Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
The silver lining here is that you’d hope that more people will simply adopt Firefox. It’s user share has been too low for too long given how great it is
They messed up 10 years ago when for some reason it took ages for Firefox to load compared to Chrome, and sadly it never really recovered the user base even though the performance is vastly improved.
To be fair, even in 2006 the Mozilla corporation was never going to outspend Firefox
Especially not given how much Mozilla wastes on executive compensation ;)
Their user share was pretty okay for a while, but bombed when Chrome first released because it was much more performant. Unfortunately, that stigma never quite fell off and they lost a huge opportunity to overtake the market.
How was it more performant? As I remember it, Chrome was loading websites not noticeably faster than Firefox, as website loading speed depended and still depends mainly on your internet connection and hardware anyway.
As I remember it, Chrome exploded because it was pushed onto users at every possible opportunity while Firefox depended (and still depends) on users actively looking for it.
Used Google or Google products? Get ads for Chrome. Wanted to download Google Earth? You had to activly uncheck a box such that Chrome wasn’t going to be installed as well. Meanwhile no ads and not the same amount of exposure for Firefox.
That way they achieved a critical mass and snowballing did the rest. There were so many users using it that it was considered a good choice just because it was used by many people.
Regarding the performance aspect, if there even was a noticeable difference, it was worse than Firefox. Where else did the “Chrome eating RAM” memes come from?
I think you are misremembering. Chrome won at the start because it was fast as fuck and Firefox was not. Firefox caught back up in the 2016 time frame iirc and they’ve been back and forth ever since.
Ironically chrome was named so as a goal was to reduce the chrome of the UI and focus on the web content, something recent versions of chrome and Firefox have abandoned in favor of massive swaths of whitespace and giant chrome buttons (on Firefox you can enable “unsupported” compact mode to reclaim some of the space if you’re on a laptop)