Goodbye Chrome...

[Bicurico]

Today I opened Chrome, as usual, and a message popped up saying that the uBlock Origin Extension was going to be removed, because it is no longer supported.

Guess what: Chrome is no longer supported on my computer!

From now on I am surfing with Firefox.

Chrome has served me well over the last years and I had little to no reason of complaint. But disabling uBlock Origin was a step too far. I know they are fighting a war against ad blockers, especially because of Youtube, but if they break Extensions on purpose for their profit, I have to move on.

[John B]

Firefox and Mozilla have their own issues.

Brave is another really good chromium based browser, with out of the box ad blocking. Plus listening to Brendan Eich speak, he does at least seem to have a genuine interest in what is good for the user rather than the usual corpo-speak slop.

[SiliconWizard]

https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/software/google-is-disabling-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-ad-blockers-what-you-need-to-know

[Analog Kid]

There's always Opera, which I at least don't find totally repulsive. (Windoze computah here.)

[DiTBho]

here we are at the end of 2024 ... how much shit is in the computer industry today ... 

Last night I had a light bulb burn out, and since I didn't have a flashlight handy I installed an application for my Android phone.
A simple flashlight app that does nothing but turn on the front LED of my phone... why the fsck does it have to show an ad for two seconds asking me to pay protection money to have it removed? 

Why!?!

Why do i have to have this kind of annoyance even on the app that makes the weather forecast?
Even worse if it then reports my habits to Google and this bombards me with ads?
Even worse, why Google uses that info to choose on Youtube the videos that they think I'm interested in?
Whey every time I open that bloody browser? and/or Apps on my Phone?

... advertising in everything, even in phone apps, increasingly paid services, increasingly paid services to remove that fucking annoying adv, two tons of padlocks in every HTTPS site to safeguard "privacy", too bad it's a fart since we are all tracked by useless AI in every stupid thing, tons of shit in browsers to support modern web-apps increasingly tied hand and foot to JavaScript and truly disgusting technologies

Not to mention Youtube which if once was the stage for people who had at least something interesting to say, today it's just a place full of imbeciles who make shitty clickbait videos just to earn easy money.

... I hope that exactly at midnight between 2024 and 2025, there will be a stellar flare, an unlikely but not impossible event, but I wish of the magnitude of global blackout, like in the events before BladeRunner 2049, one of those digital technology erasure events that instantly wipe every storage device in the world and bring the world back to the early 2000s, supposing people only have DVD-RAM and WORM backups of only that era.

[DiTBho]

compiling a Netscape clone was even doable on a 486@100Mhz with 128Mbyte of Ram
compiling a Dillo is doable on a MIPS@400Mhz board with only 128Mbyte of Ram
compiling Firefox ... requires a cluster, and I've seen stack requests go up to 2Gbytes of ram
(forget it for { HPPA, PPC32, PPC64, MIPS32, MIPS4, ... } dunno RISCV)

absurd even how these modern "mega browsers" are built 

[Bicurico]

Due to online banking and other security required applications, I steer away from non-mainstream browsers.

The options I considered where Chrome, Edge and Firefox.

Chrome: doesn't allow uBlock Origin, which is a no-go for me (I admit, one of the main features is to listen to Youtube music, while I work)
Edge: even worse with far too much bullshit thrown in by Microsoft
Firefox: seems to be the least annoying one and all the sites I use seem to work fine

But I am open to suggestions.

[Gyro]

Firefox and Mozilla have their own issues.

Brave is another really good chromium based browser, with out of the box ad blocking. Plus listening to Brendan Eich speak, he does at least seem to have a genuine interest in what is good for the user rather than the usual corpo-speak slop.

There's also LibreWolf if you want to decouple a little more from Mozilla / Firefox. Among other things, it comes with uBlock Orgin already included as standard, so I don't see any chance of it being blocked.

[JohanH]

Edge is based on Chromium, so basically there is a big browser monopoly by Google. The only still viable competitor is Firefox. Although it looks a bit bad for them. However, if you care about any kind of competition, in hope for better software and a better future, you choose to use Firefox. Not because it's better, but because it's a competitor. And open source. If everyone uses Google's browser, the future will be riddled by advertisements and your browser experience will become like television in the past, where you are fed content decided by the big players. I don't want that, so I will use Firefox until the bitter end.

[spostma]

If you use a non-mainstream browser like librewolf, I would advise not to use the latest build,
but rather one that is at least on month old, and check it on virustotal before installing it.

[Gyro]

I'm using it under Linux, I have firefox installed too. I do see the occasional LibreWolf update in the log but not as many as Firefox. My assumption, right or wrong, is that they are just tracking security updates rather than feature ones. It's a small operation, but I think they say that they typically implement Firefox related security updates within one day.

[John B]

here we are at the end of 2024 ... how much shit is in the computer industry today ... 

