With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.

      • jflorezEnglish
        561·
        1 year ago

        I switch when it was Phoenix, then switch again when it was Firebird, and finally switch when it become Firefox

        • YendorEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          I went straight from Mozilla Navigator to Firefox 1.0.

          Tabs were such a crazy new thing back then. You would show tabbed browsing to someone (rather than opening new windows) and they thought you were a wizard. IE5 didn’t have tabs, so nerds moved to Mozilla/Firefox. Then IE6 came out but still didn’t have tabs. By the time IE7 came out, I’d had tabbed browsing for 5+ years.

      • gornar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        1 year ago

        Sorry, that’s 3rd best at most, according to the data above. Sorry, I don’t make the rules!

    • Noxvento@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      I use Firefox since it’s release. It was never bad. I don’t get all the Chrome users.

      • shinjiikarus@mylem.euEnglish
        14·
        1 year ago

        I had the crappiest of PCs in 2006 or 2007 with 768MBs of RAM running Windows XP. Funnily enough the reason I switched to Chrome back then was the immense RAM usage of Firefox compared to Chrome back then. With the big rebranding an rerelease of Firefox in 2017? 2018? I came back and haven’t looked back since.

        • 001100 010010@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          50·
          1 year ago

          I’m conviced those people aren’t real and everyone is in fact secretly using an ad blocker.

          I mean, how do you not get annoyed with so much ads? People are probabaly lying in surveys to trick youtube to not blocking adblockers.

        • notannpc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          151·
          1 year ago

          I forget that these people exist sometimes. I can’t ever go back to the internet with no ad blockers.

        • GreyDawn@lemmy.worldEnglish
          9·
          1 year ago

          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

        • amenotef@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • Cryptic Fawn@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          Ah, you met my parents.

          I had to install ublock origin on my mother’s Chrome because she never would otherwise. Doesn’t even know how.

      • FoxBJK@midwest.socialEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        Google’s doing a pretty shitty job on that front since uBlock is already prepared with a new version that will work largely the same after the changeover.

      • iamthatis@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Honestly, it seems like people have basically created internal adblockers where they seem to not notice ads.

      • HughJanus@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • persolb@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        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.

      • minorninth@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1114·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • Frost Wolf@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      391·
      1 year ago

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

      • Torres@lemmy.worldEnglish
        764·
        1 year ago

        As much as I love Lemmy I don’t see it going mainstream :/
        It’s too weird for the general user

        • theragu40@lemmy.worldEnglish
          44·
          1 year ago

          Yeah 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.

        • Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social
          10·
          1 year ago

          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.

        • subway@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
          52·
          1 year ago

          We could have it both, where big instances like LemmyWorld or BeeHaw becomes the well known public interface, while they maintain federation with smaller instances.

          • jtk@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            But your content would go over so much better in those places. Pretty sure you’ve already found that your Musk-loving, antisemitic, anti-lgbtq+, misogynistic, garbage is not going to make it very far here. “cancel culture” back at it again. Guess Musk isn’t the big brain you think he is. I’m sure you’ll be back with your braindead zombie tribe in no time.

          • Torres@lemmy.worldEnglish
            41·
            1 year ago

            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.

      • Torres@lemmy.worldEnglish
        264·
        1 year ago

        I mean I love Lemmy but I don’t see it going mainstream :/
        It’s too weird for the general user

        • gothicdecadence@lemmy.worldEnglish
          201·
          1 year ago

          The irony of this comment duplicating 😅 but yeah you’re right, there needs to be a lot of streamlining first

        • ewe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          14·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Torres@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            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.

          • AnorilEnglish
            34·
            1 year ago

            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.

              • Mountaineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
                11·
                1 year ago

                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.

              • AnorilEnglish
                31·
                1 year ago

                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).

                • Frost Wolf@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
                  3·
                  1 year ago

                  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.

            • Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              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).

        • 001100 010010@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          Lemmy isn’t weird at all. Now P2P platforms like secure scuttlebutt and aether, that’s some weird stuff. I couldn’t get them working at all (or maybe nobody is using these anymore). P2P is very confusing for me. I assume that a federated network is as confusing for many people as p2p social networks are confusing for me. I guess there will be someone out there who reads my comment and be like: “What? P2P networks are so simple, what don’t you understand?” I guess people just have different amount of tolorance to being confused by complexity of something before they just give up. I couldn’t figure out those P2P systems so I just give up.

    • code_is_speech@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      9·
      1 year ago

      I think lots of boomers and gen-x do care. (At least the ones I know). They just aren’t tech literate enough to do anything about it.

      I think we need more privacy oriented devices and software with simple ux, and advertising that isn’t targetted at the tech community.

      Run some TV ads for a privacy enabled smartphone, and play up how it works just the same as your current phone but doesn’t spy on you. Shit like that.

  • GigglyBobble@kbin.social
    1331·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Captain Poofter@lemmy.worldEnglish
    85·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Metallibus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    762·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Virkkunen@kbin.social
    711·
    1 year ago

    With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder how privacy is still a word in the dictionary

  • HughJanus@lemmy.mlEnglish
    661·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Pyro@lemmy.worldEnglish
    60·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • deweydecibel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • cley_faye@lemmy.worldEnglish
    501·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Utsob Roy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    1 year ago

    Using firefox exclusively on all my devices since the last major revamp of the Firefox Android.

  • Uniquitous@lemmy.oneEnglish
    45·
    1 year ago

    Google has a vested interest in showing you ads and selling your data.

    Firefox does not.

    Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.

  • HiramFromTheChi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    462·
    1 year ago

    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.