This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
just to be clear, for fear we mentally normalize this
to accept that another person has one sided authority to determine what you can and can't do with a tool, after it is in your possession is weird.
If you're still using Chrome it's a you problem.
Firefox + ublock origin + SponsorBlock for youtube is great. Works on mobile too!
It works on Android, but I don't believe it works on iOS.
To add to this- playback also continues with the screen off too. So ya, ff mobile with those extensions is basically yt premium XD
Thanks choom, you reminded me to reinstall Sponsorblock.
The other day I got to pondering whether people who work for ad serving companies have ad blockers on their work computers.
I used to work for an ad heavy mobile game and ad serving company couple of years ago, and I had ad blocking at dns level in my house. It blocks not only ads, but also most tracking and telemetry. My bosses wanted to know why my devices were not displaying ads or dialing back to home, they were pretty fucking puzzled. They were terrified others like me were around. Basically their entire business model depends of people not knowing how to block ads and telemetry
I didn't other than for testing, in fact I had to research and figure out ways to bypass ad blockers, to prevent social icons from being blocked etc. I even wrote that company a brand new admin website to replace their old one, they liked it so much that they laid me off a few months later even though they were already underpaying me because they wanted someone cheaper to maintain it, after announcing they had record-breaking year-over-year profits. I found a 30% higher paying job a few months later and been there since. lol
Opera browser? The one that everyone was making a stink about a few years ago? The one owned directly by a Chinese based company, and was supposedly sending telemetry to China?
Plus the whole exploiting poor people thing: https://www.engadget.com/2020-01-19-opera-accused-of-predatory-loan-apps.html?guccounter=1
I stopped using Opera the second it wasn't Norwegian. I use Librewolf on desktop, Waterfox on mobile and Vivaldi as the "clean" browser when something k. Waterfox/Librewolf fucks up an important webpage I have to use
The link you shared is the company profile only and doesn't mention any controversy about telemetry being shared with China.
I've been googling for a bit, and there are articles concerned this might happen from 2016 when the takeover was announced, and plenty of discussions on reddit, hacker news, y-combinator, quora and even on the official Opera forum (not deleted or redacted, mind you), but there wasn't any clear evidence that telemetry is being shared.
While the concern remains valid, I'm also asking myself whether it's that much worse than Chrome, Brave or Firefox sending telemetry to the US? I'm neither American nor Chinese, and would consider both governments hostile. Which one of them has access to my data is merely a choice between plague and cholera.
So in the end it's on informed users to block transmission of telemetry themselves, regardless of their browser of choice.
I would rather give my data to Firefox than a company who's entire business model is selling user data. That being said, you could use librewolf which removes telemetry. I use both Firefox and librewolf
You won't get me off adblock, as of recently i've come to find we get significantly more ads compared to friends and family.
My dad plays wordfeud, so i install and play a set with him...about 5 seconds in i get frustrated at the 4th ad and my dad goes: "which ads".
My friends keep telling me i'm taking the youtube ads far too serious as they are only 10 seconds and show it to me too.
My youtube ads are 1 minute unskippable blocks before and after 1m 51s videos. I'll get a 1min ad block halfway into a 5 minute video even though youtube themselves claim they don't do that.
How the fuck am i so fucked when it comes to ads, my dads phone is almost completely ad free. Heck the google top suggestions that are basically paid for ads don't even show up on his phone.
He can play those free apps (advertisement feeding software) without getting any ads and he's adamant his phone isn't modified.
I wager your dad has a subscription or something he doesnt want to admit.
It's with all those silly free apps tho, sometimes i'll go there and have some fun game which he installs on the spot...no ads.
So it can't be with the apps itself.
Heck i've burned myself on a couple of those games where i would go: "i've played for weeks, might as well buy out the ads and save myself the headache" and it will still have ads, for power ups or some other similar things.
If you use android, just use adguard private dns. It will get rid of third party apps ads. For youtube you need revanced or newpipe
I tried setting it upfor my router.
But the insteuctions just go: "change ipv4 to x" and "change ipv6 to x".
There are no ipv4 or 6's so i need to add them, but it won't let me add without a specific name but it doesn't give me any requirements for the name.
So i'm stuck.
Eh, I haven't seen an ad on YouTube for years, I just use uBlock Origin on Firefox and they're all gone. You can also do that on mobile as well.