Last night I had a light bulb burn out, and since I didn't have a flashlight handy I installed an application for my Android phone.
A simple flashlight app that does nothing but turn on the front LED of my phone... why the fsck does it have to show an ad for two seconds asking me to pay protection money to have it removed? 

Why!?!

Why do i have to have this kind of annoyance even on the app that makes the weather forecast?
Even worse if it then reports my habits to Google and this bombards me with ads?
Even worse, why Google uses that info to choose on Youtube the videos that they think I'm interested in?
Whey every time I open that bloody browser? and/or Apps on my Phone?

... advertising in everything, even in phone apps, increasingly paid services, increasingly paid services to remove that fucking annoying adv, two tons of padlocks in every HTTPS site to safeguard "privacy", too bad it's a fart since we are all tracked by useless AI in every stupid thing, tons of shit in browsers to support modern web-apps increasingly tied hand and foot to JavaScript and truly disgusting technologies

Not to mention Youtube which if once was the stage for people who had at least something interesting to say, today it's just a place full of imbeciles who make shitty clickbait videos just to earn easy money.

... I hope that exactly at midnight between 2024 and 2025, there will be a stellar flare, an unlikely but not impossible event, but I wish of the magnitude of global blackout, like in the events before BladeRunner 2049, one of those digital technology erasure events that instantly wipe every storage device in the world and bring the world back to the early 2000s, supposing people only have DVD-RAM and WORM backups of only that era.

I'm running GrapheneOS on my pixel phone. It removes any of the inbuilt ads or cloud based nagging that comes with the stock OS.

In terms of apps, you can look into other repositories rather than the google play store, like F Droid (I'm using the droidify app as a front end).

I'm also using Obtanium as a manager for most of my apps. It's unique in that it compiles the apps directly from their respective github pages.

This gives you a wide variety of open sourced ad free apps. You certainly don't have to put up with ads on your own personal devices.

[SiliconWizard]

Edge is based on Chromium, so basically there is a big browser monopoly by Google. The only still viable competitor is Firefox. Although it looks a bit bad for them. However, if you care about any kind of competition, in hope for better software and a better future, you choose to use Firefox. Not because it's better, but because it's a competitor. And open source. If everyone uses Google's browser, the future will be riddled by advertisements and your browser experience will become like television in the past, where you are fed content decided by the big players. I don't want that, so I will use Firefox until the bitter end.

Yes, exactly.
Most Chrome "competitors" are Chromium-based. Talk about competition. So there is pretty much only Firefox as the serious, non-Chromium based browser.
On macOS there is Safari I think? It's not based on Chromium? Or is it now?

[Someone]

Edge is based on Chromium, so basically there is a big browser monopoly by Google. The only still viable competitor is Firefox. Although it looks a bit bad for them. However, if you care about any kind of competition, in hope for better software and a better future, you choose to use Firefox. Not because it's better, but because it's a competitor. And open source. If everyone uses Google's browser, the future will be riddled by advertisements and your browser experience will become like television in the past, where you are fed content decided by the big players. I don't want that, so I will use Firefox until the bitter end.

Yes, exactly.
Most Chrome "competitors" are Chromium-based. Talk about competition. So there is pretty much only Firefox as the serious, non-Chromium based browser.
On macOS there is Safari I think? It's not based on Chromium? Or is it now?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers
Safari was on the platform earlier and contributed the open source Webkit layout/rendering engine that now underpins the modern "compatible" web landscape. But then Google departed and did its own thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#Forking_by_Google

[garrettm]

Meh. Firefox works for me. I used to use Opera, but they have basically become Chrome with a different name. They don't even try to differentiate themselves anymore.

The only thing I wish Firefox had was FTP--why everyone began dropping support for it is beyond me. It just makes getting files from FTP servers more annoying. Sandbox the FTP code, give me a warning, or whatever--I don't really care--but don't get rid of it.

[JohanH]

The only thing I wish Firefox had was FTP--why everyone began dropping support for it is beyond me. It just makes getting files from FTP servers more annoying. Sandbox the FTP code, give me a warning, or whatever--I don't really care--but don't get rid of it.

Are people still running pure FTP servers? Must be some ancient service. Most that I used in the past have moved to https (for downloading only of course). If you must upload and are serious, use sftp. I do see the use case for anonymous uploads, but you could just have a known sftp user name and password for that. Otherwise it was a good thing for public security that FTP was dropped from browsers. People who know how to use FTP will use it anyway, with dedicated FTP clients.

[Halcyon]

But I am open to suggestions.

Brave.

Seems to be the best combination of the bigger guys without sacrificing compatibility. You just need to turn off all the useless stuff from the default "blank" tab.

[Analog Kid]

Do you know what underlying search engine Brave actually uses? It's not their own, I'm pretty sure.

Besides Google and Bing, who else out there actually has created their own search engine? Not many more, I'd reckon.

