This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Brave bros anyone? Been using it recently and it's spot on as a browser honestly
Google realized how much money they were losing by supporting adblock in the first place. They also had way too many extensions with MV2 that requested full site access...
At the end of the day, they want to force feed everyone advertisements. Often meant to make people angry or buy shit they don't need.
It's also why apps like NewPipe are in an arms race with the recent sideloading app changes for Android.
Inspired by the Ludovico Technique
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.
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
At this point when someone complains about anything but Linux, I just bully them.
Cool story bro.
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
It's CLI based browser that, as i understand, only runs on linux. There are text based alternatives for windows, but not nearly as cool.
No java, no nothing. Just plain text and funny colours everywhere. I used to use it a lot for wikipedia, scholar google and news outlets.
Apart from surfing the web, it proved to be a useful tool for covering serious fuckups in my linux partition.
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.
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 them to stymie the act of adblocking, because far fewer people are doing it. Businesses half-ass everything and do the lowest cost thing like always, so they will not bother to ever commit the 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 their go at web drm eventually ever comes to fruition, you can expect the fringe to be expelled from all but a few niche communities.
similar to what they are doing to private/custom android with the qr codes and play integrity and whatever else.
Considering the fact that they can't help but deliver short-term profit over all else, set the bar so low that the term "minimum viable product" is an everyday saying, and security is regarded as an inconvenient nuisance with no penalty for slacking on, I still like our chances even if they pull that off.
Consider these facts:
I think everything seems so inevitable to most people because of mental and ideological inertia combined with the fact that nobody can predict when and how major societal changes will occur. If nothing surprising that nobody predicted or thought of before happened then our future is inevitable and the current winners and losers will remain so. Fortunately for us, though, our whole history is one long string of surprising things that nobody predicted or thought of before happening.
i like our chances of thriving in an alternative internet like in here, or building our own stuff that could be used for good. it's is an immensely important resource some people take for granted and we should fight for it. however:
1 - the great majority of people accept it and the fringes are discarded as not profitable. the definitive wall where people draw the line goes further the more it's normalized and the breaking point isn't near. it's already coming to your android phone.
2 - remember elected representatives don't represent the people. they will go back at the slightest hint of disrupting business especially for banking and shopping. exemptions for the powerful aren't out of the question on anything, plenty of that already.
3 - we are living through a global oil crisis that is starving people worldwide, many wars, genocide, nuclear tension and the rise of fascism. the splinternet is often talked about as being in the horizon. we are lucky to be in relative isolation so far.
things often seem inevitable because they are in bad shape. we are still scrambling over the ongoing fascism and we've been compounding the climate crisis without a care in the world.
i'm not saying it's impossible or that we should quit. just that we need a realistic view of what we are up against, and who calls the shots right now.
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.
Like how they killed JPEG-XL.
All over some employee’s ego associated with his AVIF contributions, from what I’ve seen.
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
