LWD

after many months, and being blocked by more and more external servers, it is clear that image proxying is seriously degrading the user experience

By "external servers," does that mean external to the Lemmy network itself?

I'm interested how Mastodon handles this, since it is a much more active social network that also encourages media sharing.

Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

• It's made by an ad company
• The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
• There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla's own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I'm still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

It's probably the nature of the change, too.

1. It's easy to add a switch to disable the button.
2. It doesn't cut into their bottom line.
3. It's damn good PR.

Other stuff that people have been complaining about, like the massive backlash against baking in 3rd-party AI, won't make the cut.

Relatively benign things like tab grouping are challenging, so despite being much more popular, the easier-to-implement AI features were given a fast pass to Release versions of Firefox.

Are there raw numbers on how many people use web browsers in general? Firefox releases a report, and it's definitely been dipping, but that dip might be accounted for by a switch to other browsers (based on its percent of market share).

I'd be curious if you had any good sources for this, because my searches are mostly yielding crappy listicle blogs.

I've seen their reasoning, but I don't agree with it. The biggest counterexample to their concerns are other browsers: Firefox is no trouble maintaining its IP, and Brave is fully open source yet has not been formed once AFAIK.

I'm very aware of its built-in bloat, but the ad blocking still seems to perform more like an MV2 ad blocker than an MV3 one (more is blocked even when using the same lists), and it allows you to natively select individual elements to block yourself.

Based on every browser statistic page I can find, about 2/3 of mobile traffic is through Google Chrome. There's no ad blocker on that.

And mobile traffic is significant nowadays - it comprises around half of all traffic anywhere, despite requiring the viewer to be hunched over a phone or tablet.

No argument from me there. I didn't mean to come across this argumentative, I just wanted to point it out here because of the context of this post (someone looking to move away from Firefox). And because, to me, ad telemetry still is a black box.

Mozilla is adopting a ton of the things that were wrong with Brave. Recently, Brave criticized Mozilla's PPA data collection for being too centralized, which implies to me that otherwise, there's a lot of overlap between the two allegedly "private" systems. I don't trust Brave telemetry, but it seems not even they can come up with many ways to differentiate themselves from Mozilla.

If they're different somehow, I would love to know how.

In a way other than accrued trust or distrust, that is. At this point, I don't think Mozilla is owed any inherent trust.

Santander Bank user [solved by reducing ETP to Standard] (almost lost this user we've had since 2003!):

Give this employee a raise

How worried should people be if they are on the latest version of Fennec, which was last updated for 129.0.2 a couple months ago? (For anyone who isn't keeping track: that's not ESR (128 is), and it's two major versions behind Firefox Release).