This is your daily reminder that Firefox and its derivatives exist and should be used wherever possible if you care about Google not having a monopoly over the internet. There's even a Firefox-based version of Discord called Datcord.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Absolutely. If you think you can switch when chrome will be completely hostile it will be too late.
The reason they are trying those things in chrome is because the market share of Firefox is currently low. They are counting that you won't have the option to run Firefox anymore, because sites will stop supporting it. Don't let that happen.
Also, Firefox is in a tough situation where they have to purposefully shoot themselves in the foot, because their builtin tracking protection means Firefox usually doesn't show up in a lot of browser usage stats.
I didn't think about it, though if that makes it harder to track it (can't they just check the user agent?) could that actually be good, as the sites will never know exactly how many users they will lose, so might be more hesitant to pull the trigger?
That would be true for competent web developers. Unfortunately, those are a vanishingly small subset.
No, they'll just see the management summary that Firefox occupies less than 0.5% of their users' marketshare and prioritize their budget accordingly.
That blocks user agent string? Answer: no it absolutely doesn't
Explain how this comment isn't completely wrong
If you use a third-party analytics service such as Google Analytics, as almost all serious parties do (with their nice dashboards and reports), then you'll notice Firefox is severely underrepresented because the request never reaches Google
I think that may be true if you set the privacy protection to strict, which is not default.
I wonder if it's underrepresented more so because people who use Firefox are more likely to install privacy centric extensions
Too late. Lumen5 crashes on Firefox. Google Cloud Console barely loads. I was a Firefox user for YEARS but finally had to uninstall this week. The amount of "Firefox is not supported" warnings and weird issues I was running into every day was getting a tad ridiculous.
Firefox is the only reasonable alternative to the Chrome monopoly right now, yes, but they too are going bad, we need more alternatives
Ladybird isn't ready yet but one to keep an eye on.
Thanks I didn't know about Datcord
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They probably couldn't get google drive to work without 3rd party cookies.
Nope, sorry. That technical hurdle is easily solved. In reality, this is about advertising and snooping.
Google worked on Privacy Sandbox/Topics API/FLoC for at least five years, and it couldn't get something that advertisers, regulators, and users could all agree on, so it's just falling back to the thing that worked (but has next to zero privacy protections). Sigh.
Yeah, this is a loss for user privacy.
Also a reminder that accepting an alternative tracking method is likely to just end up with 2 different ways to track you rather than one slightly less invasive one.
Google never had any intention whatsoever of prioritising your privacy over their advertising revenue. This technology was 100% designed to shut other operators out of the tracking and advertising market and 0% to reduce their ability to track you and advertise to you. Never in a million years were they going to spend a lot of time, effort and money destroying the source of their money. Hobble competitors, yes. Hobble themselves? Never. Not even a little bit.
I think that's a matter of perspective. IMO it didn't work, it was broken, that's why we're even talking about it.
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