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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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I never left Firefox, and I will never understand, why people were so quick to adopt Chrome which was Google controlled from the start. Google was already an obvious problem at the time (2008).
Google never had an interest in building the best browser for users. They are not a browser company, they are an advertiser. What they wanted is the best browser for Google, meaning the best browser for delivering advertising. They only made the best browser to attract users with no political foresight. That is becoming more and more obvious. Google has been trying to kill Firefox for a while, by making parts of their services not work quite as intended. While if you changed your user agent, it would work fine!
Another place here today, we can read how Google is trying to kill Jpeg XL or JXL, which is a superior graphics format to JPG PNG and GIF wrapped into 1. https://lemmy.world/post/2059816
Firefox really helped protect the Internet and Internet users from the shenanigans of Microsoft. It should come as no surprise, that Google wants to control the Internet, just as much as Microsoft did, from a pure business perspective, that's an obvious move, and our best defense is still Mozilla and Firefox and lawmakers that aren't corrupt. So don't elect trump to get another Ajit Pai who has no bigger wish than to kill net neutrality.
You have to realise that to most people, Google is not seen as a bad company - quite the opposite in fact. They have all these "free" products that do everything you need them to, so they've built-up a huge amount of trust with the general population.
Google is obviously trying to take over the web, but the regular person doesn't see this as they don't follow any of this news, nor do they actually care. Google has good, fast, free products, that's all people care about.
As someone deeply immersed in libre software and the Free Software Foundation, it pains me that my conversations are likely always going to be the first time people have actually seriously thought about their software freedom. It's really difficult unwinding decades and billions of dollars of corpocratic propaganda without resorting to shock and scare tactics.
I'm still going to do it because there's nothing else better to say. :D
You are right, maybe I tend to forget that is not obvious to everybody. But it's not like I believe Google is inherently bad or evil, they just have an enormous amount of power that I think very few people realize. Google search alone or YouTube alone can make or break companies, can shift elections, can shift popular opinion in general. That's to much power IMO.
Power corrupts as we know, and although Google is not worse than most, they aren't better either, and they are using their power in subtle ways, to promote their own interests.
Because for a long time Chrome was just much faster. It wasn't until a couple of months ago that Firefox started becoming performant enough for me to use as a daily driver. Even then, there's still issues with how slow it takes Mozilla to implement new web technologies like WebGPU, etc.
Yes because a bit faster short term, is worth sacrificing you freedom long term?
I will never get people like you.
Waaaaaaay more than "a bit". Like "imperceptible render time" vs 2s for firefox. That adds up a lot.
What freedom did I lose? I used chromium mostly.
Firefox has performance now, where it did't in the past. So I don't use chrome now.
See, I use the best tool for the job I can find, and that changes over time. For a while the was Chrome.
What freedom did I lose?
It's impossible to know which freedoms we have lost due to Chrome dominance. But from an ecosphere view point, you can see it very clearly on for instance iOS, where you can't sideload apps, and Apple for years prevented subscriptions to papers if they had any kind of nakedness. We only register those limitations when compared to options that don't have them.
On Gaming you have consoles, that are also somewhat closed ecospheres, where you cannot develop freely like on PC. Games that exist on both console and PC, often have way more options like downloadable mods often user generated. Those do not work on consoles, because the control from the owner of the platform has not allowed/facilitated it.
In the same way there are closed Google/Alphabet ecospheres like Android, Google search and YouTube, which together with Chrome browser dominance can be used to achieve competitive advantages that keep out competition.
The fact that they may not have succeeded, does not mean there was no danger. But there is evidence that they tried. For instance they tried to kill Firefox, by making services like Google maps not work 100% with Firefox. We now see Google has removed Jpeg XL support from Chrome. So your freedom to use that format has been taken away. They are preventing adblockers from working with a double sided strategy, on both Chrome AND Goggle services. So they are trying to take your freedom to use adblockers away too.
I bet there are 100s cases we don't know about, because mostly such things are done stealthily, some times they may not even be on purpose, but more for practicality. But the end result remains the same. Creating a closed ecosphere with very dominant control by one player, is almost guaranteed to limit your options long term. And limiting options is equal to taking away a bit of freedom.
Most people have no idea or don't care at all about privacy on the internet. Google has a solid set of "free" services that work well and a good enough reputation to convince them.
Wow you got 2 downvotes for stating an absolutely true statement, that describes a HUGE problem.
For us to lose all our rights and freedoms, it only takes enough people not to care. And that's the problem.
Google apps are a huge surveillance machine that absolutely threaten our freedom. Most people just don't give a shit, because it's convenient.
