this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 173 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome's sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.

[–] Virkkunen@fedia.io 74 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)

If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn't make a single dent in Chromium's dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 60 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Nah it would make a big dent for sure.

Firefox has ~180 million users

Amount of users using adblockers is ~900 million.

It would massively change the market.

Numbers according to mozilla and statista

[–] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Im using Firefox because fuck Google's monopoly, but Firefox seems to care little for some stuff I think is critical, namely AV codec support. Lack of out of the box support for HEVC and a few others, which my underlying OS supports perfectly, is a big turn off.

May be time to give Opera a spin

[–] foggenbooty@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

I wish Firefox would build a tablet/scalable interface. It's horrible on a tablet and breaks on DeX.

[–] lastweakness@lemmy.world -2 points 2 weeks ago

If you're gonna use Opera anyway, why not just use Brave and disable the crypto stuff? The native adblocker on Brave is on par with uBlock Origin and performs even better. Opera is probably the worst direction you can go from where you are right now...

[–] lemmeBe@sh.itjust.works 36 points 2 weeks ago

That's true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend's house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend's been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.

What's that? What? What's with the ads? Oh that, that's YT.

I know it is, but what's with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them...

Installed adblocker for him, he's looking at it in shock. I'm looking at him shocked...

People have no idea, what we take for granted. 😅

[–] ihatetheworld@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes I agree. If you are using adblocker you are already not an average user. Using A adblocker with custom filters put you on the extreme end and most of those users are either already on FF or have migrated to FF since the MV3 announcement.

And let's not forget adblock made for MV3 will work well enough for those users who aren't using adblocker with custom filters.

Even if Google kill off adblock completely with its browser, chrome will still be dominating the market by a huge margin.

[–] airglow@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)
[–] Virkkunen@fedia.io 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

According to both websites, the research was conducted on just 2000 USA citizens. In my opinion, that's a lot of weight being pulled by claiming they represent the entire country. I am unable to download the research papers here, but what does it say about the sample? If they are researching solely on more tech savvy people, then I think the results are very likely to be skewed to one side

[–] airglow@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Frankly, I'm not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.

Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in "48 markets") use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.

My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they're not just niche tools anymore.

[–] Virkkunen@fedia.io 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I'm not really trying to disprove or disagree with anything, I just think that knowing the sample is important. For instance, earlier in Hungary, we've had a lot of billboards and other media claiming that 99% of Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine and gender affirming politics. In a purely statistical sense, this was correct and could dissuade the common folk into thinking that's representative of the country. However when you investigate further, their research was done on just a couple thousand citizens that were all either affiliated someway to Fidesz (the rulling party) or historically voted for them, which overwhelmingly skews the results towards one end.

[–] airglow@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Hey, I think you're totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn't release the full data publicly, and the survey was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there's reason to suspect that the data is biased.

I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don't subscribe to their data service, I don't have details of the methodology here, either.

[–] btaf45@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Hungarians were against things like sending aid to Ukraine

WTF Hungary suffered Kremlin captivity during the entire cold war period and now they are okay with throwing another country under the bus.

[–] ihatetheworld@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What is there to recognize? This is a survey conducted on 2,000 Americans. 2,000 is just 0.00057% of the whole US population which is estimated at 345,426,571.

The average user absolutely do not use block ads unless it is enabled by default in the browser. Chrome with the largest market share does not block ads by default and if you are going out of your way to block ads or use a browser like brave that do that by default you my friend are already not an average user.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

You...don't understand how surveys work, I see.

[–] babybus@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Then why is Google fighting against ad blockers?

[–] Virkkunen@fedia.io 16 points 2 weeks ago

Because they want every little dime they can get, no matter what.

[–] emax_gomax@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

Because their an ad company and they don't like any threats to their revenue stream. Same logic as video game companies using DRM. Selling a worse product at a bigger expense to tell shareholders their compelling pirates to pay (even tho most pirates will just not play the game rather than suddenly start purchasing it).

[–] RecallMadness@lemmy.nz 5 points 2 weeks ago

It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.

If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?

[–] Rob200@lemmings.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

It would actually.

Google makes money on ads. They think they can force more money to make. People switching to Firefox makes that a wasted effort for Google as you descibed.

[–] Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 weeks ago

I just did research on this. Up to 33% (according to some sources) of Americans use an adblocker. That feels like a dent to me...

[–] GooseFinger@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 weeks ago

At absolute most, they risk losing the portion of users who use ad blockers because of this decision. They'll certainly lose less, but are practically guaranteed to not lose more.

They probably determined that the additional ad revenue from those who used to use ad blockers was more than the revenue they'd lose from people leaving.

I don't agree with it, but I bet that's happening here. Personally, I'd be surprised if 20% or more of Chrome users have an ad blockers installed. Even fewer would use Revanced or the like.

[–] M137@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

Even here on Lemmy, where most people are tech-savvy, a disturbing amount don't use adblockers. I've seen so many posts of people complaining about ads and they always have comments with people agreeing. A lot of the time they've got some completely illogical and stupid reason for it.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 28 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.

And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree...

