Time to stop using Chrome

arstechnica.com Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a "topic" list it shares with advertisers.

Google is now rolling out a system where Chrome directly tracks your activity and shares its summary with advertisers.

Also Firefox is faster as of like two months ago.

It takes five minutes to switch browsers, and the difference is so little that you'll often forget you did it.

59 comments

no more half measures walter
Time to stop using Chrome
Using chromium, ungoogled chromium, brave (reactionary baggage), vivaldi, opera, etc is not good enough. We must switch to Firefox specifically.

All the Chrome forks I mentioned above use the same chrome rendering engine, called blink. When you use blink you're helping google take over the web. Firefox is already on the shitlist of every major website because they refuse to prevent the user from installing things like adblockers and privacy extensions like Chrome does with manifest v3 and soon with their new Web Environment Integrity system. They cannot wait to throw up a "your browser is no longer supported :(" page for all Firefox users, and when that happens it will be over for our fox friend.
- They cannot wait to throw up a "your browser is no longer supported :(" page for all Firefox users, and when that happens it will be over for our fox friend.
  
  Whenever you see a site that does this, or a site that works on Chrome but not Firefox, report it at webcompat.com. Doing that will create an issue in github.com/webcompat/web-bugs.
  
  For sites that are intentionally blocking Firefox users, Mozilla adds interventions or user agent overrides for those specific pages or scripts (go to about:compat in Firefox to see a list of them) to make it work with Firefox, even on sites trying to block Firefox.
  
  Thank you for mentioning this. Bookmarked.
- Honestly, manifest v3 can't come soon enough, the enshitification of chrome would mean more people moving to Firefox, so, I think it would be a good thing to force all chrome users to look at ads, simply to give them a 'real' (since privacy isn't annoying or something you feel with every page you click) reason to switch
The best time to stop using chrome was when they announced manifest v3, the second best time is now.
Not sure if this Chrome thing also applies to mobile, but this is as good time as any to remind people that you can now install uBlock Origin (and many other useful extensions) on the android firefox app.
- The FF Android app is great, it has more UI customization, and adblock extensions.
- Problem is webview , until there is an option from Firefox. You can either use the chrome one. Or use the chrome one. Whatever browser you use. So adding Firefox mobile only give you issues from Firefox on top of issues with chrome.
  
  Isn’t GeckoView stable at this point?
The time to stop using Chrome was always
it's always been time to stop using chrome.

ungoogled chromium isnt good enough either. if you want to get away from topics you need to be using firefox or safari based browsers.
To the people saying chromium is fine, do you know what Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish (EEE) is? Maybe you’ve heard of it in passing, but don’t really know what it is.

The web is built on standards, which is supposed to mean that no one entity dictates how the internet works. Microsoft pioneered the EEE strategy in the 90’s in an attempt to kill off HTML and replace it a proprietary alternative. This was brought to light during an antitrust trial against Microsoft. It is literally a strategy designed to centralize commonly held standards into the hands of a single corporation.

When you see a popular product created by a corporation which offers a stripped down open source alternative, understand the end goal is to monopolize that product niche and encircle all the labor contained within the commons to enshittify the product (start offering subscriptions, selling ad data, putting more and more features behind a paywall, etc).

This applies to Chrome and Chromium. It also applies to VS Code (Copilot seems to be the Killer Feature they’re attempting to do this with right now). But when a website works on Chromium but not on Firefox, it is almost always because Firefox is not implementing features which haven’t been ratified as web standards yet.
Hey Porky, what's the time?

Time to stop using Chrome!
If a simply migrate tool existed that could preserve everyone's bookmarks, saved passwords, saved banking details, settings, etc and transfer them to firefox or other browsers it would be significantly easier to get people to move.

The biggest blockade I am seeing in getting people to move is not their love of google, it is the stickyness that having all of their shit built up in the browser causes. A simple and easy to migrate method would get people off it.
- https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-chrome-firefox
  
  It's not as bad as you would think.
- Most of this can be easily imported from Chrome to Firefox. Mozilla has a guide on it and it's pretty easy.
  
  Settings will have to be redone, but I find that usually is pretty quick
- Permanently Deleted
  
  a few hours of a single day
  
  Yeah there's the problem.
  
