Because libre office is not compatible with many others. You can open it sure but there’s no guarantee that opening .doc or .docx will have broken formatting. Not good for those in the academia or workplace where formatting are strictly enforce.

Any browser really. I missed the browser wars of old where everyone is free to use and defend their browsers.

Yeah but then that would be supporting and enabling Google’s standards.

I agree they’re overkill. But there are sites that detect the adblocker and I just experiment which one they don’t detect. Most of the time, adguard does amazing. But some websites only adblock is not detected. So it’s a cat and mouse game for me. :) I installed them all just in case and activate and deactivate depending on which sites I am on.

Firefox is no less slower than chrome to me, imho. At least it doesn’t struggle as much. Chrome with 20 tabs lags while firefox works. Maybe there’s something in your extensions that’s causing slowdowns?

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.

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.

I’m optimistic. So many apps are developing at an astonishing rate. Recall that third party apps offer better experience than official reddit. Given time, third party apps will do the same too.

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.

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

But it does show feeds from other instances. Tick all rather than local

If you’re interested here are my safari extensions

I think the history and bookmarks are separate. Only the engine is the same. For safari, enabling adguard and other extensions does wonders for privacy. :)

If you can, I highly recommend using a password manager like bitwarden with multiple backups spread on local password manager or local drive. Think of it this way, what happens if firefox or chrome were to suffer catastrophic failure? At least with a password manager, you can reinstall another browser and carry on as usual. :)

Not sure why it’s weird, it’s just reddit but open source?

Firefox is the least evil as far as I know, given its non profit roots. Chrome is owned by google, Opera by a chinese company. Firefox is the closest we can get to a FOSS browser.

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.

You can still download firefox on iOS. Snowhaze for really sensitive stuff. Safari for anything else. Using different browsers for different purposes help defend against profiling.

I personally use firefox for work stuff, firefox focus for banking, safari for personal and snowhaze for ehem… err adult stuff.

Hmmm, on the bright side, with lemmy going mainstream maybe some of this culture (including privacy and FOSS) becomes more and more openly discussed.

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.