Whatever they say about "loving the Web", the Chrome team will choose Google's ad business over everything else, web standards, user agency, security, privacy, safety, interoperability, literally anything and everything else every single time.
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I mean, that's not entirely fair. There's also:
- Weird Paranoid Uncle Of Firefox, and
- Abandoned-On-A-Doorstep-At-Birth-But-Somehow-Surviving-And-Growing-Up-Fast-Cousin-Of Firefoxand a bunch of more seriously niche esoterica, but I think that covers it.
@mhoye I don't think we should ignore the tiny browser engines no one uses, because that kinda describes KHTML / Konqueror, before Apple threw a lot of dev resources at it to make WebKit / Safari. Something like Servo or even more obscure could be the basis for a real contender if they got enough resources.
Honestly my greatest fear is the LLM bubble takes too long to pop and does permanent damage to the FOSS ecosystem, including niche browsers, so such a dark horse browser becomes impossible.
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Whatever they say about "loving the Web", the Chrome team will choose Google's ad business over everything else, web standards, user agency, security, privacy, safety, interoperability, literally anything and everything else every single time.
What anyone on that team says they love or care about or want does not change anything they're going to do.
Get Firefox.
Yes, they're thrashing. Yes, the AI stuff is bullshit nobody wants.
Get Firefox, add uBlock Origin.
Eh. I use both Chrome & Firefox and I'm battling AI settings in Firefox too. Thankfully I have (so far) been able to turn everything off, but it's an unwanted game of whack-a-mole.
The article talks about uBlock Origin Lite but kind of handwaves it away. My experience has been that Lite works fine and blocks the shit I'm most worried about. Visiting the same sites with Chrome+Lite vs. Firefox+Full yield the same experience.
Clickbaity article is mostly clickbait.
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@mhoye I don't think we should ignore the tiny browser engines no one uses, because that kinda describes KHTML / Konqueror, before Apple threw a lot of dev resources at it to make WebKit / Safari. Something like Servo or even more obscure could be the basis for a real contender if they got enough resources.
Honestly my greatest fear is the LLM bubble takes too long to pop and does permanent damage to the FOSS ecosystem, including niche browsers, so such a dark horse browser becomes impossible.
@skyfaller Yeah, Servo is the "Abandoned-On-A-Doorstep-At-Birth" cousin I mentioned. I'm not daily driving it yet but I still play with it a few times a month and it's really coming along.
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@NormanDunbar @glitzersachen Respectfully, we can't ask people to buy, understand and install new hardware just to participate in the world with safety and privacy.
@mhoye @glitzersachen Agreed, 100%. I did put in my toot, "if you are able" for that very reason.
Your respect is returned!
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@skyfaller Yeah, Servo is the "Abandoned-On-A-Doorstep-At-Birth" cousin I mentioned. I'm not daily driving it yet but I still play with it a few times a month and it's really coming along.
@mhoye I'm just saying don't write off Dillo or Netsurf
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@mhoye I'm just saying don't write off Dillo or Netsurf
@skyfaller elinks4lyfe
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@mhoye I don't think we should ignore the tiny browser engines no one uses, because that kinda describes KHTML / Konqueror, before Apple threw a lot of dev resources at it to make WebKit / Safari. Something like Servo or even more obscure could be the basis for a real contender if they got enough resources.
Honestly my greatest fear is the LLM bubble takes too long to pop and does permanent damage to the FOSS ecosystem, including niche browsers, so such a dark horse browser becomes impossible.
@skyfaller @mhoye IIRC WebKit is abandoned and even Qt is using the Chrome engine, which is a shame, because I can't drive sites like here: https://www.grulic.org.ar/~mdione/glob/posts/implementing-selenium-with-python-and-qt/ One of my never-going-to-do projects is keep qt5 alive so I can.
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Whatever they say about "loving the Web", the Chrome team will choose Google's ad business over everything else, web standards, user agency, security, privacy, safety, interoperability, literally anything and everything else every single time.
What anyone on that team says they love or care about or want does not change anything they're going to do.
