The sad part is that this meme is 100% wishful thinking. The reality is that most people will just be complicit and too lazy to enact any form of protest. We're doomed unless we organize.
The sadder part is that most people don't even use/know about adblockers in the first place
Been a firefox boy since 2004 here. I never liked Chrome's UI and their hidden self-update process
And spy-ware + Trackers + system data info + location + how many hours used + what websites you use :/ Firefox is the best!! F Chrome users ew
what's beyond me is that 95% of people won't care. We will of course but most will just put up with it.
I usually don't give a fuck about ads, but they've gotten increasingly annoying lately. Used to be that the popular websites were classier and less intrusive with their ads, that's why they were popular. Now the biggest websites (most obviously YouTube) are the ones with the craziest most intrusive ads.
We can only hope normal people start using firefox again and ditch the piece of cold garbage that is chrome/ium. Though i doubt most people nowadays will even think about switching browsers (like how windows still has like 75+% of market share despite its quality freefalling since win10 and the most user hostile stuff being added)
If experience gets bad enough then people will look for alternatives. IE was something like 90% of the market share at one point and then it lost it fairly rapidly.
Not sure if software enshittification really makes people switch. I wish they would but I'm not convinced. I'd say the windows freefall started after windows 7:
8 was universally agreed to be complete horseshit because they were trying to make it work for both, touch and keyboard/mouse, which obviously failed.
10 felt like a sponsored-by-ads freemium cheap spyware, adding even more inconsistencies with these different system settings windows, adding cortana which literally not a single person on earth wanted to use but was hard to disable/remove and embracing the microsoft store which is the most cursed shithole of all (including google playstore which is already bad enough).
11 Is just like 10 but takes away essential settings, making every professional users workflow 40% slower for no reason.
Win7 also had issues, but it felt much more usable for professional use. Also much less bloated with bullcrap nobody ever asked for (preinstalled candycrush anyone?). So for me that was clearly peak windows. Obviously, every half-decent linux distro was at least as good, many were better even from a pure users perspective. After that, linux desktops got better and windows got worse. Nowadays its no competition if you ask me. But still, few people swicht from the pre-installed OS...
Or you could use a browser that's so old that the ads don't even load correctly.
Like un-patched IE 6.
Yesterday I switched to Piped because yt had to pause my music with an ad every 3 fucking minutes, and I can say that it was a great decision to make.
Has anyone else had trouble with Google search on Firefox for Android recently? It freezes after it provides results so I can't click links. Weirdly, I don't have this issue with Chrome, Edge, or Samsung Internet.
Do everything you can! Switch people's default search engine in their browser if they won't switch. I am nearly done coverting my entire office to DDG! Row! Row! Fight the power!
I'm switching as many people as I can to FF and a privacy respecting search engine
Their ads and search are their bread and butter if I'm not mistaken. So even if all you can do is change their browser's default engine every little bit helps. I myself have uninstalled chromium browsers and switch to FF/LibreWolf. I still have Google Authenticator but that will take me longer to kick with its 30+ entries. I'd love it if I could find out which services cost them money and heavily use those for the time being.
If your phone is an Android phone and it is rooted then Aegis can easily with a couple of clicks import all your data from Google authenticator
If I lose my ad blocker it's like losing access to the internet for me
Pretty much, and I think this highlights just how important it is to have at least two independently developed browser engines. If Chromium becomes the only game in town that would effectively let Google, which makes most of its revenue from ads, decide how we access the internet. That would be an absolutely terrible scenario to be in.
Does that work for the ads in YouTube videos? We have messed around with pie hole at our house but it doesn't work for videos.
Unfortunately is not that simple, now Google is pushing a new standard web environment called WEI and all browsers will be affected with it. Is not just a matter of free choice.
We'll see if sites really start forcing this standard, could just turn into a situation where you use Chrome as an app to access specific sites that force it and Firefox for everything else.
Banks will force it pretty quickly. I can't bank on a rooted android already.
Yeah, I think banks and online stores are the most likely early adapters of this.
The late stage of capitalism will force sites to adopt the WEI. Trust me. Privacy will be a luxury good in near future.
At that point we might see a split between corporate and open internet.
If and only "if" this split occur. Unfortunately only few tech conscious people about the importance of free internet as a whole and privacy will adhere to it. Will not be a big movement to harm the core of the big tech.
My perspective on this is that it's about sustainability as opposed to trying to compete with big tech in a zero sum game. For example, Mastodon or Lemmy aren't able to compete with commercial platforms in terms of users, but that doesn't mean they're not viable communities. I can see a future where there's a niche open internet that exists independently of the commercial one and I think that would be fine. As long as there are enough people to do development on platforms and browsers and to produce content, that's all that really matters. In fact, a split might even be better because then we wouldn't have companies interfering with how the network operates.
The FOSS community is big enough that most things will have a non fucked foss counterpart if that happens. Of course hopefully that doesn't need to happen
Maybe a new form to navigate the web will emerge from the FOSS community. I really hope all of us join this to support the new web that we need to make to fight back the big tech greed. Some through code expertise and others through money donates to support the projects that we love. But I don't want to be much idealistic about the future. I' m just dreaming high
Foss needs to break compatibility with WEI clients in the web servers. Yes, big companies will work around it, but it would do two things.
- Be enough of a pain for people to notice the web had split.
- Send a loud message that embrace and extend is not acceptable.