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 36 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…

Opera Browser (before it was sold to a Chinese company) did have its own browser engine before it went Chromium. It was called Presto. source. The team that used to own/run Opera before the sale to China formed again to make the Vivaldi browser.

Vivaldi and Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 addons (like uBlock Origin) until July 2025. The article doesn't say how long Opera will continue, but I'm guessing its the same deadline of July too.

[–] cfi@lemmy.world 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Presto era Opera was fantastic. At the time Firefox was kinda stagnating and Opera was just innovating.

[–] seaQueue@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

You might like Vivaldi, they're the most innovative chromium derived browser that I've used

[–] original_reader@lemm.ee 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I love Vivaldi. Am sad it's Chromium. Wish Firefox would take a page out of Vivaldi's features book and innovation approach.

[–] SeikoAlpinist@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 weeks ago

Zen browser does that.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

So... basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?

Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 11 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?

Yes.

Because if there is not massive amounts of money and resources pumped into Chromium development? Vivaldi and Brave will be up a creek

Well, the browser will function just fine with Manifest V2 support removed in July 2025, but lots of addons will no longer work.

[–] qprimed@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago

without addons to control internet crazy, that word "function" is doing some heavy lifting.

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes. Which was not the topic being discussed.

The idea was that Google Chrome would lose a significant market share because of this. And, on the off chance that somehow happens, that is basically a death sentence for all the browsers dependent on Chromium.

[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

Yes. Which was not the topic being discussed.

The idea was that Google Chrome would lose a significant market share because of this. And, on the off chance that somehow happens, that is basically a death sentence for all the browsers dependent on Chromium.

Hmm, okay if thats the only thing you're willing to discuss, I'll respond directly to that then.

The idea that Google is going to have significant market share loss from removing V2 manifest support is laughable. This is especially true if you're saying the market share for Chromium will decline specifically for uBlock Origin no longer working. As of right now there are:

  • only 40 million users of uBlock Origin on Chromium browsers source
  • over 5.52 billion people using the internet as of this month. source

So if 100% of uBlock Origin users stopped using Chromium browsers because of lack of uBlock Origin that would only represent a loss of .769%. Not even 1%.

Further, I'm betting Google would continue to keep development on Chromium going even with significant market share loss to some other browser. Google was around for the late 1990s and early 2000s when Microsoft absolutely dominated the web browser market and had the ability to literally change the specifications of the web on a whim and locking out non-Microsoft systems from the full web experience. A company Google's size (and business model) cannot be safe if a competitor can change the web standards for the web client (browser) that Google products run in.

I say all of this as a loving user of Firefox with uBlock Origin, that I'm posting this comment with right now. However, I'm realistic about the situation as it exists today.

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago

So… basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree?

Technically Chromium is based on Safari to some degree, but they split ways a long, long time ago.

Ladybird is eventually going to be a brand new browser on its' own engine, hopefully.

Servo is being worked on again, so that's something.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Safari is WebKit, which branched off from Chrome when Google forked WebKit into Blink. So they’re like siblings.

[–] stoy@lemmy.zip 21 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Technically, Chrome branched off from Safari when they forked WebKit into Blink....

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 8 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah the way I phrased it was super awkward

[–] grubbyweasel@sh.itjust.works 8 points 2 weeks ago

good. a massive shakeup like that would be great

[–] CosmoNova@lemmy.world 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Opera, being owned by Chinese big tech is probably the only "mainstream" browser I find worse than Chrome and I doubt it will have any measurable effect on Googles market dominance. Don't get me wrong Google would absolutely deserve to trip and fall for the enshittification route they're taking, but I don't see how Opera could do what Firefox can't when Opera is very reliant on Google.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

I was referring to Google banning ad blockers more than Opera's move to bypass the block in chromium. I should have clarified that in my original comment, but I was quite sleep deprived when I wrote it.

[–] TheFunkyMonk@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I know I’m a drop in the bucket but I have always been a diehard Google fanboy and, in the recent years, have switched to iOS, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. No regrets.

[–] mbirth@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

There’s dozens of us! Dozens! (Switched to Apple after 12 years of being an Android enthusiast.)

[–] boonhet@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago

I also switched after about 10 years of dunking on iPhone users for accepting locked up phones with inferior hardware.

Turns out the software experience is a lot better and if you want access to your banking apps, you have to keep your Androids locked up nowadays anyway. I'd always ran custom roms, but one day I couldn't anymore so I thought long and hard and in the end just went to the nearest Apple store and bought an iPhone.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Unfortunately, I doubt it. Chrome made it as big as it did because it had one of the biggest tech and advertising companies in the world behind it. Other than Microsoft with building in Internet Explorer into Windows, thereor Apple doing that with Safari, isn't anything else that could compete as easily, and we all how that went for Microsoft.

And it would only be harder today, since they'd not only have go contend with Chrome, but also that a lot of websites are being built around Chrome/browsers using the Chromium engine. People would go to a website that either refuses to work, or doesn't work properly for their browser and hop over to Chrome instead.

Netflix requires specific DRM addons that are really only available for the major browser engines, as an example. If someone is rolling their own, like KDE does, then that's going to refuse to work outright.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 0 points 2 weeks ago

i don’t think it’s working