14 ms·

If you care at all about privacy and the future of a free Internet, this really should be that watershed moment that makes you take your head out of the sand.

If you care at all about privacy and the future of a free Internet, this really should be that watershed moment that makes you take your head out of the sand. Seriously. Uninstall Chrome today and switch to something else. It’s only if enough people do it that they lose their grip and influence.

insanitybit 3y ago
What does a "free" internet look like without ads? Serious question, because right now ads pay for a lot. Ads are why we have reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like. Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student. If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'll show them cars" but they can't actually track that person or attribute information to them other than "likes cars".
- BanazirGalbasi 3y ago
  They're not talking about free as in no monetary cost, they're talking about free as in freedom. Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows. I have repeatedly come across sites that don't even test on Firefox because Chrome is just the default now. If you don't want to be cornered into a single option that invades your privacy, now is the time to pay attention.
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    I know what they're saying. I'm asking what the internet is going to look like when there's no advertising, and I'm pointing out what advertising currently allows for. > Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows What does that have to do with privacy or advertising? > invades your privacy I'm comfortable with a company seeing "<random id> likes cars" tbh
    - cool_dude85 3y ago
      You set up a false equivalence. Why is the choice between these kinds of features, which lock Google in as the sole controller of online advertising, and no advertising?
      - insanitybit 3y ago
        I don't think I'm setting that up, but maybe I'm not understanding. Because to me what Google is doing is a clear attempt at maintaining the status quo of an ad-funded internet while removing the ability for fine-grained 3rd party tracking. So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to hear what the alternatives are. What is it people are asking for? What's the implementation of this that you think would be better?
        lelandbatey 3y ago
        It's a threat to the "free" (as in freedom) internet in that with this as the tracking mechanism, Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests. It effectively makes "serves you ads and tracks your interests" a core part of what it means for a browser (Chrome) to be a browser. Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." The point is that it hands over a lot of control. What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? Could that be used to try to target folks seeking abortions, potentially with legal action? All of these are hypotheticals, but they're all potential destinations if we continue in this direction. Hence the EFFs warning.
        insanitybit 3y ago
        > Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests But Chrome doesn't send Google that data. The data doesn't leave Chrome. What leaves are the features. > "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." But behavior and identity are not being conveyed in this instance. > The point is that it hands over a lot of control. But you can disable it. > What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? That would suck, but: a) If this is done as intended it's anonymous b) That would be insane
- sp332 3y ago
  You can do ads without tracking.
  - dpkirchner 3y ago
    You can even host them on your own server, and vet them for quality and security.
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    True, you absolutely can. They'll potentially make much less money, and I don't know that that's sustainable but I think it's at least an alternative worth talking about. I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, "<random user id likes cars>" is not a privacy violation.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Newspapers ran for decades without any tracking, and they had to make and distribute physical objects.
      - insanitybit 3y ago
        Ah yes, print media, a thriving business.
    - NewsyHacker 3y ago
      Wordpress was founded, and hosted-Wordpress services ran for years, in an era where there was only non-personalized advertising. Why do you feel it would be unsustainable? As long as you limit media storage space and plugins, simple blogs cost extremely little to host per user.
      - insanitybit 3y ago
        I didn't say it's not sustainable, I'm saying it's potentially not sustainable. Sustainability of tracking-free ads would be a good conversation to have.
- throwawa14223 3y ago
  The internet existed without ads and big centralized sites. People ran their own sites, link rings, email and other services. The big guys have taken away so much of the ability to effectively self-host, but fundamentally we do not need them and we do not need ads.
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    You're talking about the internet when it was tiny and inaccessible, and you're acting like that was good. That's a position to take, but I don't think it's a good one - again, I would not have been able to write my blog for free, the sites we take for granted today would not exist. The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.
