This is probably the single thing that got me to switch to Firefox. Privacy whatever, I don’t care about my data or the morality of my tech company or whatever, but mess with my adblocker and goodbye.
I am from Germany and it is just sad how many people use these apps from shit companies without thinking, when suitable alternatives exist everywhere. Just use Firefox, it will work for 99,9% without any flaw. I would love to ditch WhatsApp, but could only convinge a few people to change to Signal. It is as easy as downloading a new app to prevent supporting Meta, but that’s too much effort for many :-(
Glad I don’t use chrome anymore. Though unfortunately everyone else I know still does.
I switched to Firefox many years ago, after their announcement I switched to Waterfox and I’m very happy with it.
It’s really annoying to me that Firefox doesn’t seem to work well on my chromebook, so I’m stuck with Chrome until I need a new computer…
Webserial is only reason I see to install Chrome. For everything else Firefox works great.
Chrome? I’ve heard of that once.
That was a loud ball drop from Google’s hands.
Boycott these bastids
Chrome hasn’t been my main browser in a while but I kept it as a backup and because Firefox doesn’t support PWAs and I didn’t want to mess with the extension. Turns out, the extension only takes about 3 minutes to get set up and now Chrome has been uninstalled. And on a random Tuesday, who knew?
I have used firefox from like 2005 to 2024. I am now using brave and I am quite happy with it. I just disabled all this useless cryptobro crap that it comes with. I tried most of the chromium based browsers and this is by far the one that better fits my needs. It has an adblocker that works well, it has a sync option that is not on google servers and supposedly they dont have that insane telemetry that chrome has. And yes an adblocker is tottally needed and will probably be allways needed. I do run a network adblocker with pihole and nextDNS. I haven’t seen a single add in years and do not miss them at all. I rather ahve a half broken page than some random website trying to sell me satisfiers and blue pills.
laughs in Firefox
Cries in only Chrome and Edge at work 😢
Edge extension store still has it I think. Use it until Edge removes it as well. Then tell the IT to use Firefox highlighting the importance of adblocking.
I don’t like my chances of swaying IT. The organisation is too big and I’ll get told I should be using Edge which is the only officially supported browser.
Yeah, that’s true.
Tell your IT.
Yeah. What company wouldn’t allow it?
When I was working for an ad exchange, everyone had adblock installed in their browsers, I found that quite ironic.
I would argue it’s a security issue not to have any ad blocking. Many scams online start with popups or fake ads.
So if you get the opportunity to talk to IT that’s what I would mention.
A good IT is blocking ads at a company-level. Browser extensions wouldn’t matter, and in fact, shouldn’t be allowed for the same reason.
You can only catch so much at the edge and DNS level. Browser extension catches the stragglers that get through. But we’ve mitigated virtually all browser induced malware possibilities by just moving to cloud-based internet isolation. It’s similar to what the DoD uses, if anyone’s familiar with their use case: https://www.bylight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/CBII_2020-2025.pdf
Even with CBII ads still make the internet cancerous to even look at
I’m not always working in the office, and they’ve asked us to connect to VPN only if we need access to the internal network. Email and Teams work without VPN, but now you want me to log in for web access? A browser blocker is better imo.
(Although they have since taken down their PSA woth no explanation)
Yeah. What company wouldn’t allow it?
My IT department uninstalled it from my work laptop, and told me not to reinstall it because - and I quote: “The only browser IT officially supports is Google Chrome.”
What makes this doubly stupid is that I’m a web developer. I literally can’t test my stuff on another browser…
I used to develop ads (non intrusive things for home depot or go RVing) and i used ad blockers. When testing, i would just run private browsing with plugins disabled…
Officially only Edge is supported, but Chrome is tolerated. It’s a full MS environment.
Same here. The worst thing is in their justification of disallowing Firefox they listed that it was not an enterprise application. I get that it might be extra effort to support it but don’t list something factually untrue as a lame cop out for why you don’t want to.
