Alaknár

if you meant Mv2

Yup! Edited the comment.

Out of curiosity - have you tried any of the fully Mv3 compatible adblockers yet? I stopped using uBlock Origin a while ago, switched to AdGuard and Ghostery. Right now I’m running Ghostery exclusively (because they help with the cookies pop-up) and… it just works. Still blocks ads as well as uBlock ever did.

I can’t find them now, but I saw some articles saying that actually Mv3 offers some new tools that help achieve adblock goals easier than Mv2 allowed. I have no clue if that’s true or if that’s a paid shill trying to calm people down, but from my own perspective, Mv3 seems to be painted as a much bigger baddie than it is.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

By the fiftieth “your browser is outdated, please upgrade to an up to date browser” on an up to date version of Firefox, but with privacy extensions and on a VPN, yeah forgive me if I harbour some resentment

Interesting! I used Firefox for ages and never encountered that issue.

The VPN “click to confirm you’re human” is annoying but at the same time understandable - 60% of all Internet traffic is bots.

Not even a captcha challenge half the time, just “you’re not worthy of seeing this website, peasant.” And don’t even think about disabling JS, that gets you blacklisted all the same.

Super weird. I’m using Mullvad Browser half the time, never had any such issues. It automatically kills all cookies, has uBlock and NoScript installed, etc. EDIT: oh, yeah, it’s also Firefox-based.

They also block you from loading standalone images, so you can’t download images from search results or even open an image from an article in a new tab

What…? I do that literally every day - I handle the service catalogue at work so I need a lot of icons for the hardware and software we provide to users. Just yesterday I downloaded the images for a bunch of Apple hardware, straight from the search results.

Should I be grateful that they’re saving the website megabytes of server traffic while making it impossible to save stuff offline or use the browser’s zoom tools to get information out of a high resolution image?

Other than the fact that I fail to see that “impossible to save stuff” bit - yeah, you should, somewhat. Again: over 60% of traffic is bots, that generates A LOT of traffic. These days a lot of people wouldn’t be able to afford hosting a website if they didn’t have services that Cloudflare and similar companies offer.

Also, they’re literally a man in the middle as a service (…)

I don’t know enough about networking to have an opinion on that. I only know that the two network security companies that I follow on socials recommend them. And it’s not “shills shilling”, these are two companies that will take governments and companies to court for threatening user rights.

Also also, just because they say their DNS service is “private” doesn’t make it private. Companies have been lying about their privacy policy since privacy policies started being mandated with zero consequences

Sure, I get that. But I’m a fan of Occam’s Razor. Can they exfiltrate data from their DNS? Of course. Everybody can. But why would they? If anyone finds out, it effectively kills the entire company, and they don’t do business with personal data - that’s Google’s market. It’s a lot of risk for zero reward, the way I see it.

browsers are not a market in themselves, browsers are used to browse the internet. they are irrelevant without the context around it.

Google’s Chrome used to be only about 60% compliant with W3C guidelines. They still became the de-facto default browser and so the guidelines changed to better match Chrome’s interpretation.

if google or cloudflare decide to create some bullshit attestation system to lock alternatives out and vendors adopt it,

It’s already happened when Microsoft released the first version of Edge. Google killed it by making it “incompatible” with its services.

and they seem to be scoping out how to do just that.

Cloudflare? By giving money to a project aiming at breaking up the duopoly…?

Oh, yeah, since I sometimes state facts about topics you don’t like, clearly, I can be ignored.

How fucking pathetic are you?

Mate, we’re talking about the BROWSER MARKET.

Even assuming Ladybird somehow gains 100% of that market, completely kicking out anything Chromium related, it has ZERO bearing on who people choose for their host! Cloudflare currently has around 20% of that market, and if Ladybird - today - goes up to 100% share of the browser market, Cloudflare will still hold 20% of hosting!

You’re talking about some overarching Internet revolution, while the thread is about a single aspect of how people reach the Internet!

This is like saying “the duopoly that reigns the water is Maersk and Smartwater”, two companies that do completely different things that just happen to be related to water…

they have the capability to do more.

And you don’t think that financing a third party browser to break the duopoly is “doing more”?

What’s not bad? Ladybird sitting at floor-leves of market share?

If we want to threaten the status quo in any way, it absolutely is. Firefox has 2.26% and - in terms of defining standards or forcing changes upon Chromium - it’s 100% irrelevant.

Again: what does Cloudflare have to do with the browser market…?

You compared the Cloudflare situation to “taking money from Google” and added that due to Ladybird taking money from Cloudflare, they’re “not challenging the status quo”.

Ladybird being a browser has absolutely no bearing on webhosting and the only status quo it can challenge is in the browser market. Which implies that you think Cloudflare has something to do with the browser market.

But we’re discussing the potential future of the browser, not its current state. Right now it can barely render a modern page without crashing (but not always).

By being a monopoly

How so? There are dozens of website hosts and DDOS protection services around.

having a unique chokehold on the internet

Have they ever utilised it in any extent?

Even if we don’t get into their ties with various governments that they inevitably have to have

That sounds suspiciously close to “I have zero proof but I think they’re doing X”. Can you elaborate on those government ties?

the fact that they alone can cripple the internet is concerning

Imagine a hosting company that’s 100% open-source, 100% vegan, 100% pro-consumer. Their service is so good that the vast majority of the Internet starts using them.

Do you start hating them at the point where they reach, lets say, 50% market share, just because they managed to grow that large?

I guess what I’m asking is: do you have any concrete cause for the Cloudflare hate, or is it just a “they’re big therefore they must be bad, because big == bad”?

Ladybird is not threatened to be killed by whatever anybody but the developers do.

It absolutely is. If Google forces incompatibility on it (like it did with Edge) ordinary users won’t switch. Because the majority of ordinary users are still deep in the ecosystem.

All it takes is for Google to block high quality streaming on YouTube and the browser will never go outside of 2-3% market share.

But… they did blacklist Kiwifarms? In 2022.

It’s such a weird mix of people with very strong opinions on topics they’re extremely ignorant about here, on Lemmy. I was first shocked to see it on the Technology community.

I thought that, since Lemmy (and fediverse in general) is relatively difficult to get into, it’d attract more tech-savvy people, but now. Here, in this thread, we have a dude saying that “Cloudflare always sucked”. Any Windows-related discussion always devolves into crying about data being siphoned (and nobody has bothered to read the telemetry documentation, of course)…

Just getting a weird cognitive dissonance whenever I’m browsing here.

Semantics. I agree with you in principle, but the matter of fact is that we ended up with effectively zero choice over the browser engine.

Not what I meant.

Microsoft - in theory - had the finances to push their browser to peoples homes. Be it by baking it in to Windows, by ad campaigns, etc., etc. And they still lost to Google’s control over the Web.

Ladybird, by comparison, is an obscure no-name product, being made by a controversial figure, with (relatively to MS) zero ability to market itself to the wider audience. All Google has to do is make their products completely inoperable under Ladybird and, other than some extremely committed power-users who want to “de-google” their lives, nobody will use it.

Personally, I think if the engine was closed source, then we didn’t in fact “had that”. Maybe Microsoft had it, not us.

Well, yeah, in that aspect, you’re correct. I meant that as a “we had a non Google-reliant engine”.

Why?

How did the literal best DDOS protection on the planet and the provider of a very safe and secure DNS suck?