this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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[–] nyakojiru@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Horrific but strategically inevitable, switch to chromium engine, and do your own privacy related fork . Like all the other browsers.

[–] samuelc@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

fork

what if google chrome decided to close the fork by changing the license to something restructive, i mean the fork can goes on for a little while but we are still depending on the resources of a Big $$ corporation....

firefox is the only way for a free web....

[–] jcg@halubilo.social 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Then they'd be alienating the open source community that makes a lot of contributions (though much of chromium is still essentially built internally). They also wouldn't be able to lock down the code that's already been released under the more permissive BSD license.

Now, a fork of Chromium is its own beast. Some searching shows that just to build it takes 30 minutes on a decent workstation. It's huge, which makes me think it's the kind of project that could only really be maintained by a large company. Not necessarily a Google sized company, but a large one nonetheless if you seriously want to remove the dependency on Google.

EDIT: turns out it's Chrome that takes that long to build, which includes things not in Chromium like Widevine, licensed codecs, telemetry, sync, that kind of thing.

[–] scytale@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I tried doing my annual vehicle registration online on FF yesterday and the dmv site kept throwing an error and bringing me back to step 1 when I submit my payment information. Tried turning off all my extensions and still wouldn’t budge. Finally tried it in Chrome and it worked instantly. You’d think government websites of all places would have compatibility with most popular browsers.

[–] shotgun_crab@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Government websites don't care at all about support, most of them were made 15-20 years ago and haven't been updated at all

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

Well, those will work in Firefox just fine...

[–] Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

TIL Samsung makes a browser.

[–] tyrant@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And it apparently has just .6% less market share than the mighty Firefox

[–] Knusper@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

Yeah, people will use anything, if it comes as default...

[–] Waluigis_Talking_Buttplug@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So changing the user agent to chrome to fool websites that work shittier on non chromium stuff will ruin this metric?

[–] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

No, what this means is sites might start adopting features like PassKeys - a major browser feature that works in every browser except FireFox and one where you just might not be able to access the service, at all, unless your browser has support.

(Passkeys are a replacement for passwords - essentially the idea is to take the technology commonly used for second factor authentication and use it as your "first factor" instead)

[–] mormund@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

Maybe its because I'm on Nightly but PassKeys work natively for me on Windows 11 with Firefox already

[–] red@sopuli.xyz 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I am personally unaware of any serious reason to believe that Firefox’s numbers will improve soon.

Yeah about that. Manifest V3 will infuse Firefox userbase nicely come next summer.

[–] Firipu@startrek.website 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Get out of the lemmy Foss bubble and ask again. I don't know anybody that actually gives a fuck about manifest v3 tbh.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They will care about their adblocker no longer working

[–] Blackmist@feddit.uk 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Given the amount of people all too happy to use Chrome on Android where you can't block ads easily, I doubt it.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

That's usually not because they don't care but because they don't know that ads can be blocked on the phone as well

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Really sad. In Germany, Firefox sits comfortably at 10% market share, and actually is having a slight uptick in the last month.

[–] silencioso@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Wait until Google implements manifest V3 and "kills" adblockers. Firefox will become cool again for the normies.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I will wait and see. We could see Google pulling it's weight to convince publishers to start blocking Firefox. Google is not just going to sit and watch its market share shrink.

[–] crispy_kilt@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

They will get rekt by Vestager faster than they can say "profits"

[–] Kekzkrieger@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

People are so used to seeing ads they probably wont bother, i have friends who work in IT who just acceppt that half of the sites they visit are full of annoying flashy and intrusive ads.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) provides a comprehensive set of standards which guide those who build the U.S. government’s many websites. Its documentation for developers borrows a “2% rule” from its British counterpart:
. . . we officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov.

Reminder to self to always use FF when visiting .gov sites.

[–] yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.ml 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for the excerpt. I initially interpreted the title as US government agencies will stop using Firefox, not US government agencies will stop requiring their web masters to test in Firefox.

[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I’d imagine that effectively means agencies would stop using Firefox, if they can’t use it on their own sites.

[–] _s10e@feddit.de 0 points 11 months ago

Websites built for Chrome do work in Firefox.