Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome
arstechnica.com
Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a "topic" list it shares with advertisers.

Google is now rolling out a system where Chrome directly tracks your activity and shares its summary with advertisers.

Also Firefox is faster as of like two months ago.

It takes five minutes to switch browsers, and the difference is so little that you’ll often forget you did it.

  • raven [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    10 months ago

    Using chromium, ungoogled chromium, brave (reactionary baggage), vivaldi, opera, etc is not good enough. We must switch to Firefox specifically.

    All the Chrome forks I mentioned above use the same chrome rendering engine, called blink. When you use blink you’re helping google take over the web. Firefox is already on the shitlist of every major website because they refuse to prevent the user from installing things like adblockers and privacy extensions like Chrome does with manifest v3 and soon with their new Web Environment Integrity system. They cannot wait to throw up a “your browser is no longer supported :(” page for all Firefox users, and when that happens it will be over for our fox friend.

    • sovietknuckles [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      They cannot wait to throw up a “your browser is no longer supported :(” page for all Firefox users, and when that happens it will be over for our fox friend.

      Whenever you see a site that does this, or a site that works on Chrome but not Firefox, report it at webcompat.com. Doing that will create an issue in github.com/webcompat/web-bugs.

      For sites that are intentionally blocking Firefox users, Mozilla adds interventions or user agent overrides for those specific pages or scripts (go to about:compat in Firefox to see a list of them) to make it work with Firefox, even on sites trying to block Firefox.

    • Clever_Clover [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Honestly, manifest v3 can’t come soon enough, the enshitification of chrome would mean more people moving to Firefox, so, I think it would be a good thing to force all chrome users to look at ads, simply to give them a ‘real’ (since privacy isn’t annoying or something you feel with every page you click) reason to switch

  • bennypr0fane@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    3·
    1 month ago

    NOW you think it’s time to stop using Chrome? How about a decade ago? Ideally, when a gigantic, publicly owned monopolist makes stuff, you never even start using it.

  • albigu@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Not sure if this Chrome thing also applies to mobile, but this is as good time as any to remind people that you can now install uBlock Origin (and many other useful extensions) on the android firefox app.

    • LoveSausage@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Problem is webview , until there is an option from Firefox. You can either use the chrome one. Or use the chrome one. Whatever browser you use. So adding Firefox mobile only give you issues from Firefox on top of issues with chrome.

  • ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    To the people saying chromium is fine, do you know what Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE) is? Maybe you’ve heard of it in passing, but don’t really know what it is.

    The web is built on standards, which is supposed to mean that no one entity dictates how the internet works. Microsoft pioneered the EEE strategy in the 90’s in an attempt to kill off HTML and replace it a proprietary alternative. This was brought to light during an antitrust trial against Microsoft. It is literally a strategy designed to centralize commonly held standards into the hands of a single corporation.

    When you see a popular product created by a corporation which offers a stripped down open source alternative, understand the end goal is to monopolize that product niche and encircle all the labor contained within the commons to enshittify the product (start offering subscriptions, selling ad data, putting more and more features behind a paywall, etc).

    This applies to Chrome and Chromium. It also applies to VS Code (Copilot seems to be the Killer Feature they’re attempting to do this with right now). But when a website works on Chromium but not on Firefox, it is almost always because Firefox is not implementing features which haven’t been ratified as web standards yet.

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    If a simply migrate tool existed that could preserve everyone’s bookmarks, saved passwords, saved banking details, settings, etc and transfer them to firefox or other browsers it would be significantly easier to get people to move.

    The biggest blockade I am seeing in getting people to move is not their love of google, it is the stickyness that having all of their shit built up in the browser causes. A simple and easy to migrate method would get people off it.

    • dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Chrome reading list is just a knock off of pocket which Mozilla owns and is integrated into Firefox.