With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
The best time to switch to Firefox was 5 years ago. The second best is today.
Oops, I switched 15 years ago,
10 to 15 years ago, myself. Don’t remember exactly.
Google has a web-browser?
Sorry, that’s 3rd best at most, according to the data above. Sorry, I don’t make the rules!
Noob. I switched in 2006 - 17 years ago.
I cannot be 100% certain but I’m confident I was using it not long after the 1.0 release. That’d put me at 2004. 19 years!
Although I did briefly switch over to Chrome when it was new and fast. Then switched back when Firefox had a major optimization pass.
The early Chrome was crazy fast when it had none of the bloat.
What took you so long?!?
I had to pee!
Funnily enough - this article is 3 years old
I use Firefox since it’s release. It was never bad. I don’t get all the Chrome users.
It has a pretty severe memory leak issue during the period where Chrome siphoned off most of its users.
Does it have native dark pages. Why I use brave. Would use Firefox but it’s glaring white
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
With Chrome killing ad blocking, they’ll quickly care
Honestly, it seems like people have basically created internal adblockers where they seem to not notice ads.
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I’m going to use Chrome as long as I can. If they update and break my Adblock extensions (and there isn’t a fix in a day or two from devs), I switch browsers or find some other workaround.
I’m glad people with more ability to avoid the problem are trying to do so proactively (via ad-on updates, alternative browsers, etc)… so I don’t need to worry about an ‘escape route’… because I know there will be one.
They won’t. The vast majority aren’t using any kind of ad-blockers in the first place or Google would go out of business.
The plan to deprecate Chrome V2 extensions has been constantly postponed again and again for years now. There is NO SCHEDULED DATE for this to happen currently, and when it is announced it will be more than 6 months out.
Source: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-extensions/c/zQ77HkGmK9E/m/HjaaCIG-BQAJ?pli=1
If Google really wanted to kill ad blockers, they would have done this years ago.
They don’t. They want to force ad blockers and other similar extensions to use more efficient APIs that don’t slow down the web. Extension developers overall (not just ad blockers) aren’t happy with the changes, so they’re still working on the APIs.
Hmmm, on the bright side, with lemmy going mainstream maybe some of this culture (including privacy and FOSS) becomes more and more openly discussed.
As much as I love Lemmy I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userYeah I agree. Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream, and it is exponentially larger than Lemmy now and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I’m really loving Lemmy, but it is not even remotely a factor if we are having a conversation about things that are mainstream enough to reflect popular opinion.
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Then why are you here “Generic User 1234”?
I’m sorry, I don’t know if “general user” means what I think it means. English is not my first language.
What I meant was that most people who use the internet and social media on a regular basis aren’t exactly nerdy/tech-savvy. So as soon as you start talking to them about federated instances and whatnot, they lose interest.
I mean I love Lemmy but I don’t see it going mainstream :/
It’s too weird for the general userI dunno. Lemmy isn’t all that weird outside the first little bit of choosing an instance and signing up for communities. Everything since that has felt extremely normal to me. Some more thought about that and a good instance onboarding workflow can be implemented, that seems like a solvable problem.
I completely agree, I don’t find it difficult at all. But I have already tried to recommend it to a couple of friends and just having to go through those first steps was enough for them not to want to use Lemmy.
The irony of this comment duplicating 😅 but yeah you’re right, there needs to be a lot of streamlining first
jsjajsj yeah, Jerboa froze on me so I had to retype the comment. I didn’t realise it had already gone through.
I had that issue with Jerboa a lot so I switched to Liftoff, it’s much smoother!
Not sure why it’s weird, it’s just reddit but open source?
I wish that was the case. Privacy is barely a thing in the general public’s eye. FOSS is a spec in the wind in comparison.
WHAAT? I CANT HEAR YOU OVER THE MEEEEEMEES!!. SPEAK LOUDEERRR!
Firefox + Ublock Origin blows Google Chrome out of water.
In adittion to this make sure to disable the telemetry that’s on by default. If you want even better protection from fingerprinting etc, use arkenfox/librewolf (librewolf being preconfigured fork of firefox)
I’d also recommend disabling Normandy in Firefox.
The whole Reddit debacle has really made me rethink all my services. I recently installed duck duck go and still getting used to it, so not quite sure if I’m ready to make another drastic change.
I used to love Firefox in 2006 or so, but got Chrome when it was released and forgot about Firefox. I think I’ll open a tab in my chrome browser for the Firefox page now…this is how I remind myself to delve deeper into stuff later. Thanks for the inspiration, everyone. Google has irked me ever since removing the Don’t Be Evil mantra.
True. It takes a big chance to switch browsers for some. And there may be learning curves, but being intentional about our internet and app use goes a long way to saving headaches in the future. The early investment (ie learning a more open source and free, even FOSS software) will help mitigate loss in case a profit driven company changes or “pivots” to a new direction.
The best time to start with a new browser is when you get a new device. Since you have to re enter your logins or re enable your pw manager anyway, it’s just a convenient time. That’s when I switched, about 1 year ago when I upgraded phones.