That said, I use Grayjay on mobile because it eliminates ads and also lets me sub to videos from other platforms. I have a few subs from Odyssee, one from Rumble, and a half dozen or so from Nebula. None of them display ads, and I only occasionally have some weird issue where a video doesn't load (usually just close and re-open the video and it works).
The DNS option is nice if you use an app that you don't have any control over, but for videos and regular web browsing, you can just use an ad-blocker.
A reminder that Opera is owned by a Chinese public company. I wouldn't trust the browser for privacy reasons.
Not even just that, they also have a history with making loan apps with predatory rates. I wouldnt trust them even if I was a member of CCP.
s/owned by a Chinese public company/proprietary/
Although another problem is that it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Yet another chromium browser with built-in proxies and data collection 🤷
Opera is not a trustworthy browser and there has been no point in it existing since they stopped using presto.
It seems that many people here are not aware of how much Mozilla depends on Google, so switching to them is a small consolation. Maybe it's time to support the development of new engines like Servo and Ladybird more. Servo even recently released an Android version (currently not very usable, but I downloaded it just to show support).
Sure, but it is still the most usable alternative we have for now. I would avoid stock FF and use either Librewolf or hardened FF because the default browser spies too.
Really have hopes for Servo/Ladybird!
Of course, I also use LibreWolf, Mull... but we expose ourselves to security risks this way (as is currently happening with Firefox and Mull), and besides that, you have to trust projects more and more whose code is not reviewed as thoroughly.
I truly hope this leads to the collapse of Chrome's sheer market dominance. Fuck Google.
If every single person that uses adblock decided to move to Firefox because of MV3, it wouldn't make a single dent in Chromium's dominance. We vastly overstate the amount of people that even know what an adblocker is.
Nah it would make a big dent for sure.
Firefox has ~180 million users
Amount of users using adblockers is ~900 million.
It would massively change the market.
Numbers according to mozilla and statista
That's true. 2 years ago, I come by my friend's house for a drink, and his kid is watching cartoons on YT. My friend's been a gamer for +20 years. Spent most of his life around PC. All of a sudden, I hear ads.
What's that? What? What's with the ads? Oh that, that's YT.
I know it is, but what's with the ads? Well, they have ads. I know they do, but why do you have them...
Installed adblocker for him, he's looking at it in shock. I'm looking at him shocked...
People have no idea, what we take for granted. 😅
Even here on Lemmy, where most people are tech-savvy, a disturbing amount don't use adblockers. I've seen so many posts of people complaining about ads and they always have comments with people agreeing. A lot of the time they've got some completely illogical and stupid reason for it.
If the chrome market share significantly degrades then google will stop pumping so much money into it.
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree...
And considering basically everyone but Firefox (and maybe Safari?) are based on Chromium to some degree…
Opera Browser (before it was sold to a Chinese company) did have its own browser engine before it went Chromium. It was called Presto. source. The team that used to own/run Opera before the sale to China formed again to make the Vivaldi browser.
Vivaldi and Brave will continue to support Manifest V2 addons (like uBlock Origin) until July 2025. The article doesn't say how long Opera will continue, but I'm guessing its the same deadline of July too.
Just use Firefox and its variants for more privacy. Done. Chromium is a dead road. Even with ungoogled chromium , brave , etc you have to trust the maintainers and their compiled version.
A better title: Opera explains shit on how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support. Will talk to developers so see if anyone has a good ideas.
They mention that the shared codebase means they can add functions back in, so there's that. To me that reads like a hard fork that they'd have to maintain independently.
They explain nothing. They're in the same boat as all others: open source will let them keep MV2 longer than mainstream chrome, but that future is uncertain as the main project codebase starts to evolve around MV3 and backward compatibility to hack MV2 back in gets lost over time. Nobody here can make promises, and sites that make that make those judgments are naive.
serious question: how does opera (the company) make money?
originally? a paid product. now? crypto!
Partner integrations from what I know - search engines, bookmarks and so on.
Partner integration? You mean a partner of them pays them to be allowed to look at your browsing habits?
Did opera leave Norway? Is this stuff worse after that, if they left? What country did they go to?
Zhou Yahui (Chinese: 周亚辉; born February 1977) is a Chinese billionaire and entrepreneur. In 2008, he founded Kunlun Tech Co Ltd (formerly Beijing Kunlun Tech Co Ltd) one of the largest web game developers in China, where he was the chairman and CEO until 2020. Yahui Zhou currently serves as chairman and co-CEO of Opera. His estimated net worth is US$2.2 billion.
