Submitted 6 months ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.zip
https://www.neowin.net/news/chrome-increases-its-overwhelming-market-share-now-over-70/
No matter how hard other browsers try, people stubbornly do not want to leave Chrome, and its market share is now above 70%.
I’ve been noticing a lot of sites that just refuse to work when not using some Chromium browser. More so than usual. Clearly not a coincidence.
It’s bullshit but I’m too tired to fight it sometimes. Especially for college, I don’t want teachers bitching at me for a test glitching or a textbook link not working, so I just use ungoogled Chromium as a replacement. I use Librewolf for personal browsing which is more likely to break shit + uBlock, so I’d have to make a whole nother profile for school that has reduced security and disable most of uBlock to do my work. But to go through all those hoops is tiring.
Schools are just forcing people to give up their privacy, especially since you know non-techy students aren’t gonna do stuff like have a separate profile for their school and private browsing, so now Google knows all their shit. Plus Firefox has become the “green bubble shaming” of browsers I guess, cause I’ve had several friends and randos tease me and make it seem like FF is obsolete or something and, “why not use Edge or Chrome?” 🙄
Google has waited patiently for the moment at which they could start strangling their users without fear of ostracizing them and it's apparently arrived. Blocking ad blockers in YT, breaking sideloading apps in android, charging for storage after the forever-free model getting people to store everything with them, etc. I believe the average user feels moving would break too many elements of their daily life and will put up with anything Google does at this point.
I'm definitely not what any true privacy-seeking person would call a diehard but I have pushed back where I can, choosing to try to find a way to keep from being impacted by these changes. Firefox, Freetube, CoMaps, personal mail, etc but it takes a decision to give up a ton of convenience that I feel a lot of people aren't willing to make.
I'm waiting to see what the sideloading change brings before I decide where to go with my phone.
There are three browsers in that image. There are two additional skins for one of the browsers.
Will, Mozilla adding AI and advertising to Firefox. That’s not helping things.
It’s just a way to interact with AI models from the browser, and you need an account on a provider as Mozilla does not provide any AI services.
People just love to hate Mozilla for 0.001% of the shit other browsers do
support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models
They are definitely heading towards on-device models.
From what I’ve seen they’re only adding ways to use AI more efficiently from the browser, it’s not like they’re developing their own AI, or forcing anyone to use it. It’s not even an obvious feature either, and you need to set it up with an existing AI service.
So on the AI enshittification scale, I’d rank Mozilla pretty low (unless there’s something I’m unaware of)
Heartbreaking, I’ve been using it since it was called Phoenix but am now considering a switch to Vivaldi depending on their implementation of this stuff.
I’m pretty sure you can just turn it off in settings. Or you can look at Librewolf which is just Firefox with some tweaks.
Switch to another Firefox-based browser instead.
On macOS I can’t understand why people like that clunky, spyware-ridden browser. Just yikes.
Because 99% of users have never heard of any browsers other than Safari, Edge, Firefox, or Chrome. So they go with what's most familiar to them.
Ask a hundred random people off the street to name 5 browsers; they won't.
What? Google Chrome is never installed by default on macOS and Windows. How would you not know what a browser is if you have to intentionally install it?
I think half of those people wouldn’t know what a browser is.
I have coworkers who refer to Chrome as “The Internet”, so there’s that…
I wouldn’t worry at that. People said the same thing about Internet Explorer.
“Just a little bit of history repeatin’”
Google <-> Browser
[Add “They are the same” Meme here]
StowawayFog@piefed.social 6 months ago
Google made Chrome because they can gather data about what you do on a page after you search Google and click on a link.