With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
Most people aren’t concerned about privacy outside of places like here and Reddit.
With Chrome killing ad blocking, they’ll quickly care
Except most people don’t use adblock. I don’t even know how they live
I forget that these people exist sometimes. I can’t ever go back to the internet with no ad blockers.
You realize the Internet costs money. Those sites don’t charge due to advertising. If everyone used ad blocker. There wouldn’t be internet.
But blind there
The Internet existed well before it was handed over to commercial entities for enshitification.
The current Internet which basically consists of 5 giant websites who’s content is largely stuffed full of ads for the other four might not exist and I am okay with that.
And it exploded because of that. Stuff costs money. You either pay for it or ads though.
I’d prefer having the internet of now than what was before.
You can use ad blocker but I’m pointing out the your theory. Without ads the Internet doesn’t exist in its current form. As long as 90% don’t use ad blocker it’s all good.
It could be a good thing. Maybe they won’t bother about people blocking ads because they become even less than before.
So maybe you need to pause the ad block a lot less.
I suspect they spend most of their time in apps and not surfing the internet. Just a guess really since I saw the mobile traffic exceeded desktop. A lot of people don’t spend hours on the “internet” surfing. Tic Tok sure. Hell I’m getting more and more like that. Even when I use chrome I still only go the the same sites for the most part. lol
They don’t!
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.
Honestly, it seems like people have basically created internal adblockers where they seem to not notice ads.
That works foe now until we get to Resume viewing eeeeeee Resume viewing EEEEEeeeee Resume viewing EEEEEEEE
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.
Arguably reddit isn’t even mainstream …
… with just 0.91% of US social media visits
this yearin March this year, if this isn’t wrong:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/265773/market-share-of-the-most-popular-social-media-websites-in-the-us/FB 53.09%, Twit 16.25%, IG 13.85%, …, Reddit 0.91% …
[Edited to fix my error.]
[I have no affiliation with the linked site.]
deleted by creator
Reddit was too weird for most people until they ended up being in their Google search results for most topics. It will take a while but the Fediverse will eventually reach a level of popularity and mainstream utility.
deleted by creator
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 userThe 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!
I 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.
Not sure why it’s weird, it’s just reddit but open source?
Whole idea is weird and as of now its lacking features. Like no ability to look on the other instance local feed without registrating there (at least not in apps i use). Also needing to type whole adress with instance name if you want some community from other instance is unhandy.
Also, as far as i understand, there can be the same communities on different instances, so you could subscribe to, idk, cat community on lemmy.ml, but not see anything from cat community on lemmy.world. If its true its kinda stupid, i think there should be a way to associate comunities across fedarated instances.
Hell, even registration is kinda messed up. As lemmy.world shown, you easilly can sign up on overpopulated instances which would drop several times a day. Not sure, it probably fixed for now, but that was a problem when i started.
So far i like the idea and want it to succeed and become popular. But with how elitist people here are usually towards users from other platforms and with overall roughness it kinda seems unlikelly. Maybe it will change when current apps get better, or reddit app developers make versions for lemmy, idk.
If you click the All, you can see that I am able to see posts from lemmy.ml even though I’m on lemmy.world
Yes, but you would be seeing ALL posts from everywhere your instance knows about.
I kind of like the idea of being on lemmy.world, filtering to say aussie.zone and getting it to show me local.
Or being able to simply get a list of every community on another instance.These are cool ideas.
But it does show feeds from other instances. Tick all rather than local
No, i mean not all, but local from other instances. I dont remember why i needed it, probably discussion of more specialised instances out there. Most down to earth example i can imagine now would probably be trying to find instance on your local language (other than english, ofc).
There are instances dedicated to other languages, but because they are new, and has not a lot of people, they won’t push at the top of your feed. The best thing for now is to help those instances grow by contributing to the instance and communities. As more activity sprouts, more and more specialized communities and instances will get pushed to the top.
As a start, you can select Hot or New rather than active and see if there are specialized regional instances. Or try directly searching for it.
If not start your own community in the language you desire. Bear in mind that lemmy only has 200k users. And most are probably from the US. So you’ll likely see more mainstream communities and in English.
If that’s still not enough, the best I can advise is to wait until it matures. The more mainstream it gets the more lesser known communities and regional instances can develop or start.
Agreeing that it’s not a seamless transition in user experience from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin. But one thing that at least the instance that I’m on (kbin.social) makes easy is subscribing to various communities (or magazines, which is what they are called on kbin):
I go to the Magazines screen in kbin.social, type.in the general topic I’m interested in (in your example, cats). The search results in kbin.social bring me all of the magazines and communities that have cat in the name, and I subscribe to them all. (Meaning, I don’t have to type out the full community address.)
Yes, a lot of it will be redundant and if I don’t subscribe to specific communities I may miss some stuff. But I can say that now I have a ton pf.contwct that I’m interested in my “Subscribed” feed (similar to the home feed on Reddit).
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.
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.
Firefox is a weird buggy mess that constantly freezes.
This is definitely not normal, Firefox never freezes for me. May be worth checking that out, especially your extensions.
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.
Maybe this is silly but I worry about the security of password managers. Is Bitwarden very secure and reliable (im assuming yes in your estimation)?
