This is clearly about all the youtube advertisement changes lately. (though maybe with a dolllop of not being happy about their other ads being blocked either) I’ve not seen a single one on FF with Ublock, no slowdown, no nothing. He was (as I understand it) making changes as needed to stay ahead of or abreast of them. (I already wasn’t using their browser long before this.)
He beat them. They didn’t crush him with their technical prowess and all their genius engineers, they didn’t find a way to legally challenge him (I’m sure they had their lawyers working on it), they didn’t find a way to outmaneuver him, the only thing they could do is ban his extension from being used on their browser. Because they literally could not force their shit down our throats as long as we were using it.
So I guess, maybe not a beat for beat fit for the parable, but he’s very much the little guy, and they very much are the gigantic IT megacorp, so I think it was a glorious victory.
I’d call it a pyrrhic victory at best. It’s like if Ukraine got Russia to use their nukes on them and there was no response from the rest of the world. Sure, you got them to use their strongest weapon, but you still got nuked and they’ll continue as usual.
I do see your point, but OTOH Chrome ain’t the only browser. Ublock getting kicked off Chrome is just going to be one more factor that will tip some people away from it. I don’t strongly disagree, but I see it as a net positive. Maybe that does undo my shower thought a little, but hey, it was literally a shower thought. 🙂
But it’s not a nuke. The addon still lives and thrives, on browsers not controlled by google, and Firefox is not like a complicated browser that the average user couldn’t drive.
I think the nuke would be if
a) google would find a way to effectively break all sites where uBO is detected, and uBO couldn’t defend against it, or not in time while there’s mass breakage
b) uBO and such would be legally outlawed in a large country or more
Manifest V3 was well on its way to being implemented before the aggressive youtube advertisement push. It was well known (to people who cared) it would kill uBlock back in 2019.
Still chromium at the end of the day. Anything they have control over has the potential to be ruined by them. Don’t give them the chance, just fix the problem and use Firefox.
I mean, Vivaldi absorbs whatever changes they like from Chromium, but it's not whole cloth. Vivaldi is specifically not implementing V3 and maintaining compatibility with existing addons.
According to their blog they will stop supporting v2 next year.
“We will keep Manifest v2 for as long as it’s still available in Chromium. We expect to drop support in June 2025, but we may maintain it longer or be forced to drop support for it sooner, depending on the precise nature of the changes to the code.”
Thats not "will stop", that's "may stop if it becomes unsupportable". Google would have to be activly adding code that fucks with V2 support in order to make it impossible to support it. It's not gone until it's gone.
Meanwhile, in Firefox land, they had no external pressure, and continuously removed features the users wanted, despite outcry from those users.
Is Firefox the better option just because its not Chromium based? That's not clear. What is clear to me is that I don't particularly trust Google OR Mozilla to do the right thing, and (despite using Chromium as a basis for their browser), Vivaldi is doing everything I'd want a dev to do. I wouldn't put it past them to stop taking updates from the main Chromium repo and just start doing their own thing (if Chromium becomes too much of a pain to deal with).
People are complaining that having a mono-browesr is a problem, and I don't disagree, but Google and Mozilla are both assholes that don't listen to their users. Maybe we should be paying more attention to that than which codebase they use.
Mozilla is WAY better than Google. The fact that you’re still arguing that a chromium browser is better than Firefox because of a feature you’ve already been told might not exist next year tells me that i really shouldn’t trust your opinion on this. Just use a Firefox fork so you don’t have to worry about it, don’t give Google control over your stuff because their incentive is to ruin it.
I didn't start using Vivaldi because they support V2, I'm choosing to keep using Vivaldi because of their continued support of it.
I used to use Chrome for testing, but I've dropped it entirely now that ublock doesn't work.
If Vivaldi also drops support for proper ad blocking (I prefer ublock, but Vivaldi has their own blocker that doesn't use any addon framework, not V2 or V3), then I'll go elsewhere, but it sure as hell wouldn't be Firefox unless there was no other option (there are a precious few to even try, but I would try them all before going back to Firefox). And it would probably have to be a fork, in a desperate attempt at some amount of feature longevity.
Also, I don't give Google control over shit. You're making a ton of uninformed assumptions. My browser is a client to access content - nothing more - replaceable on a whim. I don't feel the need to interconnect every software, account, or hardware that comes my way. Those who do are trapped by their laziness and desire for convenience, and almost none of them have any idea what they've given up.
The same way one is able to change the default browser on any OS? Because a lot of people claim that FF downfall is exclusively due “other browsers” being the default.