Was told it wouldn’t be allowed because you couldn’t restrict it using GPO… Until I told them they could absolutely apply those restrictions using GPO and even provided the ADMX templates.
Click on every single ad and banner, click “I agree” on every pop-up. Make that computer hate it’s life!
uBlock Origin Lite does work, but it’s predefined lists only. You can’t use the element zapper 🙁
lame
How To Get Fired 101
My condoleances
Download Firefox portable
At large organizations you’re generally not allowed to download much of anything without it passing through IT security and management first. If it’s a no, it will probably stay a no.
In your experience, what large organization restricts this? I’ve worked at a few SaaS companies and a FAANG that always gave us full install rights and browser choice. Granted we are on the software side, but I haven’t experienced this at all.
I work for a non-profit and they are way more lenient about what we would like to install as long as the job gets done.
Then you have bad opsec and security holes.
This matters more for some industries than others. But this attitude lets a malicious employee install basically whatever they want in service of “the job” and you won’t even know you’re being breached until after it’s all over.
Well, we still have to get approval. But it just seems like they don’t mind as much. For example, I don’t know how many companies out there would be fine with installations of AutoHotkey and LibreOffice.
Just remember,it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission!
Just to be clear, I mean it’s literally managed at the Group Policy level (in Windows server environments at least) and no amount of asking will suddenly give your user account permissions to be able to save files of any kind.
You generally literally cannot download it without going through IT to get them to approve of and give your account access first.
Ya I forgot I have escalated device privileges and an admin account, which I definitely would have used for installing anything. Although I believe I can also skirt the rules using winget on a user account. That will probably get you in trouble however!
Download Firefox portable
https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable
Link for convenience.
Download a Firefox based browser from the Microsoft store?
some “infosec” systems tags firefox as a “vulnerability” risk
ahem tenable ahem
Store is disabled
Wellp, time to get a new job.
I can’t install anything. I’m lucky I can install uBlock Origin because I worked out later most extensions are disabled too. But I guess it’s only matter of time until that disappears.
I would have run already.
If you had uBlock origin already, you may have gotten a message through Chrome that it was no longer supported, so it’s been disabled, and gives you the option to remove it. I noticed you don’t have to remove it, and it can be re-enabled. However, I need someone smarter with adblockers than I to say if this is actually helpful and not hazardous.
People are saying manifest v2 (the old API that ublock uses) will be gone soon, which I think should effectively make ublock unusable whatever you do unless you stop updating chrome maybe (which could open you up to a ton of security issues) ? Not sure, don’t care since I’ve ditched chrome long ago
Good to know, thanks.
I just downloaded the Kagi Orion browser and I can install extensions from both Chrome and Firefox web stores!
Nice!
Is there any firefox based browser on android where I can have easy gestures for the arrow buttons? All the firefox versions I can find require me to do this in two clicks which for the way I browse is a pain in the arse. Can I fix this somehow?
Unknown, i can use gestures on my phone which work in Firefox. Maybe it’s is a phone problem.
You mean swiping left up go back? Works fine for me in regular FF on Android…
Doesn’t work for me. I don’t have “plain” android but a specific type that’s compatible with my eink screen.
Chromium gestures work fine though.
No feature for it that I know of. They may be thinking of the swipe to change tabs support?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-gestures-in-firefox-android
I haven’t tried it, but Iceraven has a lot of extensions available compared to Firefox. Maybe there is one to do exactly what you need?
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Chrome is no longer available in my Start menu.
Been a loooong time
But my time is finally near…
Yeah, I switched to Firefox when this whole Manifest V3 thing was announced, I only still have Chrome installed because it’s better for PDFs than Firefox and once in a great while i run into a site that doesn’t work right on Firefox.
better for PDFs
Sumatra!
I actually really like Firefox for reading pdf’s, how is it in chrome? I’ve never actually tried chrome for that because I was still using okular back when I still had chrome installed on anything.