[Someone]

Do you know what underlying search engine Brave actually uses? It's not their own, I'm pretty sure.

Besides Google and Bing, who else out there actually has created their own search engine? Not many more, I'd reckon.

LMGTFY
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=brave+browser+search+engine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_Search
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_(web_browser)

[MrMobodies]

Today I opened Chrome, as usual, and a message popped up saying that the uBlock Origin Extension was going to be removed, because it is no longer supported.

I never allow the browsers to update like that to try and help stop that from happening. I keep the browser program by number and launch shortcuts different data profiles linked to those for different websites I use.

I am experimenting with Firefox 125 but still need works. The tabs don't show up when loaded with a profile from Firefox 75 that I customized in 2020 and I think that is the only thing left.

I use mainly use Vivaldi as I found I can customize the appearance and get it in the way I want but it'd be a matter of time when Google remove the manifest 2 from their code base according to some articles I found of trying to retain it as long as they could.

I remembered a question in their forums a few years ago something about Vivaldi switching to Firefox engine and the answer for that it was a massive undertaking for them. Now this is happening and maybe they'd consider it again.

So it looks like Firefox is looking the way forward.

There's also LibreWolf if you want to decouple a little more from Mozilla / Firefox. Among other things, it comes with uBlock Orgin already included as standard, so I don't see any chance of it being blocked.

Never heard of that before. Will give it ago and see if I can get similar results.

Edge: even worse with far too much bullshit thrown in by Microsoft

I use to use that in 2020 just to view Amazon Prime video but one day I got a message from the web player that the Chrome version will be discontinued at the end of the year. So I updated it at some point and as soon as I saw these stupid animated skeletons placeholder CRAP in the menu's and the impact of slowing it down when they appearance I thought that's it and installed the old copy until it stopped working and swapped it for Vivaldi when I discovered it later.

[Analog Kid]

Do you know what underlying search engine Brave actually uses? It's not their own, I'm pretty sure.

Besides Google and Bing, who else out there actually has created their own search engine? Not many more, I'd reckon.

LMGTFY

Look pal, don't give me that shit. I fucking know how to "Google"*, like, I don't know, every other person on the planet.

I'm intentionally asking people here instead of having to wade through dozens of irrelevant "hits".

* I hate the "verbification" of that name.

[Someone]

Do you know what underlying search engine Brave actually uses? It's not their own, I'm pretty sure.

Besides Google and Bing, who else out there actually has created their own search engine? Not many more, I'd reckon.

LMGTFY

Look pal, don't give me that shit. I fucking know how to "Google"*, like, I don't know, every other person on the planet.

I'm intentionally asking people here instead of having to wade through dozens of irrelevant "hits".

* I hate the "verbification" of that name.

So literally asking others to answer trivial questions for you? Not dozens of irrelevant hits, that obvious search term gets right to the point.

So you know how to google but are so bad at it you need to ask others to do it for you?

[Analog Kid]

Do you know what underlying search engine Brave actually uses? It's not their own, I'm pretty sure.

Besides Google and Bing, who else out there actually has created their own search engine? Not many more, I'd reckon.

LMGTFY

Look pal, don't give me that shit. I fucking know how to "Google"*, like, I don't know, every other person on the planet.

I'm intentionally asking people here instead of having to wade through dozens of irrelevant "hits".

* I hate the "verbification" of that name.

So literally asking others to answer trivial questions for you? Not dozens of irrelevant hits, that obvious search term gets right to the point.

So by that reasoning, maybe Dave should just shut down this forum. After all, who needs it when you can just "google" your question?

So you know how to google but are so bad at it you need to ask others to do it for you?

No, I just don't need nannies like you suggesting how I should go about getting my information.

Go away.

[amyk]

here we are at the end of 2024 ... how much shit is in the computer industry today ... 

Last night I had a light bulb burn out, and since I didn't have a flashlight handy I installed an application for my Android phone.
A simple flashlight app that does nothing but turn on the front LED of my phone... why the fsck does it have to show an ad for two seconds asking me to pay protection money to have it removed?

I have generic Android phone from mid 2012. Came with a stock torch app that has nothing but a single button to turn the LED on and off. You can still find plenty of those but they likely aren't at the top of search results since they don't funnel ad $$$ to Google et. al...

[the Chris]

You can still find plenty of those but they likely aren't at the top of search results since they don't funnel ad $$$ to Google et. al...

For this, a suggestion regarding android devices: search and downloads apps on f-droid.org instead or alternatively, use their own app to do so. The keywords "torch", "flashlight" or similar in native languages like the German "Taschenlampe" will yield lots of open source alternative choices with warnings if code has been used that might raise privacy concerns. Not all apps are good and many just stalled in development month or years ago. But there are still a lot of apps that will do the required job just fine, even browsers like the Firefox based Fennec. If installed via the f-droid app, non-forced Auto-Updates are available, too.

Christian, surfing with Firefox since Netscape