Technology

It is lmfao it was my first one 🥲

Would you like to see my tattoo of Tom from MySpace I got on my left testicle? Hey man, in 2005 it seemed like MySpace Tom would be in our lives forever. Why WOULDN'T you get his profile picture inked into your body with needles on the most painful part of your body? It made sense in 2005!

But noooooooooo! Facebook had to be a dick. And now whenever I pull my pants down in front of some hot 20 year old with daddy issues, she's like "Is that your uncle or something?"

Meanwhile Tom sold my MySpace for hundreds of millions of dollars, and now does photography of bikini models on his yacht! While I have to explain who Tom is to Gen Z....

sigh

This kind of thinking shouldn't be acceptable from a legal standpoint. Yet the courts do nothing...

Is librewolf a good alternative? Most plugins seem compatible

In theory yes. But remember that Chrome is based on Chromium which is open source. But nobody has stepped up to do a viable hard fork to take power away from Google.

Maintaining a modern browser is a huge undertaking which is why almost nobody except Google, Mozilla, and Apple are really even trying. Even Microsoft threw in the towel.

The more bad stuff is added to Firefox the harder it will be for any forks to keep up removing it while also keeping it up to date. Will anyone step up?

Yes, they allow full avoidance of any potential data collection through the browser, if they remove the collection features.

Mozilla would need to change their licensing terms to prevent forks from being able to remove things like that, and forks could just use the last version of the code before the license change and just backport new features.

Also Firefox is fully open source, unlike chromium which relies on a closed source binary blob in the middle. Some chromium forks have replaced the binary blob with open source code, but the default is for chromium forks to have a nice chunk in them controlled by google that no one can deeply inveatigate what it does. Firefox does not have this issue.

Mozilla can't hide any potential data collection in Firefox due to the full open source nature (unlike chrome forks). They also can't stop fork devs from stripping out any data collection functions. And as of today, they have not introduced any data collection that is not supremely anonymized, and they have not introduced any data collection that cannot be opted out of through the browser settings (and about:config).

It's because it's hard to maintain a browser. There's lots of protocols and engines and other moving pieces; I remember when web pages would render in Netscape but not Internet Explorer, for example.

We take for granted how seamless and ubiquitous the internet is, but there were lots of headaches as internet devs decided to adopt or include different users (or not).

And now, it would take a lot of effort and market upset to convince the capitalist overlords to include something new in their dev stack. The barrier to entry is monumentally high, so most people don't bother to try inventing something better.