Duckduckgo app tracking blocker is my new jam too. Which I leaned about here on lemmy about 1 weeks ago when I joined
If you use a password manager like bitwarden, there’s no need to enter all your logins. I guess that’s why I’m a bit browser agnostic. I use different browsers for different purposes. And I don’t have to worry about remembering my passwords with bitwarden.
IMO the thing is that people don’t care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn’t block cookies, etc etc etc.
Most people don’t actually care. Some claim they do, but then can’t even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the “inconvenience”… So do they really care?
Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don’t.
The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.
Exactly this. Most people care about convenience above all else. People want their software to “just work” without having to fiddle with settings or add-ons or anything else.
I think about this every day, but I keep coming back to this: they do care. It’s just that they don’t always know they care, or to what extent. The big problem is that there’s virtually no way to visualize the harm in using privacy-invading products and services. Everything that goes on in the background of our phones, we’d never tolerate in real life.
If you could visually see every time there’s a background process, an app activating the mic, the sensors, the location, accessing your messages, etc., we’d be in a better position.
There’s no way we’d tolerate the IRL equivalents of what goes on digitally—at the browser level, at the app level, perhaps even at the OS level.
It’s usually visual cues that set off change. Think about it this way: 9/11 killed ~3000 people and we got the USA PATRIOT Act virtually overnight. COVID-19 happened and killed ~1.1 million people in the US alone. But because COVID wasn’t as “visual” and as “graphic” as 9/11, there was less urgency to do something about it.
I am one of those people. Nothing bad has ever happened to me in the decades I’ve been putting my info online beyond a bad actor getting ahold of my credit card info for a minute. I just don’t see the issue when companies with my data actively make my life better…?
It could happen to you, but it has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen to other people. And you enable it happening to other people by participating in it.
Here’s another where the police used Facebook messages to target a woman getting an abortion
Just take one look at China to see the kind of dystopian future we’re heading toward. Look up Zhima credit. Look up what happens to protestors.
The short version is, your government can easily turn fascist at a moment’s notice, and when it does there’s no way to claw back all that data you put out there.
I don’t give a single shit about what Google or Facebook has on me, other than the fact that they give a backdoor to that data to every government body that asks.
That video was nuts. I hope they win that case. It’s ridiculous.
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
It’s no wonder. It’s because people aren’t actually concerned about privacy.
If you ask someone if they’re “concerned about privacy” many people will of course say yes. If you follow up that question with “what are you willing to do about it”, you’ll find that the answer is a resounding “not a God damn thing”. If they were they would spend 3 minutes on Google looking for an alternative browser that works even better than Chrome but without the privacy invasions.
A browser is the low-hanging fruit on the “do-you-care-about-privacy meter”. It’s the one step with no sacrifices and the highest increase in privacy.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
That number appears to be very small, all things considered. Out of everyone I know, literally one person cares about privacy. My mother. She will even go as far as to only use her first initial online instead of her name if she can get away with it. However, she uses Chrome all the time because she doesn’t understand that your browser also tracks you.
I think that’s what it comes down to. A mixture of lack of public interest, and lack of public awareness about tracking/privacy in general. If people can’t immediately see how having their data harvested will inconvenience/hurt them, they simply don’t care.
With the number of people concerned about privacy
Generous estimate there. “People” don’t care. Who cares if your browser tracks your online presence when everything is connected back to your facebook profile or whatever is trending.
Most individuals embrace convenience above all; literally putting all their private stuff on any online service that tout “shiny feature that you won’t even use”. Even some privacy-focused people don’t see putting all your emails/photo/video/agenda/chat/text messages in one third party opaque service as an issue.
Tons of business do the same, outsourcing the most basic stuff like private discussions and storage to anything “convenient” to not pay for two sysadmin to manage it (leading to most major leaks). I have direct experience of business coming to us, asking “yeah, privacy is good, data ownership and control is mandatory, so we won’t host anything and you’ll keep all our data, deal?”. They prefer have us, a third party, bill them for hosting rather than have some control over it.
My take on this is that while pointing that browsers can be an issue is not a bad thing, the first step would be to get people and business interested in their privacy. Without that, it remains a niche. Sadly.
It might be a niche yeah, but it won’t be when a lawsuit looms. It won’t be when Data Privacy Laws come knocking. People underestimate the value of privacy even though virtually any job has privacy as its most basic requirements. May it be medical records, banks, NDAs, contracts, even the most basic of tasks, has some form of privacy stipulations in it.
As someone pursuing a career in health care I became more and more concerned because some store patient files and notes in unsecured text files/apps like notion, google docs and even excel. I’m sure other jobs and employment has their own privacy issues as well.
Privacy is a niche at face value but so many people underestimate its value. When everything they say or store online and even offline can be hacked, tracked or exploited, anything can be a potential lawsuit without taking the necessary precautions.
Privacy is an ideal but I don’t agree that privacy laws are a looming threat to those who ignore them. Our right to privacy is being swept away at a rapid rate and there will be no repercussions for those who invade our privacy.
