Your first point is made irrelevant by the law existing. It doesn’t matter what Apple says now, they must comply or face fines for violation. Maybe they’ll bring that up at a future court hearing to which I say: I hope the EU imprisons Tim Cook if they try. Why? Fuck em that’s why
They’ll very likely try some fucky shit. Good news is 1) simply the existence of proper alternatives, even if required to be sideloaded, is a MASSIVE step forward and 2) I assume the EU will pursue them if only to suck money from their coffers. Blocking it to a EU citizen who is outside the EU absolutely violates the spirit of the law and the EU should come down on Apple with all their power if/when that happens
I personally use Fennec and Bromium whenever using Android (I’m a sick fuck who hot swaps between an iPhone and a Google Pixel phone). Fennec for a lot of stuff is fine, but much like the default Firefox, it’s still slow- although better. Bromium and other Chromium based browsers on Android, especially on older shittier hardware, are really hard to beat. I find myself using Bromium a lot just because it’s simply faster. Firefox/Fennec with native support for actual ublock origin though… nothing beats that browsing experience as far as replicating real desktop browsing. Bromium can’t keep up and Google doesn’t want Chrome to. Brave can offer a similar blocking experience but at what cost? I fucking H A T E crypto and even their features that you can turn off, just seeing references to them and such pisses me off. Honestly wish someone would spitefully fork Brave anonymously and remove any crypto references. Last time a team did it openly Brave got pissy and tried to get the project taken down… Even though it’s open source. So, fuck them.
Do you have ublock origin installed? It eliminates all those popups in my experience.
This is pretty much what happened, yes. I’d offer an important expansion on “innovative features” though. Chrome was objectively faster at everything. Loading pages, starting up, all that stuff. If all you care(d) about was a super fast, modern-feeling browsing experience then Chrome was all there was.
I was one of those “fuck Bill Gates!” dudes circa 2008 or 09 or whenever Chrome came along. I had been using Firefox for years because, I dunno, nerd shit. All my nerdy buddies used it and said I should use it, so I did.
And then Chrome came along and like you say Google was the cool kid on the block. They were building out Google Fiber (remember that? Feels bad), “taking it to the man ™️!” in the form of ISPs. Oh God, how I wish they had won that fight… Even the might of Google proved incapable of breaking the collusion of government and corporations that empower the ISPs in the US…
Anyway, Google was, if I’m being fair here, doing an amazing job with PR.
They were building up and out Android OS, providing an actual competitor to Apple’s (basically) first to market iOS.
Mozilla simply couldn’t keep up. It was already pretty niche pre-Chrome, but post-Chrome it was just IE/Edge and Chrome basically. Firefox was left far behind by the general public, forgotten and, if remembered, remembered only as “the browser for nerds.”
I’m back on Firefox now after Google’s billionth threat to end adblockers in Chrome. That plus Google’s clearly unethical practices. I don’t agree with everything Mozilla does/has done and some of the stuff that comes prepackaged in Firefox is unnecessary in my view, BUT there’s little point in denying their superiority over the competition in many ways.
I let people play on my lawn just to bring balance to the universe. Unless they don’t clean up their dog’s shit. Then old man mode erupts.
Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.
I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.
And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.
What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?
My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world
(Not that person)
1 File transfers can be done via apps like localsend, pairdrop/snapdrop (selfhosted, I wouldn’t use the public servers), or simply putting files on a shared server, etc.
2 This is impossible to correctly answer until the new phones are actually out. Reason being we don’t know the restrictions (or hopefully not) that Apple will arbitrarily apply to the port. The iPad, for what it’s worth, can easily mount USB C drives and other accessories, so, hopefully Apple continues in that vein of sanity
3 no
4 my iPhone is my actual phone phone and the pixel is wifi only.