybe it could win in customisability, but that’s something only a few percent of users care about.
It has longer load times and sometimes breaks sites entirely while using about the same resources. Yes, the reason for that is that website creators don’t deliberately support it, but the normal user only cares about functionality.
I still use it and recommend it to anyone that asks, but saying that it’s the better browser is just delusional.
Chrome’s developer tools are better, and having two browsers open at the same time while programming is a strain on RAM resources, especially since Visual Studio Code needs to run in its own Chromium.
Have you checked recently? Chrome devtools have been getting steadily worse the last few years, and Firefox’s keeps getting better.
I haven’t seen anything getting worse, but I agree that the Firefox dev tools are now barely usable. They weren’t before.
FF dev tools haven’t been shitty for like more than 10 years
… strain on RAM resources? What year is it?
Idk, twenty twenty-something. But Chromium with the YouTube homepage takes less RAM than GNOME Software and GNOME Shell, which either says I should move to Xfce or that Chromium has improved. Can’t speak on VS Code though since I run that in a distrobox and podman is broken for me rn.
The year where a browser can easily eat up 10GB of RAM.
On my Mac mini with 8GB, just having Visual Studio Code open is enough to fill up the RAM. No other programs necessary.
8gb of RAM? What year is this?
A lot of more budget devices still have 4 and 8 gigs. Not to mention all the older devices.
yeah, but thats not an development environment (at least not an acceptable one for anything serious)
Genuine question (I am not a developer): if you don’t use a bloated IDE, what do you need this much RAM for?
I have no idea what people are talking about. My M2 MacBook with 8 GB handles pretty much all programming I do on it (biggest thing I’ve worked on on it was probably a 500k line C++ project). And I do use CLion usually which is one of the big IDEs. I’d go for more disk space before more RAM honestly. (Sure, my main machine has 64 GB but that’s because I run huge compilation jobs testing distro packages, games, VMs, and a bunch of other stuff on it sometimes in parallel and especially the compilation jobs can easily take up 40 GB sometimes but I’d say that is not a usual use case.)
Your WORKstation is for working. Budget devices are not for working.
The new MacBook Pro Apple just released a few days ago comes with 8GB in the lower two tiers.
A Mac mini with 8Gb of ram is sadly not an appropriate config for programming anymore.
It’s 2024. 32GB is a min requirement. I roll with 128GB because it’s a couple hundred bucks to never have to worry about RAM.
Yeah well, I can see how you don’t run into RAM issues with 128GBs of it.
Exactly. If you’re a dev, you should too.