It’s a perfect system. People don’t care about their privacy. Companies use all their data for profit and then use that generated money to lobby against privacy laws. They get to get more data, more money, more lobbying.
I don’t think anyone will actually care until it’s too late AND they are personally affected.
I hope that in my lifetime there is a turnaround and people take privacy seriously. I will continue to tote privacy practices and support privacy supporting software until then but god is it exhausting.
As someone pursuing a career in health care I became more and more concerned because some store patient files and notes in unsecured text files/apps like notion, google docs and even excel.
This is just the beginning - the medical space is notoriously awful and also a place where you probably really care about privacy. But using secure alternatives is too annoying for most medical staff and they just see it as ankther hurdle. Actually getting people to use secure software that’s not the software they’re already used to is way harder than it should be.
People just don’t understand or don’t care. Convenience is way more important to people than anything else.
Using firefox exclusively on all my devices since the last major revamp of the Firefox Android.
Gotta love the uBlock Origin extension on Firefox Android!
Yes. And it makes many sites more browsable in phone.
The biggest issue for a lot of people is going to be Microsoft forcing all Office 365 users to use Edge all the time. Our sysadmin recently forced me to uninstall Firefox and Chrome from all workstations unless they had an approved use for it. Everything must be through Edge.
Why? “Security” of course. It’s always “security”. Curious
Edit: the point is Microsoft could have worked to provide enterprise customers with ways to manage third party browsers going forward. They could have worked with Google and Mozilla to make that happen. They didn’t. Not really.
It’s that Microsoft continues to make decisions that create rationale for only using them, because that’s their business. “Security” gives them an extremely convenient cover for anticompetitive behavior. Anyone that thinks their C-Suite hasn’t pulled the defender/365 team into a meeting or two to discuss business strategy has far too much faith in a corporation that deserves very little.
There can be other reasons, and while it saddens me to say, we were forced to keep IE for specific web-panels, which hadn’t been updated since the 90s.
Edge does, after all, allow for compability with such sites, which is a good thing.
Please note that this is work work-related machines only. I dont see how it’s an issue when it has to do with your work account. You shouldn’t be using this for other things than work.
I wouldn’t count on Microsoft’s security:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/12/1187208383/china-hack-us-government-microsoft
If this can happen to governments using microsoft, it can happen to little guys using microsoft.
That’s just because Edge is integrated with O365 and can pass device compliance information. There’s actually a plugin to enable Chrome to do the same thing, but nothing yet for Firefox.
This is the problem! :( Monopoly is never good, in this case in particular since it’s in the hand of a corporation they make money on people data.
There’s no reason you should be using Chrome. Using Chrome:
- Means you consent to spyware (along with everyone else you interact with)
- Allows Google to continue dictating web standards
- Is a resource hog
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading this comic about the dangers of Chrome: https://contrachrome.com/
If you need to absolutely use a Chromium-based browser, at least use Brave (just for that site).
Not-so-fun fact from the comic Contra Chrome: Google Chrome’s URL bar is called the “omnibox.” The name is derived from the Latin word “omnis,” meaning “everything.”
When you type into the omnibox, it’s sent to Google’s servers and added to your profile forever.
Even if you deleted it or didn’t hit enter.
I’ve been using Firefox for years.
Chrome is popular because it works. The average person is not going to give up convenience for privacy, even if they claim to care about it. As someone who uses Firefox, I can say that some websites don’t work on Firefox and Firefox is often slower than chromium browsers. While I’m ok with that, others might not be.
Anecdotal experience is great.
I’ve never once come across a website that doesn’t work in Firefox and find Chrome and Edge significantly slower.
regarding cookies which are fucking annoying…
you can install this:
(its supported by various browsers including chromium based, and firefox)
its open source, and made by some people at the university of Aarhus in Denmark.
you set the preferences and it automatically clicks your preferences, to the cookies, on the site(s) you visit.
its very much a “set and forget” kinda thing.
it doesn’t prevent cookie tracking or anything. it just fills out the cookie-consentform automatically based on your preferences (so check those after installing)
I can say that some websites don’t work on Firefox
threads.netcomes to mind. That annoyed me until I opened the console and saw that it was because of an infinite number of cross-site origin violations, at which point I lost interest in Threads.So how do we make privacy convenient or get the average person to genuinely care about privacy or both? Can’t do nothing… ~Cherri
If you’re able to, donate to Mozilla as well! Keeping them up and running is imperative.
Their VPN + Relay bundle is also pretty good if you want to monetarily support them while also getting something back. Relay is actually a killer product for keeping your inbox clean.
the phone functionality looks useful, though most of the email stuff is covered by using the + convention
your.email+trash@gmail.com -> this kinda doesn’t make it anonymous but it either goes directly to trash or you can easily set up a filter in gmail so that emails sent to this address are automatically trashed
Yeah the key thing for me was anonymity. Plus I think most spammers know about the + feature now and will get around it. Currently degoogling my life by switching everything over to relay and having it forward to my Proton mail. Never had such a clean inbox before and it’s amazing.