    - suslik 3y ago
      There a plenty of non-ad-driver services that allow hosting blogs for free. Github, cloudfare’s free tier, and many others - and you can certainly find a one-click vm deployment of a blogging platform for less then 5$. I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.
      - insanitybit 3y ago
        All of those businesses subsidize their sites because they're billion dollar companies. Is that better than just... using ads? > I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy. I'm saying someone has to pay for it.
        skydhash 3y ago
        Hosting a static cheap is cheap. And even something powered by a CMS can be hosted on a cheap droplet. No one really expects you to share contents like video and music for free (and even that can be done cheaply if you’re only loking at a few TB of monthly bandwith). So yeah, someone should pay for it, but the internet itself isn’t free and everyone is paying for it.
- stubish 3y ago
  Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. And that would be less without all the crap needed to serve ads and track users and monetize everything. I can't wait to find out what an ad-free Internet looks like. Maybe more like when I was a student, and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle. Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services, because they no longer have to compete with free crap. Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity. An ad-full Internet is harmful, polluting our minds to the point people consider it normal and making them afraid of what could only be positive change.
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    > Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career. > and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon". > Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising. > Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?
    - g-b-r 3y ago
      Things were already free before the advertising boom, internet was not really worse twenty years ago
    - ifz 3y ago
      Nowadays, you can get a free VM from some providers (GCP) and there are lots of sites where you can deploy a static website for free (github pages). I'd argue deploying something for free is easier than ever.
- beej71 3y ago
  But ads aren't going away. Maybe eventually all tracking goes away (probably in the EU first), but ads never do. And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers. And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too. Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
- ornornor 3y ago
  > reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like. I don’t know how good of an example these sites are. They’re turning into gigantic dumpster fires very fast.
- Erratic6576 3y ago
  [dead]
Always42 3y ago
this. I went as far as uninstalling chrome ~1 year ago on my daily driver personal desktop. I use firefox as much as possible at work, but it is "not supported" by our IT department. Confluence doesn't even work properly with firefox, its insane. Try pasting a photo you copied into your clipboard (by selecting the file) into confluence and it wont work.
- goku12 3y ago
  With the future of the open web and privacy at stake, it's imperative that we stop letting the IT department or some random web service from dictating our choice of web browsers based on their convenience. If something doesn't work on Firefox, we should be collectively putting pressure on those in charge, letting them know that their laziness and lame excuses amount to forcing us to install spyware on our system.
  - cpeterso 3y ago
    You can report websites that don’t work in Firefox on webcompat.com and Mozilla web developers will test and diagnose the problem. When possible, they attempt to reach web developers at the site (using personal contacts or referrals when official channels aren’t working) to share the bug report and a suggested fix. In other cases, Firefox can include a site intervention script to patch the site or send a different browser User-Agent string to make it work.
- grogenaut 3y ago
  Use chrome for work and ff for everything else. You should keep your work and personal stuff separate anyway.
  - MegaDeKay 3y ago
    There are at least two other ways to keep these things separate while only using Firefox: containers and profiles.
contravariant 3y ago
Also, switch to something non-Chromium if at all possible. Which brings us in the paradoxical situation that if you want there to be any choice left at all in browsers then you're pretty much forced to choose firefox.
- _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  You seem to think that a choice of two things isn't a choice. If/when Firefox disappears and you only have chrome, that is what I would call not having a choice. To repeat: if you can choose between two things then you've got a choice.
  - aqfamnzc 3y ago
    GP is saying that yes, you have a choice now, but if you want to preserve that choice, you should use Firefox.
    - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
      You're right, I misunderstood. Thanks.
- Liquix 3y ago