The main issue I have with Firefox is that some pdfs have this side-by-side layout (especially rpg pdfs) that Firefox respects and I keep having to turn it off every time I load a new one. Chrome doesn’t respect it and shows it a page at a time like I want. My eyes don’t work too good so side by side the text is just too small.
Interesting, funny enough I have sorta the opposite problem using Firefox for PDFs: I like the side by side view of two pages and Firefox always loads books with single pages, zoomed way too far in for my taste. Have you tried it for PDFs recently? It’s a new way of reading them for me, and I wonder if they’ve changed it since you used it last.
Yeah, it’s still set as my default for handling PDFs, so I keep opening them in there and then copying the address over to chrome by hand because I’m too lazy to go find the default app settings.
Or in my app drawer
or in ~/.local/share/applications
Google is not an IT company. It’s an advertising company. Surprised Pikachu, it blocks ad blockers.
It’s been an ad company for a long time, though, and blocking ad blockers is new.
Because they are at the end of their growth phase and have entered their squeeze until dead phase.
Yes, but enshittification doesn’t happen all at once. And this is a textbook example of the actual meaning of enshittification.
Yeah it’s always been an ad company. And you are correct, blocking apps is new, welcome to the last stage in the ad-blocking arms race. Glad I degoogled my digital life a decade ago.
Hey, can you tell a little bit about your stack, what apps and services do you use? Also on phone? I guess in a decade you could work that out pretty well.
Your options for phones come down to linux phones (which I haven’t heard great things about) and pixels ironically.
Apple phones make a similar number of calls to google services as android phones simply because of how much google runs.
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Instead we get an almost unusable internet where ads take up more and more real estate.
Its even worse than just hurting usability. Lots of ad networks are not policing their advertising customers and malicious payloads have been injected from ads. So allowing ads is a security risk because of the lack of security at the various ad networks.
I was about to comment something similar but you said it before I did. Sometimes I’ll mistakenly open YouTube with Chrome and then I realize I messed up because I have to sit through three, sometimes one-minute long ads just to watch a twenty second video. I’ll typically just nope out and switch to Firefox. The worst thing is they’re unskippable and I swear for some of them the ad actually pauses if you switch to another tab or browser. I’m getting ads even on super old videos so I’m pretty sure it isn’t all to do with the channels themselves monetizing their videos.
3 one minute long adds are better than those 2 hour long prageru racist propaganda videos trying to masquerade as “Educational” content
I went to help out a friend, a few years ago, he runs vanilla Edge, I can’t believe anyone actually uses the internet like that.
some some youtubers that had setup like that, it was so cringey. its from idiocracy
I love this movie but honestly it’s getting to the point where I can’t even watch it without getting upset.
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Listen scro, Imm just tryin to keep the people from gettin deaded
I only made it through like one season of Handmaid’s Tale, it was too real.
What movie is that?
Movie turning into a documentary in real time.
Idiocracy
uBO is not just an ad blocker, its almost a firewall against malware and a tracking filter
Im old enough to remember the internet before ads, and with ads became a thing and you had to make sure to keep your speakers low/off all the time less some screaming loud ad popped up somewhere to burst your eardrums at 2am.
There were so many obnoxious, visual cancer ads.
Then they became actual digital cancer by being injection points for viruses and malware, and thus adblockers became a necessity.
And they remain a necessity to this day, for the same reason as they were 20+ years ago.
and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking.
not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.
and yet the ad servers want to blame the end user for adblocking. not their absolute refusal to moderate or police any of the content they deliver.
This is the American way. You try to shit blame elsewhere so noone puts the onus on you to improve so you can keep a larger portion of the profit. “Fuck you I got mine” should be printed on our money lol
CONGRATULATIONS, YOU WON!!!
I’d be okay with sites showing me unintrusive non targeted ads, but since it’s all or nothing I choose nothing.