I’ve been using Firefox since 2018 and I wish I started to use it much earlier than that but sorry this sounds like a lame excuse. Edge came as a default browser but no one used it when it was built on EdgeHTML engine. People love it now because with Chromium it is a better browser now.
This isn’t the first time that something being the default was considered part of a monopoly case. Most notably internet explorer in the Microsoft monopoly case.
The big thing is that even if there are other options… A lot of people won’t ever bother to change it.
@RunningInRVA@Maven it would be monopolistic if Google forced Mozilla to remove the ability to change the default search engine. But if you want Mozilla to ask users which search engine they would like to set as default during initialization of the browser even after dealing with Google, that would definitely be nice.
This might be a best case scenario. It won’t happen, Mozilla has been turned into a corporate funds receiver for years. That CEO compensation doesn’t pay for itself. Imagine paying for actual software engineering work.
You may want to educate yourself before spreading unnecessary FUD. Firefox is free and open source, and always has been. There’s no danger in Firefox becoming a paid browser because even if they tried, it would just be forked and maintained by another community or group.
Mozilla does have a for-profit arm called the Mozilla Corporation, and they manage the money received from Google and others. But that doesn’t mean Firefox is going to become paid even if Google gets broken up by the antitrust efforts of the US government.
Maintaining a web browser in the 2020s is an expensive thing to do. You need full time employees who specialise in all the systems that make up a browser, and can’t leave security-critical parts like ensuring the integrity of the JavaScript sandbox to volunteer hobbyists. It’s far from the only thing Mozilla spend money on, so if they need to mage cost savings, it won’t necessarily stop them being able to maintain Firefox, but another organisation picking it up if they do stop isn’t likely.
You are not totally wrong, but I think if you were totally right, the internet as a world-changing technology would have never come to be in the first place. An internet operated by a single company is basically just a cable service. I think right now there certainly is apathy in the public consciousness towards the value add of keeping the internet decentralized, because it is taken for granted. But I think this is temporary, human society has always been reactionary in that way, we let things back slide, until it gets bad, and we only do something about it when we feel the pain.
When the internet was becoming a world-changing technology, there weren’t thirty years of websites to keep working and malware to protect from, web standards were far simpler, and a much higher proportion of users were enthusiasts who were excited by anything they could get and didn’t mind if things were rough around the edges. Similarly, two brothers could make the world’s first aircraft that flew under its own power, and yet with the combined might of everyone working for Boeing, people are worried about airliner doors falling off and an eight-day space trip has become an eight-month one. Mature technologies need a lot more effort to build and maintain than emerging ones.
There are already other open source forks of Firefox that are community driven and maintained without employees or a for profit organization behind them. The obvious example is LibreWolf which describes itself as “a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom”. There’s no argument that maintaining a web browser is currently complex and needs to make security first decisions, but LibreWolf as an example shows us that it is not only possible but I argue proves it will continue even if Firefox as we know it goes away.
Those forks aren’t maintaining Firefox itself, just their own modifications. If a bug is found in Firefox, the LibreWolf team don’t have to fix it themselves, they can wait for Mozilla to do it, and incorporate the fix once it materialises. There are forks that diverge further, but they either get quickly abandoned after their creator realises how much of a headache maintenance will be, or they’re left with gaping security holes.
I’m a Librewolf fan too, but the majority of the hard work is done by Mozilla developers. Their work is very important too, but what they are doing is preconfiguring prefs, adding patches, and writing the patches sometimes. Much easier to be done as a team of volunteers.
I appreciate what you’re saying, and you’re not wrong about the level of effort. But I take exception to the implication that, somehow, paid developers are better developers than OSS or hobbyist ones.
Getting paid for something doesn’t make you good, or diligent. It doesn’t even make you competent.
But it does mean you can spend forty hours a week or thereabouts putting effort into a particular goal and maintaining the knowledge, skills and experience to keep doing it to a high standard without having to sink time and effort into something else in order to get paid enough to live on.
Because they have dedicated time. A contributor has his free time, and will contribute with work they are interested in, while still having to work at a job to be able to afford living.
Although thats probably not whats going to happen if google gets broken up but I‘ll still happily pay for firefox just for the sake of breaking up google.
Y’know, it never stops being exciting when you get to watch someone become one of today’s lucky 10,000.
@/u/caboose12000, I’ll add that the author is Alan Moore. The book is a masterpiece and absolutely worth reading. He also wrote V For Vendetta and honestly too many other increxible works to try to list here.