This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Ublock was already somewhat neutered on Chrome, and people didn’t seem to notice. They keep using it.
I’m just so cynical these days. It’s not like the Windows XP era, where people eventually get fed up with enshittification, and move.
Google won. Facebook won.
They have absolute control, basically.
At this point when someone complains about anything but Linux, I just bully them.
Firefox exists.
At ~3.5% market share, depending on the statistics source. And declining, month-on-month:
https://radar.cloudflare.com/reports/browser-market-share-2025-q4
And people still use these trash dumpster of a browser?
Firefox and its derivatives (and Safari - sorry Apple users) are the only browsers not using Google's Blink web engine these days - at least until Ladybird is released.
Despite the Mozilla Foundation's many stupid decisions, Firefox (and Safari) is starting to look like the only thing stopping Google from completely controlling the internet.
Not true — Safari is still based on WebKit. And Safari is still the default browser on over two and a half billion mobile devices currently in use. And say what you might about Apple, but at least they aren’t in the business of selling ads, and thus don’t have any business interest in allowing you to block them effectively, unlike Google.
Sure but that alternative doesn't work for anyone who already doesn't own an Apple device. Also those two and a half billion devices you mentioned can't run alt browsers due to Apple policy so you're basically just picking another company to hand complete control to.
Lynx gang, assemble
What's Lynx? A quick search gave me a lot of different things
For real though. I had the thought earlier today of how I could reduce my internet usage to text only and try and skip all the bullshit. Might be tough but I'm not seeing another way. At least I'd still be able to access things like Wikipedia.
Between AI killing the idea of "believe what you can see" and ads/tracking being forced on every part of the internet, the end is very, very near.
And it should upset everyone, because the internet was not designed for this. We (the people) ultimately paid to develop what is being taken over by corpos for profit.
If not corporations' benefit, then whose?
Links2 is not as funny to use, but it is easier to understand. It supports a graphical interface and images. I use it from time to time and it's nice when you know what you are looking for...
I used them cause my PC had 384 MB of RAM in 2012. It was ok for everything but surfing the web and lynx solved the issue.
If you are looking for something for the phone, i once used Vivaldi.
People keep mentioning Firefox but fail to realize that Google, as the sole sponsor of Mozilla Corporation (not to be confused with Mozilla Foundation), can just kindly ask for Firefox to follow suit and gimp itself, just like it did before with a move to webextensions. Gotta admit it, Google has won the web, what they say (eventually) goes.
Like how they killed JPEG-XL.
All over some employee’s ego associated with his AVIF contributions, from what I’ve seen.
Google doesn't even need to get their hands dirty like that. IMO all they need to do is continue making it difficult for companies to support Firefox when designing their websites. That, in addition to making sure companies know that Google is tirelessly working to make sure Chrome won't work with ad blockers is going to eventually kill Firefox completely.
Glass half full time:
Making adblockers available to only people on the far fringe that are going to go through the extraordinary hoops to get it to work makes it less important to stymie the act of adblocking, because far few people are doing it. Businesses half-ass everything and do the lowest cost thing like always, so they will not bother to ever commit token effort to stop the few remaining adblockers, making it trivially easy to perform the adblocking by comparison to today. The pendulum always swings, in everything, and one of the big factors that cause it to swing back even when all seems lost is that the current group or way of thinking that is at the forefront today has its group members get lazy and complacent in their superior position, creating opportunities for the opposition.
If there are no remaining mainstream browsers that support ad blockers that pendulum is going to take a long time to swing back.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Now they're basically making us work on it. Sometimes loud obvious actions like this are the catalyst to more drastic response. Everything often seems to always stay the same, but everything stays the same up until the very second it doesn't. Nobody knows when that will be, but it will be.
then we'll move again, like we did with chrome. this game of cat and mouse is easy to keep up and really only serves to harm these company in the long run.
Except they aren’t moving anymore.
I think Google finally trapped most of the web’s population, for good.
This. The number of people (real people, not internet people) I know who just keep using Chrome or other Google products without care is shocking.
That's they're choice is all I'll say, I know plenty went to fire for for these reasons, it stands to reason they'll do it again.
Just use Firefox (or Zen Browser, which is a nice fork of Firefox)
Waterfox
I counter with IronFox! Lol I just enjoy all the alternativeFox options