Get Firefox.
Yes, they're thrashing. Yes, the AI stuff is bullshit nobody wants.
Get Firefox, add uBlock Origin.
Brave, Ungoogled Chromium, and Helium are working fine with uBlock.
It's the google that is the problem.
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Eh. I use both Chrome & Firefox and I'm battling AI settings in Firefox too. Thankfully I have (so far) been able to turn everything off, but it's an unwanted game of whack-a-mole.
The article talks about uBlock Origin Lite but kind of handwaves it away. My experience has been that Lite works fine and blocks the shit I'm most worried about. Visiting the same sites with Chrome+Lite vs. Firefox+Full yield the same experience.
Clickbaity article is mostly clickbait.
@ralfmaximus @mhoye you can try librewolf for a firefox with most of the noise stripped out
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The current state of the browser ecosystem is fundamentally:
- Google Chrome
- Microsoft Chrome
- Apple Chrome
- Crypto-Neofash Chrome
- Microsoft Proxy Chrome
- Norwegian Chrome
- Other Norwegian Chrome
- Overtly-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many)
- Embedded-Corporate-Sock-Puppet Chrome (many,many)
- Serial-Numbers-Filed-Off Chrome, and- Firefox
So.
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Whatever they say about "loving the Web", the Chrome team will choose Google's ad business over everything else, web standards, user agency, security, privacy, safety, interoperability, literally anything and everything else every single time.
What anyone on that team says they love or care about or want does not change anything they're going to do.
Get Firefox.
Yes, they're thrashing. Yes, the AI stuff is bullshit nobody wants.
Get Firefox, add uBlock Origin.
@mhoye
Also get https://justthebrowser.com/ -
@ralfmaximus @mhoye you can try librewolf for a firefox with most of the noise stripped out
Real talk here: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for a decade, I've seen exactly how that sausage gets made, and I'm never going to install Librewolf.
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Whatever they say about "loving the Web", the Chrome team will choose Google's ad business over everything else, web standards, user agency, security, privacy, safety, interoperability, literally anything and everything else every single time.
What anyone on that team says they love or care about or want does not change anything they're going to do.
Get Firefox.
Yes, they're thrashing. Yes, the AI stuff is bullshit nobody wants.
Get Firefox, add uBlock Origin.
@mhoye@cosocial.ca if you don't want to configure anything yourself use @librewolf@chaos.social. It's basically Firefox with sane defaults.
https://librewolf.net/ -
@mhoye@cosocial.ca if you don't want to configure anything yourself use @librewolf@chaos.social. It's basically Firefox with sane defaults.
https://librewolf.net/Respectfully: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf is and how it's made and I will never install it.
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@mhoye or use Librewolf or Waterfox forks.
Librewolf removes all the AI and other questionnable features from Firefox and is a drop-in replacement.
(I have not tried or looked at Waterfox) -
The weird paranoid uncle is the Tor Browser. Respectfully, I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf and Waterfox are, I know exactly how they're made and I will never install either of them.
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Real talk here: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for a decade, I've seen exactly how that sausage gets made, and I'm never going to install Librewolf.
@mhoye do you know of any write ups around the why of that? @ralfmaximus
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Respectfully: I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf is and how it's made and I will never install it.
@mhoye@cosocial.ca ok now I'm interested. Any link recommendations where I could read up on the problematic aspects?
And the recommendation wasn't meant for you specifically, but for anyone stumbling upon your post. -
The weird paranoid uncle is the Tor Browser. Respectfully, I was Mozilla's engineering community manager for ten years. I know exactly what Librewolf and Waterfox are, I know exactly how they're made and I will never install either of them.
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I mean, that's not entirely fair. There's also:
- Weird Paranoid Uncle Of Firefox, and
- Abandoned-On-A-Doorstep-At-Birth-But-Somehow-Surviving-And-Growing-Up-Fast-Cousin-Of Firefoxand a bunch of more seriously niche esoterica, but I think that covers it.
@mhoye Seamonkey still works...