  ...which leads to yet another paradoxical situation: 80-90%+ of Mozilla's yearly revenue comes from google [0]. they keep firefox afloat (with 3% market share) with the sole purpose of avoiding antitrust action vs. chrome. IMHO if Firefox starts gaining traction big G takes the gloves off and employs different tactics to protect the vertical integration. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    The more people that use Firefox, the more revenue Mozilla will earn as there are various ancillary services they sell and integrate into Firefox, along with things like sponsor links.
ianlevesque 3y ago
I’m far more worried about attestation features that will force you to use the browser sites want you to use than I am about any browser-specific targeting “feature.”
burningChrome 3y ago
I stopped using Chrome in all my personal stuff years ago, but its getting harder and harder to find a browser not based on Chrome. My work? Yeah, they switched from Firefox to Chrome since Chrome updated their license faster. If you want to get FF installed on your laptop now, it takes an act of congress. Even as a developer you have to go through a process to get it installed; they discourage it that much. You also get a FF version that is about 4 versions older than the current stable version.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Switched to Firefox from Chrome a few months ago and most days I barely notice. I see no disadvantage to switching.
j-bos 3y ago
Hear hear. Of course, on my workstation Chrome is "the recommended browser for internal applications" and firefox is a developer special request which is not allowed to support add-ons
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Do they allow extensions on Chrome?
  - j-bos 3y ago
    They do, approved extensions. But for example dark mode can be added to chrome, but not to ff.
- chii 3y ago
  The chrome add-on system has the ability for the management organisation to set a whitelist for your corporate computer. I don't recall this to be the case for Firefox (that may have changed by now?). So you can only use vanilla Firefox in a corporate managed profile.
  - j-bos 3y ago
    So in the org I work for, we aren't allowed to add through the normal chrome extensions process. Instead you must request the add on in an intranet app, assuming it's preapproved, and then reload your desktop applications.
dreamer7 3y ago
I now use Firefox Focus as my default phone browser. It's great! Lacks a lot of the gestures that make Chrome good. But it deletes tab history by default on closing the app which makes it an adequate sandbox to open one-off links in
- jlokier 3y ago
  Same here. Firefox Focus has worked excellently as my default phone browser for years. I feel confident clicking randomly on cookie popups, knowing all the cookies will be gone by the time I close the page so they don't matter. When set as the default brower, it also provides the in-app web view to other apps (e.g. inside LinkedIn). There it works fine too (also with that cookie-deleting confidence), and it has a drop-down to "Open in Firefox Focus", which is rarely needed but I found it useful for the full experience outside the app web view. That opens near-instantly without reloading, as it just transfers the already open page state.
mderazon 3y ago
I really wish other browsers were supported natively in ChromeOS as I really like the OS but would prefer to use Firefox
- treyd 3y ago
  I don't know how this isn't an antitrust thing since Microsoft was almost broken up over basically the same thing. Just goes to show how cocky megacorps have gotten.
- Andrex 3y ago
  Both the Android and ARM Linux versions of Firefox are available and installable on ChromeOS. Google has been taking steps to decouple Chrome from the base OS for a bit now[0]. 0. https://chromeunboxed.com/lacros-chrome-browser-chromebooks-roll-out-one-year/ https://chromeunboxed.com/lacros-chrome-browser-chromebooks-...
  - mderazon 3y ago
    Android version on a PC is not a good experience. The Linux Firefox is installable on ChromeOs but takes a lot of time to load and feels second class
grogenaut 3y ago
I've treated chrome like I used to treat explorer... I use it for work because saas and internal apps are often only tested on one platform. I use ff for everything else. Funny thing is chrome is breaking a ton of internal Amazon tools as they're killing tamper monkey which is used to a very high level inside.
rnd0 3y ago
Every single person could switch and it wouldn't make enough of a dent to change anything -that, and also change to what? Firefox? Who's one of the the largest sponsors of Firefox -if not the largest- again?
autoexec 3y ago
You're absolutely right. Google has no respect at all for people's privacy and it's pointless to endlessly change settings in their adversarial browser to keep some (but not all) of our data from leaking. Google is just going to keep coming up with new options we'll have to change, or silently change our settings following an update to allow more data collection, or even just ignore our settings and do whatever they want anyway. You can't use untrustworthy user-hostile software and expect to not be constantly taken advantage of. Taking people's private data and handing it over to Google is what chrome was designed to do from day one.
M95D 3y ago
You are speaking to the wrong people. User have no power to change anything. Instead of asking users to uninstall Chrome, ask web devs to make sites compatible with something other than Chrome. As an example, I would use Links a lot more if OpenWrt forum would work.

