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by robshep 471 days ago
No it's realism.

ALMOST EVERYONE is voilating user privacy to some extent. That's the price to pay for free software. It sucks, but how do we climb out of that reality?

Punch the bad guy in the face if you like, YOU have options, but once FF is sunk, the the only provider most people can turn to for the stuff they need is Chrome.

If Mozilla/FF is the bad guy in your analogy then Chrome must be an atroticy-committing omni-cidal megalomaniac, which correct me if i'm wrong, is not better.

If you understand the privacy landscape and don't want to get involved you don't have to. I'm on a multi-container, multi-privacy extension, private-search setup because I roughly understand the environment. But I'm certainly not recommending that setup to my parents.

In my view MZ/FF is the least worst of the VIABLE alternatives and has the best chance of success. Sinking Mozilla's firefox in favour of ladybird or brave but none of these will ever have the marketing collaterall that mozilla has/had to be anything other than niche, until they are bought by Meta or Amazon or (you get me)

Most banking websites that most people need to use don't give a fuck about niche browsers and actively agent-sniff to reduce their support and security footprint. Whining down the phone to megacorp's customer support that "you don't want to use Chrome on privacy grounds" and "they really should support ladybird" will not be the mighty hammer of resistance you think it is.

I don't have a better suggestion and so I'm willing make a deal with a bad guy it means I don't have to install Chrome on my mother's PC.
1 comments
JohnFen 471 days ago
> once FF is sunk, the the only provider most people can turn to for the stuff they need is Chrome.

There are a number of FF forks available as well.

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cholantesh 471 days ago
Pretty much all of those forks are small volunteer projects that rely on upstream work by Mozilla, who are already struggling to keep up with MS, Google, and Apple. We were already at a point where Mozilla was laying off technical staff a few years ago. We're now seeing sites just outright block Firefox because it's not worth the effort when most users are reaching for something built atop Cr. How would any of these forks survive?
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JohnFen 471 days ago
The worst that would happen is that the forks don't stay updated. They won't stop working. It's pretty easy to evade the blocks on sites that are poorly designed/managed enough that they feel it's necessary to block certain browsers.
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cholantesh 471 days ago
>The worst that would happen is that the forks don't stay updated.

Which is hardly trivial, there are hundreds of open issues on Bugzilla for XUL alone. Some of the gaps include accessibility issues, which is down more to Cr better supporting APIs provided by vendors like NVDA. This is first of all, not something that is 'easy to evade' for the affected demographic, and secondly something Mozilla was an industry leader in for a long time. Obviously, Google didn't invest in this out of any sense of altruism, but it speaks to the sustainability of browser development, and what approaches thereof actually work.

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robshep 471 days ago
So your advice to my parents is...

(a) Ignore browser security updates

and

(b) Install some extensions to fettle with user-agent strings to match popular browsers.

Streuth.

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