Besides lip-service to the contrary, our politicians want to control communication and supervise their citizens, so for politicians it is better to have a browser controlled by a company like Google, than a really free web

I got downvoted to hell for being against a centralized authority in other threads. Good to see I'm not the only "paranoid and crazy" one.

I switched this week.

Firefox is awesome now. It was great, then it lost out a bit to chrome, but it’s back to being awesome. If anyone’s reading this and isn’t using Firefox, please switch!

And importantly, their import mechanisms are great. A typical user can switch with basically no effort. Next time they ask you for help, switch your parents too, and your siblings, and that neighbour who keeps referring to the internet as “the google”. Set them up with Firefox and ublock origin and they’ll be set.

I'm hoping the average user will be sufficient annoyed by the lack of adblocking to finally give a shit.

I don't think our politicians will do anything but protect big business, personally.

Safari won't care as it benefits them and their ecosystem to have device checks.

Apparently Apple already rolled it out in a previous update, they just didn't call any attention to it.

I just hope that google won't try to lobby for this API like disney does for copyright changes

Same as with IE in the past. A little better with most of the source being open but not much. I wonder how we could solve this issue since people obviously don't care.

It's like IE in the 90s/early 2000s all over.

Being fair to Chrome (which I hate doing but there is a point), they got in when more tech-people online saw them as pushing so many things forward. Was functionally faster than IE for sure, but also Firefox got stuck on their 4.0 limbo and being heavy in memory usage. Though I think the issue with memory usage also came from having almost a decade of so many extensions. Chrome was also slightly simpler than Firefox (imo even though my primary browser is and has been since before 1.5). Pair that with Google also then becoming the only (in market share) real competition to Apple's ecosystem on Smartphones.

The best way to start taking down Chrome's massive control over web standards is to do the same things as when IE was the default name people knew. Start using Firefox and get others to try it again or for the first time. Since so many people would trick their parents into using Chrome by changing the name and icon to IE. Most older folks kind of don't even notice, and just think and "update" changed the look a bit. But as long as it works, they will just use it. In fact this can apply to a lot of the general public in actually scary ways. Back in the day with IE and those stacks and stacks of toolbars that I saw on almost every PC I worked on for people. I would just start removing them while they told me about why they were in (which was often caused by but not seen as to them as the issue). They would see me just OCD getting rid of them and would be shocked, and I do truly mean shocked, that those things weren't just "part of the browser and never questioned them being there."

Now that Chrome and Chromium are the main browser and browser base. I see soooo many BS Chromium browsers just get installed via the same kinds of tactics as the old toolbars. Even set themselves to both launch at every reboot, set themselves to always be able to run in the background, AND set themselves as the system default browser. Sometimes there may be multiple all doing the same things, but also have been made into desktop toolbars/docks of sorts. And that same shit is done by the super annoying ones skinned by the AV companies (AVG, Avast, CCleaner, and now even mainline Norton). And the person just thinks they are just part of Windows, but they only even came in because they "started having issues with wifi" or even a broken Windows update that wasn't related.

That shit should really really get more attention in general. With so many fake things just being ignored, it means that the mass public will just never know or care about Google turning the internet into whatever it wants. Just not even know that they had actual options before they are removed. If it wouldn't piss off the massive amount of companies that do ad business with Google. I wouldn't be shocked if they turned ad blocking into a "premium feature" to subscribe to monthly.

I personally install Firefox as the non-Edge option when setting up someone's new PC (so long as they didn't specify Chrome) so they might at least try it. I never set it as the default, and will remove it if they want it gone when picking up the PC. Also do try to let some of them that ask about Chrome know that Edge is 100% compatible for their sites that mention Chrome. Which they at least then tend to be like "oh, well then I guess don't worry about installing Chrome then." No real pressure is put on them, just information, though Microsoft is making it hard with all the wild "HEY TRY THIS FEATURE!" pop-ups and that damn pointless desktop search bar.

They definitely are reference!

Ad blockers are more important to security than virus checkers.

ya, using the internet without an adblocker is a security risk because Google enables scams across its services.

How about they learn to clean house first before shitting on the internet lol.

incompetent company will do incompetent things.

In our society it's literally stupid NOT to do these things. If you got rich doing it you "won." Fuck the general population, fuck "good" things, fuck literally everything, C.R.E.A.M.

I hate it so much.

The vast majority of people will not care about or even be aware of this. They'll support it because they just want to watch their Netflix or YouTube. Things will continue on as normal, but with more ads and less end-user control.

The web is not the whole internet. Plus isn't you being here prove that the internet is resilient?