insanitybit 3y ago

What does a "free" internet look like without ads? Serious question, because right now ads pay for a lot. Ads are why we have reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like. Ads are why I could run a wordpress blog as a young student. If you assume "the current internet is good, but we want to improve privacy" what Google is doing makes sense. Advertisers can still say "ok that person likes cars I'll show them cars" but they can't actually track that person or attribute information to them other than "likes cars".

BanazirGalbasi 3y ago
They're not talking about free as in no monetary cost, they're talking about free as in freedom. Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows. I have repeatedly come across sites that don't even test on Firefox because Chrome is just the default now. If you don't want to be cornered into a single option that invades your privacy, now is the time to pay attention.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  I know what they're saying. I'm asking what the internet is going to look like when there's no advertising, and I'm pointing out what advertising currently allows for. > Google has enough market share that they can just make their own standards and everyone else just follows What does that have to do with privacy or advertising? > invades your privacy I'm comfortable with a company seeing "<random id> likes cars" tbh
  - cool_dude85 3y ago
    You set up a false equivalence. Why is the choice between these kinds of features, which lock Google in as the sole controller of online advertising, and no advertising?
    - insanitybit 3y ago
      I don't think I'm setting that up, but maybe I'm not understanding. Because to me what Google is doing is a clear attempt at maintaining the status quo of an ad-funded internet while removing the ability for fine-grained 3rd party tracking. So when people say this is a threat to the "free internet" I'm asking what that means - because right now the status quo has a lot of upsides, a few of which I listed. I want to hear what the alternatives are. What is it people are asking for? What's the implementation of this that you think would be better?
      - lelandbatey 3y ago
        It's a threat to the "free" (as in freedom) internet in that with this as the tracking mechanism, Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests. It effectively makes "serves you ads and tracks your interests" a core part of what it means for a browser (Chrome) to be a browser. Many folks feel like this is a capitalism-flavored move on par with "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." The point is that it hands over a lot of control. What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? Could that be used to try to target folks seeking abortions, potentially with legal action? All of these are hypotheticals, but they're all potential destinations if we continue in this direction. Hence the EFFs warning.
        insanitybit 3y ago
        > Google via Chrome is directly tracking your interests But Chrome doesn't send Google that data. The data doesn't leave Chrome. What leaves are the features. > "all phones should track the bad behavior of their owners and report it to the government." But behavior and identity are not being conveyed in this instance. > The point is that it hands over a lot of control. But you can disable it. > What if Google decides to expand the topics to include things like "seeking reproductive care" in a state like Texas? That would suck, but: a) If this is done as intended it's anonymous b) That would be insane
sp332 3y ago
You can do ads without tracking.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  You can even host them on your own server, and vet them for quality and security.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  True, you absolutely can. They'll potentially make much less money, and I don't know that that's sustainable but I think it's at least an alternative worth talking about. I think the other question would be "can you do tracking without violating privacy". To me, "<random user id likes cars>" is not a privacy violation.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Newspapers ran for decades without any tracking, and they had to make and distribute physical objects.
    - insanitybit 3y ago
      Ah yes, print media, a thriving business.
  - NewsyHacker 3y ago
    Wordpress was founded, and hosted-Wordpress services ran for years, in an era where there was only non-personalized advertising. Why do you feel it would be unsustainable? As long as you limit media storage space and plugins, simple blogs cost extremely little to host per user.
    - insanitybit 3y ago
      I didn't say it's not sustainable, I'm saying it's potentially not sustainable. Sustainability of tracking-free ads would be a good conversation to have.
throwawa14223 3y ago
The internet existed without ads and big centralized sites. People ran their own sites, link rings, email and other services. The big guys have taken away so much of the ability to effectively self-host, but fundamentally we do not need them and we do not need ads.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  You're talking about the internet when it was tiny and inaccessible, and you're acting like that was good. That's a position to take, but I don't think it's a good one - again, I would not have been able to write my blog for free, the sites we take for granted today would not exist. The only way to actually publish would be to have technical skills and money, which I don't think is good.
  - suslik 3y ago
    There a plenty of non-ad-driver services that allow hosting blogs for free. Github, cloudfare’s free tier, and many others - and you can certainly find a one-click vm deployment of a blogging platform for less then 5$. I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy.
    - insanitybit 3y ago
      All of those businesses subsidize their sites because they're billion dollar companies. Is that better than just... using ads? > I believe this implies that saying that you must have ads to have free online services is a fallacy. I'm saying someone has to pay for it.
      - skydhash 3y ago
        Hosting a static cheap is cheap. And even something powered by a CMS can be hosted on a cheap droplet. No one really expects you to share contents like video and music for free (and even that can be done cheaply if you’re only loking at a few TB of monthly bandwith). So yeah, someone should pay for it, but the internet itself isn’t free and everyone is paying for it.
stubish 3y ago
Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. And that would be less without all the crap needed to serve ads and track users and monetize everything. I can't wait to find out what an ad-free Internet looks like. Maybe more like when I was a student, and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle. Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services, because they no longer have to compete with free crap. Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity. An ad-full Internet is harmful, polluting our minds to the point people consider it normal and making them afraid of what could only be positive change.
- insanitybit 3y ago
  > Even today, a Wordpress blog costs about as much as a coffee per month. I was able to do it for free because of ads. I was a teenager just getting into computer security, I had a $0 budget. That blog is why I even have a career. > and stuff got put up because people were interested rather than as a side hustle How are people who are interested going to put something up? They'll have to pay for it. Say goodbye to "I'm a random person with a random interest, oh sweet I can post about it online" and hello to "Sponsor this content on patreon". > Perhaps cheap subscriptions or microtransactions for quality, curated content such as news services All of this "I'll just pay for it" stuff ignores that the only reason you can find content creators to pay directly is because they have free platforms like Youtube that are paid for by advertising. > Or some other novel business model will emerge, making a new generation of people rich, thanks to human ingenuity So propose it. I'm all for this. Give me a new business model that doesn't involve ads and let people choose. Go for it. But maybe let's not break the entire internet before we even have an idea of what that will look like?
  - g-b-r 3y ago
    Things were already free before the advertising boom, internet was not really worse twenty years ago
  - ifz 3y ago
    Nowadays, you can get a free VM from some providers (GCP) and there are lots of sites where you can deploy a static website for free (github pages). I'd argue deploying something for free is easier than ever.
beej71 3y ago
But ads aren't going away. Maybe eventually all tracking goes away (probably in the EU first), but ads never do. And even if they did, just imagine all the sites that solely use ads vanishing. And there you have it. You can still do shopping and banking. You can still subscribe to newspapers. And you could have run your blog for free with no ads on SDF, and you could host videos there, too. Sure, it wouldn't be the same as today's Internet, but like I said, since ads aren't going away, it's just an interesting thought experiment.
ornornor 3y ago
> reddit and twitter - two sites that I think a lot of people like. I don’t know how good of an example these sites are. They’re turning into gigantic dumpster fires very fast.
Erratic6576 3y ago
[dead]

