I am one that switched. I have Linux Mint which I use 99.9% of the time, and a windows 10 laptop that I use 0.1% for that one windows program.
I think more people are wanting to get out of the grip that google, apple, and Microsoft have over them. Many are overwhelmed because they are in so deep. It took me months to get out, which I did about 6 years ago. I never looked back though. I know people that want out, but are not strong enough to commit to switching all their services and apps.
Seeing that half of my extensions (it was seriously like 10 of them) were going to be disabled is what pushed me to finally switch to Firefox because if I have to find alternatives to them it might as well be on another browser
The reason for this is because switching from Windows to Linux is a lot bigger change, requiring a fair amount of technical know-how, and even knowing that Linux exists in the first place. Swapping browsers is easy in the technical sense, it’s breaking the habit that’s the hard part, but if they piss people off enough all it takes is uninstalling it in order to break the habit, not a drastic paradigm shift. I’m a long time Chrome user, like over a decade and with the recent “unverified download” nonsense unless you enable their invasive tracking has put me over the edge. I had both the Chrome and Firefox icons pinned to the taskbar and just out of habit kept clicking it, I finally removed it last week
I’m not so sure about that. Windows despite its ads is still generally usable or at least readable, but adblockers affect almost every website, and in a much more extreme way, without which renders some websites virtually unusable. As someone else said, installing another browser is also far easier than taking backups, installing an entirely new OS, implementing your backups, and learning an entire new OS which may not readily support the software you have licensed from windows for most users.
Users care a lot about convenience. I expect that they weigh installing and learning linux etc as less convenient than the ads in windows which is why they would not switch, but I expect when it comes to this case, they would weigh installing a different browser with adblock as much more convenient than using the internet with ads on every single website.
I’ve actually been using Waterfox lately though because for some reason there’s a video codec issue on Firefox that makes YouTube videos not play correctly.
I’m not sure why it happens. It happens on every PC I have Firefox installed on (three of them). I should probably try and reduce my extension count to see if it works lol.
Oh no, they are about to lose the $0 that uBlock origin users bring!
They know they will lose users and they don’t care. They will make much more per user selling ads than before. Google is an ad company. They’re not a browser company, or a mobile OS company, or an office suite company. It’s all about ads.
Good point, but also it’s not that they will lose all of the user data they sell if people switch off Chrome, just the parts that chrome collects.
If they were blocking ublock users from accessing any google products then it would be purely a ‘we only care about ad revenue’
It would be very interesting to see the internal data they use to make these decisions, but also knowing tech these decisions were probably made by a series of mid level managers sufficiently sucking the air out of the room until a critical mass was hit to make this happen
They absolutely also get data through means other than their browser. But they data they get off of the browser directly is probably a shit load.
but also knowing tech these decisions were probably made by a series of mid level managers sufficiently sucking the air out of the room until a critical mass was hit to make this happen
1000%
I’m sure a bunch of bean counters were involved as well.
Google doesn’t sell user data, they sell user eyeballs. There’s no incentive for Google to sell user data since they’re an ad company and the only people who would buy the data are competitors.
Corpos like to lie, and their promises to not sell data is worthless. Even if they’re not outright selling data directly, or “anonymizing it” before selling it, at a bare minimum they’re still abusing the hoard of data they have to make a buck. They want that data and get large amounts of it through people’s broswers, even with adblockers installed.
Your first link talks about Google consuming data for its AI
Your next two links (which are talking about the same thing) talks about how other companies are abusing Google’s adbid system to try and collect correlated data against their own.
Love it or hate it, Google has been pretty transparent that they use your data for advertising, but nothing there talks about Google selling your data to third parties.
If you use anything Google, you are the product. This has been pretty obvious since the early 2000’s, yet people dive right into all the crap they release.
Counterpoint: so what? I’m not going to start paying for a search engine, or maps, or the dozen other Google services. Yeah, if I search for a lawn mower I will see lawn mower ads everywhere… and that’s actually better than seeing dishwasher ads or dating site ads.