  I'm not talking about just me. I'm talking about getting mass migration to occur. The only people you're going to get to go through anything that takes more than 10-20mins at most are people that REALLLLLLLLLLLLLY care a lot.
  
  Mercury promises to be a faster Firefox with Librewolf patches.
- Just run both at once for a while and transfer logins over as needed.
OKAY OKAY

it's done. the only thing missing is Chrome's reading list, but that's minor.
- Chrome reading list is just a knock off of pocket which Mozilla owns and is integrated into Firefox.
I've been in the process of switching to Firefox, and I've been half assing it, time to really do it
i just got a new laptop and it came with firefox installed on it, but i couldn't really figure out its features. on chrome i like having different profiles with their own histories, bookmarks, appearances, accounts/passwords, etc.. I couldn't work that out in firefox.

I've seen lots of people say it's an easy switch, but my ass could not do it
- All you need should just be in about:profiles, but it's definitely not as intuitive as on Chrome unfortunately yeah
  
  Ok sweet, I’ll give it another go tonight with that tip. Tyvm
- Would containers work for you? They don't separate bookmarks, but everything else would work like a profile. It says you need an addon but I'm pretty sure you don't anymore because I don't have it.
  
  I’ll check out containers too, ty!
Anyone have a good guide to migrate data to Firefox. Things like auto fill bookmarks ect
- Here
  
  Thank you
I am a vim gremlin. I use qutebrowser, which is ultimately chromium-based, because I cannot find any reasonable way to do vim bindings for Firefox. Tridactyl, the most featureful and mature vim binding extension for Firefox, shits out if Firefox hasn't loaded a webpage.

Is there any Firefox fork that is keyboard driven like qutebrowser? I don't see how it could be accomplished without a fork or patchset, as the WebExtension API simply has too many restrictions for a proper input method.
- spacebar heating ass reason to use chromium
  
  Accessibility for people who have a hard time regularly switching between their keyboard and mouse is not a spacebar heating like reason.
  
  If it were, there would be a functional Firefox alternative that I'm unaware of. You don't seem to know of one either. The moment such a fork exists I'll switch, but my wrists are too fucked up to use a mouse constantly.
  
  GOOD reference
The time to stop using Chrome was yesterday, but I guess today is the next best
God they just can’t but ratchet this shit up huh? I finally heard my roommates suggest ditching streaming recently and am hoping moves like this make it easier to migrate people off these platforms. Unfortunately the greatest issue is always ease of use in terms of what people are used to
How about Chromium?
- no more half measures walter
  
  just use firefox
- I think that has it too.
  
  Google is telling everyone this feature ("privacy sandbox") is good for them and not Google-specific.
- "ungoogled chromium" should have this feature removed (I assume).
I switched over and there's a few things I miss:

Profiles: Containers works okay for me but every once in a while it'll just completely kill a website and then I have to open it in a different window. I know Firefox also has actual profiles which I need to try out but it's also annoying how those don't sync (I think?)

Offline Google Docs Editing: Huge deal breaker for anyone without consistent internet. Only works on chromium based browsers. Yeah I can kind of work around it but I wouldn't expect many people to want to go out of their way for this.

What I love:

ublock origin for Android. I wouldn't switch back without it. I can watch videos on YouTube without ads, and there's no ads anywhere else either. Absolute game changer.
People still use chrome?

I stopped using it in 2013 when I realized that it would load all your restored tabs at once, while firefox didn't
yeah uh. it keep crashing the shit out of my PC so i just use edge, imported all the extensions and never looked back.
- Edge is still Chromium, so it's not really any better.
  
  true. but its less bloatware on my PC, ill probably switch to firefox or something in the future
- It’s always weird to hear this. I haven’t had stability issues with Firefox on dozens of computers over the past decade. Not doubting that it happens. I just don’t know what I’m apparently doing right, if anything, to prevent that.
  
  I'm pretty sure they were talking about Chrome, but that's just how interpreted it.
NOW you think it's time to stop using Chrome? How about a decade ago? Ideally, when a gigantic, publicly owned monopolist makes stuff, you never even start using it.
haha
I don't use Firefox because it's slow on Android. I use Vivaldi. Not fully Open Source but still good with privacy and actually kind of easy to check thay're not fooling the users. Plus, it has a bunch of features I really like, such as nested tabs, workspaces, and full sync of almost everything

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