Always42 3y ago

this. I went as far as uninstalling chrome ~1 year ago on my daily driver personal desktop. I use firefox as much as possible at work, but it is "not supported" by our IT department. Confluence doesn't even work properly with firefox, its insane. Try pasting a photo you copied into your clipboard (by selecting the file) into confluence and it wont work.

goku12 3y ago
With the future of the open web and privacy at stake, it's imperative that we stop letting the IT department or some random web service from dictating our choice of web browsers based on their convenience. If something doesn't work on Firefox, we should be collectively putting pressure on those in charge, letting them know that their laziness and lame excuses amount to forcing us to install spyware on our system.
- cpeterso 3y ago
  You can report websites that don’t work in Firefox on webcompat.com and Mozilla web developers will test and diagnose the problem. When possible, they attempt to reach web developers at the site (using personal contacts or referrals when official channels aren’t working) to share the bug report and a suggested fix. In other cases, Firefox can include a site intervention script to patch the site or send a different browser User-Agent string to make it work.
grogenaut 3y ago
Use chrome for work and ff for everything else. You should keep your work and personal stuff separate anyway.
- MegaDeKay 3y ago
  There are at least two other ways to keep these things separate while only using Firefox: containers and profiles.

contravariant 3y ago

Also, switch to something non-Chromium if at all possible. Which brings us in the paradoxical situation that if you want there to be any choice left at all in browsers then you're pretty much forced to choose firefox.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
You seem to think that a choice of two things isn't a choice. If/when Firefox disappears and you only have chrome, that is what I would call not having a choice. To repeat: if you can choose between two things then you've got a choice.
- aqfamnzc 3y ago
  GP is saying that yes, you have a choice now, but if you want to preserve that choice, you should use Firefox.
  - _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    You're right, I misunderstood. Thanks.
Liquix 3y ago
...which leads to yet another paradoxical situation: 80-90%+ of Mozilla's yearly revenue comes from google [0]. they keep firefox afloat (with 3% market share) with the sole purpose of avoiding antitrust action vs. chrome. IMHO if Firefox starts gaining traction big G takes the gloves off and employs different tactics to protect the vertical integration. [0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-google-search-deal-for-firefox https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  The more people that use Firefox, the more revenue Mozilla will earn as there are various ancillary services they sell and integrate into Firefox, along with things like sponsor links.