So a bit of speed short term, is enough to sacrifice your freedom long term?
Obviously I know it was faster, what I don't get is that people had no principles, and was ready to give everything up to a company clearly trying to control the Internet.
And that was even so shortly after we had similar problems with Microsoft, that we have now with Google.
I could understand your argument if we're talking about the choice today but don't act like Google 15 years ago was the same as it is today. They are vastly different companies.
i’m not sure you quite remember the leap in performance that chrome was.. it was night and day, and literally ushered in the era of performance being an actual concern for browsers
as much as i hate google, you’ve gotta credit them with starting that
and at the start, many (myself included) believed that googles motivation was to make the web fast to compete with native apps (they wanted the web platform to be what everyone used on their phones), because google can serve web ads across all platforms on the web, but native they mostly only control android
that still might have been the entirety of their original intent too! but now they have that dominance, they’re being evil with it
This Manifest V3 business with Chrome is going to be the trigger for me to jump ship.
If we spin up the way back machine, Chrome became popular as a competitor to Internet Explorer. Even though IE had the vast majority of market share it was a truly awful product. It was slow, unreliable, and insecure. Chrome resolved those issues and it was the reason I went with it at the time. Basically I was just looking to dump IE.
At the time Firefox was clunky, unpopular, and did not have good compatibility across all sites. Now that Chrome is less desirable we're left with Firefox as the best alternative. It's come a long way since IE and Chrome went head to head. It's a much better product now with a bigger user base.
Firefox was an excellent, fast, highly compatible, alternative to Internet Explorer. It was already winning when Chrome came on the scene. However, Firefox actually got more clunky and slower over time, so Chrome was a breath of fresh air in comparison. People like me who used Firefox back from version 0.6 jumped to Chrome because it was doing what Firefox used to do. Chrome was a genuinely better product for a long time, but then like Firefox, it too got slower and more clunky. Meanwhile, Firefox saw what they were up against and went back to their roots. Firefox has gotten a lot better in the last couple years.
Google also significantly pushed Chrome adoption by encouraging people to download it in Google search and Gmail.
That's probably true, but when I bailed on IE I tried both and Chrome was the better. I must have missed that early Firefox beats Chrome era. Even so I do remember having compatibility problems with Firefox on some sites and I simply couldn't stand the settings interface. In any case the current awfulness of Chrome removes any question. Chrome is only going downhill and it will probably pick up the pace.
Firefox compatibility got worse as Chrome became more popular. There was a time when Firefox was the standard that everyone developed to. I'm talking like 2003-2004 period. Case in point, to this day Chrome identifies itself as Firefox to websites to get the "Firefox" version of a webpage as opposed to the Internet Explorer version.
Firefox has never been slow and clunky. If anything, that was Chrome because it runs so much fucking bloat to scrape your data.
I disagree. I remember Firefox since the days it was called Phoenix (I even remember its grandad - Netscape Navigator) and it ALWAYS was very slow and buggy. Until very recent times when they did a big rewrite.
Firefox used to be very slow, very buggy and full of memory leaks.
I was a Firefox user until they started releasing major versions every few days which broke addons. Not sure how it is today but it was a hassle for a few weeks at least. I switched to chrome because it was the next best option back then.
Yes that was stupid, I don't deny Chrome could easily be seen as the better browser in some respects.
But it was still pretty obvious that we were on our way to the exact same problems we had with Internet Explorer, and Microsofts attempt to control the Internet, through extensions only available on IE, that were necessary to use several Microsoft technologies, when Microsoft had a monopoly.
So would you say Firefox has settled down in the last years? I don't like where chrome is going (not only privacy, the "dumbing down" sucks too) and tempted to switch back again. But it requires a bit of work
I'd say yes, there are still frequent upgrades, but IMO add-on breakage is not common anymore in my experience.
I have to admit though, that I'm not using nearly as many add-ons as I used to. uBlock Origin is my most important add-on, and Dark reader, and bypass paywall are also always on add-ons, and they have all worked flawlessly for years.
I'm on Manjaro Linux, so I get updates very frequently and early, although most are probably security updates. So I'm probably near max exposed to breakage, and haven't had problems with it since years ago, when an add-on for splitting windows into panels broke after being unmaintained for quite a while.
Alternatively, you might want to try Chromium, which allegedly should be like Chrome but without the Google shenanigans.
Personally I prefer to not use that either, because it's still heavily influenced by the development of Chrome, but I guess it's better than Chrome from a freedom perspective.
It's easy to forget now, but IE was such absolute dogshit for years that literally anything else was better
Back in the day Firefox delivered the same look and feel with a better experience than IE did.