If you like the chrome feel, you should check out a browser called brave. It’s built off of chromium (read as: looks like chrome) and can run all the extensions you like, but is built to be privacy minded.
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…?
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder how privacy is still a word in the dictionary
The Tech industry has been boiling frogs at an industrial level, they could open a fast food chain. DRM? Everywhere? Owning digital purchases? Nah. Privacy? What’s that?
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.
This sounds like a very simple fix. The next time you see her in person, take all of her devices and download a different browser and set it to a different search engine if you need to (with her permission of course). Put the new browser icon in the same spot as the Chrome icon and move the Chrome icon someplace else on the home screen/desktop. Have her use it and bookmark the sites she goes to most often (or export and upload her bookmarks for her). It will take a little getting used to but it will seem like a habit in a couple of days. Of course you’ll also explain why you’re doing this.
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.
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.
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.
Curious
Not really, it means less work and less risk for them if they have to support fewer software.
It’s curious because Microsoft owns the operating system and was more than capable of designing in such a way that would allow sysadmins more control over third party browsers and software. Firefox would have been willing to work with them to provide the necessary levers. They already do with group policy.
“Security” is a term that shuts down arguments and silences all accusation of anticompetitive behavior. And they absolutely abuse that. You don’t think the bean counters are ecstatic about the fact that they have effectively been able to turn every IT department in the country into Edge salesmen? You don’t think there was a board meeting where the benefits of that were discussed?
Of course. I hate MS as much as the next linux user, but unfortunately from the IT team’s pov it makes a lot of sense now that MS’ browser isn’t a broken pile of shit anymore.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I used to use Brave and saw that article last week about how they are selling your data for AI training. I instantly jumped to Firefox
Source: https://stackdiary.com/brave-selling-copyrighted-data-for-ai-training/
Brave is just a reskinned Chrome anyway. Even Chromium has built in telemetry.
Firefox is the only independent browser. Even Edge is Chrome these days.
We need to support Firefox. Unfortunately it’s dying more and more every year
Firefox is the only independent browser
Yeah, funded by google seems pretty independent to me…
I used to work for Mozilla. They are funded my many sources, of which Google is only one. Google does not drive Firefox’s feature set or roadmap in any way at all.
They only get money from google to be the default Engine (which you can change easily)
In terms of development and the program of Firefox itself, google has no input or say…thus Firefox still being independent
When 430 out of your 450m annual income comes from google you’d be naive to think they have no say at all. In a perfect world maybe.
Time will tell. We’ll see what firefox does when chrome drops manifest v2.
So far they don’t seem too keen on bending the knee
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559234/firefox-manifest-v3-content-ad-blocker
Which is good for us
Brave said the same. Lets see who puts their money where their mouth is. I hope both.
Yeah that’s why I was still using brave (until now)
Honestly it’s a relief to break away from chromium
Isn’t Safari independent?
Well essentially there are 3 browsers. Chrome / Firefox / Safari. Everything is a version of these three (besides niche browsers, like I think KDE might have their own browser)
What I mean by independent is Firefox is the only one not owned by a massive international corporation. I would say the only open source one but Chromium is technically open source.
You can for example download “ungoogled chromium” which is a Chromium fork that removes the Google telemetry
How is Apple “independent”? You’re just trading one mega corporation for another.
It’s not Chromium specifically, but it has basically the same issues.
That article you’re talking about isn’t about brave as a browser. It was a out the brave search engine.
You are aware that as a user of Brave it doesn’t affect you? If not, you’ve only read the title and if you read the article and didn’t understand how it affects you, you could have asked. I didn’t understand and asked and knowledge people answered. That’s why we’re here. We can learn from each other.
All that rambling and you didn’t even get to the point you started with.
They literally got to the point in the first sentence. The point was that the article wasn’t about the browser, it was about the search engine. If you’d actually read it you’d also know that the author was also wrong in several aspects and updated it with corrections.
The point was that the article wasn’t about the browser, it was about the search engine.
Finally someone got to the point.
If you’d actually read it you’d also know that the author was also wrong in several aspects and updated it with corrections.
I don’t use Brave in any form. I don’t care about any of it. Just thought it was ridiculous that the commentator spent the whole post rambling without ever actually saying why it didn’t effect the person.
They said it in the first sentence.
You are aware that as a user of Brave it doesn’t affect you?
That does not get to the point of the comment. It makes a claim. The point of the comment was about the information of being why it doesn’t effect someone being in the article and then they never actually say why. They just ramble for a paragraph leaving everyone to wonder what the point of that rambling was.
For me, the switch to Firefox from brave came on when they made it so that you had to get an account with a kyc crypto exchange to use brave rewards. It wasn’t necessarily the change itself, but the gravitational pull down to earth that made me realize that no matter what features brave puts in there browser, they will always be a for profit Corporation that doesn’t have my interests in mind.
That’s the thing - I am willing to try new things, like new browsers, but I get spooked when I encounter things like this.
I, too, was using Brave’s browser and search engine on my phone when I heard about their shady actions. So I stopped using them and now am pretty much just using Firefox with DDG as the default search engine and have uBlock Origin and another adblock add on. I don’t even know if having two ad blockers is redundant.
I’m willing to trade some privacy for a useful free service or convenience but I don’t even know how much is too much on the privacy spectrum.
Well, you read misinformation then.
I’ve been using Firefox for years.