ianlevesque 3y ago

I’m far more worried about attestation features that will force you to use the browser sites want you to use than I am about any browser-specific targeting “feature.”

burningChrome 3y ago

I stopped using Chrome in all my personal stuff years ago, but its getting harder and harder to find a browser not based on Chrome. My work? Yeah, they switched from Firefox to Chrome since Chrome updated their license faster. If you want to get FF installed on your laptop now, it takes an act of congress. Even as a developer you have to go through a process to get it installed; they discourage it that much. You also get a FF version that is about 4 versions older than the current stable version.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Switched to Firefox from Chrome a few months ago and most days I barely notice. I see no disadvantage to switching.

j-bos 3y ago

Hear hear. Of course, on my workstation Chrome is "the recommended browser for internal applications" and firefox is a developer special request which is not allowed to support add-ons

paulryanrogers 3y ago
Do they allow extensions on Chrome?
- j-bos 3y ago
  They do, approved extensions. But for example dark mode can be added to chrome, but not to ff.
chii 3y ago
The chrome add-on system has the ability for the management organisation to set a whitelist for your corporate computer. I don't recall this to be the case for Firefox (that may have changed by now?). So you can only use vanilla Firefox in a corporate managed profile.
- j-bos 3y ago
  So in the org I work for, we aren't allowed to add through the normal chrome extensions process. Instead you must request the add on in an intranet app, assuming it's preapproved, and then reload your desktop applications.

dreamer7 3y ago

I now use Firefox Focus as my default phone browser. It's great! Lacks a lot of the gestures that make Chrome good. But it deletes tab history by default on closing the app which makes it an adequate sandbox to open one-off links in

jlokier 3y ago
Same here. Firefox Focus has worked excellently as my default phone browser for years. I feel confident clicking randomly on cookie popups, knowing all the cookies will be gone by the time I close the page so they don't matter. When set as the default brower, it also provides the in-app web view to other apps (e.g. inside LinkedIn). There it works fine too (also with that cookie-deleting confidence), and it has a drop-down to "Open in Firefox Focus", which is rarely needed but I found it useful for the full experience outside the app web view. That opens near-instantly without reloading, as it just transfers the already open page state.

mderazon 3y ago

I really wish other browsers were supported natively in ChromeOS as I really like the OS but would prefer to use Firefox

treyd 3y ago
I don't know how this isn't an antitrust thing since Microsoft was almost broken up over basically the same thing. Just goes to show how cocky megacorps have gotten.
Andrex 3y ago
Both the Android and ARM Linux versions of Firefox are available and installable on ChromeOS. Google has been taking steps to decouple Chrome from the base OS for a bit now[0]. 0. https://chromeunboxed.com/lacros-chrome-browser-chromebooks-roll-out-one-year/ https://chromeunboxed.com/lacros-chrome-browser-chromebooks-...
- mderazon 3y ago
  Android version on a PC is not a good experience. The Linux Firefox is installable on ChromeOs but takes a lot of time to load and feels second class

grogenaut 3y ago

I've treated chrome like I used to treat explorer... I use it for work because saas and internal apps are often only tested on one platform. I use ff for everything else. Funny thing is chrome is breaking a ton of internal Amazon tools as they're killing tamper monkey which is used to a very high level inside.

rnd0 3y ago

Every single person could switch and it wouldn't make enough of a dent to change anything -that, and also change to what? Firefox? Who's one of the the largest sponsors of Firefox -if not the largest- again?

autoexec 3y ago

You're absolutely right. Google has no respect at all for people's privacy and it's pointless to endlessly change settings in their adversarial browser to keep some (but not all) of our data from leaking. Google is just going to keep coming up with new options we'll have to change, or silently change our settings following an update to allow more data collection, or even just ignore our settings and do whatever they want anyway. You can't use untrustworthy user-hostile software and expect to not be constantly taken advantage of. Taking people's private data and handing it over to Google is what chrome was designed to do from day one.

M95D 3y ago

You are speaking to the wrong people. User have no power to change anything. Instead of asking users to uninstall Chrome, ask web devs to make sites compatible with something other than Chrome. As an example, I would use Links a lot more if OpenWrt forum would work.