Unfortunately is not that simple, now Google is pushing a new standard web environment called WEI and all browsers will be affected with it. Is not just a matter of free choice.
We’ll see if sites really start forcing this standard, could just turn into a situation where you use Chrome as an app to access specific sites that force it and Firefox for everything else.
The FOSS community is big enough that most things will have a non fucked foss counterpart if that happens. Of course hopefully that doesn’t need to happen
Maybe a new form to navigate the web will emerge from the FOSS community. I really hope all of us join this to support the new web that we need to make to fight back the big tech greed. Some through code expertise and others through money donates to support the projects that we love. But I don’t want to be much idealistic about the future. I’ m just dreaming high
If and only “if” this split occur. Unfortunately only few tech conscious people about the importance of free internet as a whole and privacy will adhere to it. Will not be a big movement to harm the core of the big tech.
My perspective on this is that it’s about sustainability as opposed to trying to compete with big tech in a zero sum game. For example, Mastodon or Lemmy aren’t able to compete with commercial platforms in terms of users, but that doesn’t mean they’re not viable communities. I can see a future where there’s a niche open internet that exists independently of the commercial one and I think that would be fine. As long as there are enough people to do development on platforms and browsers and to produce content, that’s all that really matters. In fact, a split might even be better because then we wouldn’t have companies interfering with how the network operates.
Everytime I see someone I know using chrome and getting an ad (because most adblockers in chrome are useless), I try to nudge them to the furry browser
Do everything you can! Switch people’s default search engine in their browser if they won’t switch. I am nearly done coverting my entire office to DDG! Row! Row! Fight the power!
Their ads and search are their bread and butter if I’m not mistaken. So even if all you can do is change their browser’s default engine every little bit helps. I myself have uninstalled chromium browsers and switch to FF/LibreWolf. I still have Google Authenticator but that will take me longer to kick with its 30+ entries. I’d love it if I could find out which services cost them money and heavily use those for the time being.
That is my next move as well as abandoning GPay. My final move will be sorting through the 400+ accounts attached to my gmail and switch that to proton. With my schedule it will take me possibly 2 months to get around to it unfortunately.
We can only hope normal people start using firefox again and ditch the piece of cold garbage that is chrome/ium. Though i doubt most people nowadays will even think about switching browsers (like how windows still has like 75+% of market share despite its quality freefalling since win10 and the most user hostile stuff being added)
If experience gets bad enough then people will look for alternatives. IE was something like 90% of the market share at one point and then it lost it fairly rapidly.
Not sure if software enshittification really makes people switch. I wish they would but I’m not convinced. I’d say the windows freefall started after windows 7:
8 was universally agreed to be complete horseshit because they were trying to make it work for both, touch and keyboard/mouse, which obviously failed.
10 felt like a sponsored-by-ads freemium cheap spyware, adding even more inconsistencies with these different system settings windows, adding cortana which literally not a single person on earth wanted to use but was hard to disable/remove and embracing the microsoft store which is the most cursed shithole of all (including google playstore which is already bad enough).
11 Is just like 10 but takes away essential settings, making every professional users workflow 40% slower for no reason.
Win7 also had issues, but it felt much more usable for professional use. Also much less bloated with bullcrap nobody ever asked for (preinstalled candycrush anyone?). So for me that was clearly peak windows. Obviously, every half-decent linux distro was at least as good, many were better even from a pure users perspective. After that, linux desktops got better and windows got worse. Nowadays its no competition if you ask me. But still, few people swicht from the pre-installed OS…
I’m heavily anti-Windows but if I had to pick a release (and have it supported forever) Windows 2000 would be my pick. Pure NT kernel, no 9x bullshit? Sign me up.
Win7 also had issues, but it felt much more usable for professional use
What issues did you have? I remember it only being light on resources, stable, and aesthetically pleasing. The UI introduced snap-to-edge, which was such a game changer at the time and really makes Windows versions before it feel archaic in comparison. It was the last Windows version before the layout of settings stopped making sense.
I’m sure this is just rose-tinted glasses so I might be ignoring some issues, but I can’t recall anything in particular.
Yes I also remember it as pretty awesome! It had some normal windows fails, like the search in explorer searching through many file formats content instead of only just file names (which would be a reasonable default), thus being slow, needing to build a search index (doing heavy work in the background on its own, which is terrible) and making it super weird to navigate the results. And of course windows update, which was always enormously heavy and slow and required reboots. And of course hiding file extensions by default (I think they still do it. Who the fuck is so damn stupid to make this the default?! Heck, I wouldn’t even allow this setting at all).
Thinking of it, these three little examples all stayed the same or got even much worse with later versions (updates!). E.g. in win10 the explorer search is still unusable but they managed to fuck up the start menu search as well (which worked well in win7).
Pretty much, and I think this highlights just how important it is to have at least two independently developed browser engines. If Chromium becomes the only game in town that would effectively let Google, which makes most of its revenue from ads, decide how we access the internet. That would be an absolutely terrible scenario to be in.
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