I have coworkers who refer to Chrome as “The Internet”, so there’s that…
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
86 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
4077 readers
336 users here now
Which posts fit here?
Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
Post guidelines
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I wouldn't worry at that. People said the same thing about Internet Explorer.
Google <-> Browser
[Add "They are the same" Meme here]
“Just a little bit of history repeatin’”
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?" 🙄
There are three browsers in that image. There are two additional skins for one of the browsers.
Will, Mozilla are adding AI and advertising to Firefox. That's not helping things.
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)
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
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/on-device-models
They are definitely heading towards on-device models.
Well an on-device model is private and solves the data concerns, so it is much better
Hell, I'd might use it if it uses something like llama.cpp
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. Most would struggle to even name 3.
I think half of those people wouldn’t know what a “browser” is.
"Browser, like from the video games?"
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?
If you ever visit Google or any other their hundreds of services which dominate the entire web, which 99.9999% of internet users will do at some point, you'll eventually be prompted to install Chrome.
How do you install software without knowing what it is? 😭
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.
Google made Chrome because they can gather data about what you do on a page after you search Google and click on a link.