I use Google since the beginning, and the o ly thing that would make me stop is if the quality of the product goes down (like the recent AI summaries that apparently they show in the US).
Actually if everyone paid for software instead it would be very cheap. Maybe like $1. Think about it, it only takes a tiny fraction of the people that use free open source alternatives to make a donation to keep those products going. I use all the alternatives to google. The only google product I use is YouTube. And I find alternatives VERY affordable and voluntary donations mostly. Take for example Microsoft Word and Excel, I switched to LibreOffice 6 years ago. It’s 100% as good. We are here on Lemmy instead of Reddit. And Firefox is every bit as good as chrome. I get it that once your are in the google system it’s hard to get out, and is a lot of learning and work to move over, but daym it feels good once the only google you use is YouTube. Supporting a load of little projects instead of the mighty google feels good also. The alternatives have come a long way. I made I list of alternatives and as a project switched over one by one. I have never looked back and don’t miss all the google demands for phone numbers etc. I am now in control instead of google.
I use Firefox (and chromium and even chrome at work) and lemmy, but nothing comes close to Google search, maps and YouTube content. I tried ddg and openstreet maps, not even close. Partially because of crowd sourced, privacy invading features like location tracking for traffic info. I even pay for YouTube premium, easily the cheapest entertainment around. The ads in the free version is crap because how disruptive they are, and I prefer to pay the creators than use an ad blocker (although new pipe is on my phone and yt-dlg on my computer for videos I really like and want to preserve).
For email Google has features that other clients just don’t, even tho I ran my own server, DNS domain with dkim, etc, I still prefer Gmail for 90% of my emails. Only friends and family get my non-gmail account. Spam filter, calendar integration, mobile Client, threads, consistency, customization…
Same for office. While I do have Libre office installed (and Next Cloud on my server) I mostly use Google Docs. I never know who I will need to share a document with, or open on mobile or somewhere else, Google docs just works.
I also loved Google Reader and used Google domains, but I don’t want to talk about that :D
Wow you use a lot of tech! Good share, thanks. I’m with you with Google maps, however check out “Organic Maps” I was very impressed with it (here in the UK) it finds shops and businesses, but no reviews obviously. I still use Google maps most of the time (on a separate phone that lives in the car), but Organic is really impressive, way ahead of the other map apps, definitely one to watch. Paying for YouTube is a great idea. I may do that also actually. I run a server with Mail-in-a-box for email. Yes it is just email basically, but I personally do not need or use more than that. And I love having unlimited aliases that all point to my main email. Also NextCloud is amazing yes. I love NextCloud. The other services you use I just don’t have a need for. But yes google = convenience. I bet there are good alternatives to document sharing. And I use Hover.com for domains.
I guess you want the internet to be a place for finding useful information, and/or the entertainment you choose to access, over it being a long uninteruptable stream of infomercials for crap products you have no interest in? Then groogle is not for you. In fact groogle is not for humanity.
With the direction FF is taking it’s gonna be forks for now.
The only thing that held me back from using LibreWolf over Firefox was that it disabled (automatic) dark mode on websites. I understand this is part of the “resist fingerprinting” configuration. There’s a workaround now ( bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1732114).
Sure, many of those people probably weren’t going to use it anyway, but plenty were. I installed it on my daughter’s Chromebook that she was forced to use for school.
Looks like you can, but if you have an older Chromebook (which most schools definitely have), it takes more work than I think a lot of people would be willing to do.
This was all about the news probably 2 years ago. Chrome uses a new api manifest that does not allow for changes in websites like blocking specific type of content. Once manifest v3 is fully implemented and enforced there will be no way for ublock origin to work correctly anymore.
The word “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your edit. The replacement for that dependency doesn’t allow an extension to work as an ad blocker as effectively as the thing they are deprecating. This is deliberate.
Could a grease monkey script do something similar? I’m probably just talking out of my butt, but it seems like GM can sometimes do things easier or better (or just at all) that extensions can’t or won’t do.