Whatever that means anyways...

I don't know what Mozilla is thinking with this one, but my firefox updated and I got an alert about ai implementation in it. Clicked read more and in the new tab, disable. Thanks Mozilla...

I'm getting tired of AI everything. Can we move onto the next fad already?

This is a 10000ft overview of the browser market and where things stand. There could be mistakes in the breakdown here, so please excuse them, but I believe this is the general gist of how things are currently going.
Now that Google practically has a monopoly on the browser market, they're implementing what they call Manifest V3.

Manifest and version 3

Manifest is essentially Google's extension platform for Chromium, its engine for the Chrome browser as well as a whole litany of "forked" browsers.
There are some great things about Manifest V3 compared to Manifest V2 - from From Chrome's developer page

• Moving to service workers - Extensions in Manifest V2 had a long-lived background page that took up resources, even when an extension wasn't running. In Manifest V3, we have moved the background context to service workers, which run only when needed.
• No more remotely hosted code - Manifest V3 removes the ability for an extension to use remotely hosted code, which presents security risks by allowing unreviewed code to be executed in extensions. With this change, an extension can only execute JavaScript that is included within its package and subject to review by the Chrome Web Store.
• Changes to network requests - We are deprecating the blocking version of the webRequest API. This required extensions to proxy all network traffic to provide filtering capabilities, which came at a performance and privacy cost. The new declarativeNetRequest API provides a safer alternative for many use cases.
• Other changes - Manifest V3 also adds a number of new APIs and capabilities, improvements to the platform including support for promise-based methods, and more.

At a glance, the one that really gets me is that Manifest v2 allowed remote code to be run. This must slow down computers depending on the host computer connection and even worse must be a huge security risk. So I can imagine this being a good thing.
But what it really comes down to is Google is losing a lot of potential income through the emergence of adblockers.
So where does that leave us if your ad blocker of choice is not going to work as of sometime this year? The easy answer is switch away from Chrome or Chrome based browsers. If you're not using a chromium based browser then google manifest doesn't affect you. But that begs the question, which browsers are Chromium based? I bet you might be using one of these and don't even know it's based on Chromium.

Proprietary
• Arc
• Amazon Silk
• Avast
• Comodo Dragon
• DuckDuckGo
• Epic
• Huawei
• Maxthon
• Microsoft Edge
• Naver Whale
• NetFront
• Opera
• Puffin
• Samsung Internet
• Sleipnir
• SRWare Iron
• UC Browser
• Vivaldi

Primarily non-English
• 360 and QQ, for the Chinese market
• C?c C?c, for the Vietnamese market
• Yandex, for the Russian market

Free Open Source Software
• Brave
• Dooble
• Falkon
• Konqueror
• Otter
• qutebrowser
• Supermium
• ungoogled-chromium

Things that stick out to me are Opera, Edge, Brave and Konqueror. Opera being closed source is somewhat of a surprise, but it's not owned by the same people who originally developed it and word is it spies on people tremendously.
Edge isn't really a surprise other than the fact that Microsoft left the market to just use a chromium based engine rather than continue with their own.
Brave being open source is a bit of a surprise and Konqueror was the first unix based browser I used. Aside from Safari, I think it was my first taste of Webkit.

Alternatives

It begs the question, if I like privacy and hate ads, what does that leave? Not much really since the majority of the browser out there rely on Google now. The big outlier here is Mozilla/Firefox's Gecko engine and other non-google webkit browsers.
I've been searching for a new browser for some time, because things by Mozilla are changing and not for the better.
I'd post a list of Gecko based browsers but it's not promising as most are forked from very old Mozilla code. Firefox is at version 136 and most are from version 52 or 56. They just aren't safe to use.
Mozilla and it's products have relied heavily on a partnership with Google, where Google would pay Mozilla Millions of dollars to make google the default search for Firefox. A ridiculous amount of Mozilla's income came from this deal and when the US government hit google with antitrust lawsuits, then won and threatened to break google up, the writing was on the wall for Mozilla and they needed to find an alternative source of income.
They started by reducing some of the restrictions on facebook and their tools, then had a preferred advertising setting in the privacy section of the browser, went as far as buying an advertising firm and finally have Removed never sell personal data from their FAQ. The long time champion of the private web has fallen.
I'm trying to compile a list of browsers and what they offer so that we can make an informed choice one what to switch to. It might be in the comments or maybe in its own post. But essentially, for now, I'm sticking with Firefox for a couple of reasons:

1. Not falling victim to Manifest V3
2. Helps spread an open and free web
3. They haven't implemented any major privacy breaking things yet, but the writing is on the wall
4. Firefox Sync can be run on a home server, which is something I'm going to do when I set up my own home server using something like CasaOS
5. As a forum member said on either OSNews or ArsTechnica: They're still the best of the bunch, or at least the least worst

One last thing to mention is a browser called Ladybird Browser, not much is known about it other that it's open source and so far mac only. It's completely new but has some key people behind it. You can't download a compiled version yet, but you can compile it yourself from their github page. There's a decent amount of hubbub surrounding it.

I've been an avid user of Firefox for years now. They were scoring all sorts of point with their privacy features which started with a basic walled garden approach to anything facebook related. That evolved into a massive overhaul of their entire privacy settings which I believe led the browser space to become more private. Chrome "followed suit" eventually and even added some of their own privacy settings but honestly, I don't trust chrome at all when it comes to this. I'm pretty sure that one of Google's main sources of income is advertising and they need user info to advertise effectively.

Fast forward to recently and Firefox is in dire standings in the browser usage market. Currently sitting at 2.7% globally, and 6.7% globally but specifically on desktop, it's easy to say they aren't the kings of the show that they used to be.

It's sad really, because in the last couple years the browser's features really took off.

Then the US government sued and won a case against google, apparently google has a search engine monopoly? One of the things Google is not allowed to do anymore is pay other browsers to make google the default search engine. That was a big blow to mozilla as a good junk of their money comes from that.

So they made a deal with the devil and bought an digital advertising and no one really understood why.

Then, more recently Facebook and Mozilla were in talks on how to weaken firefox's privacy and anti tracking. Now you have to opt in for that extra privacy that used to be default, and the options aren't easy to find or labelled properly either.

There's more going on too, just too much to remember.

Things for firefox are on a downward trend.

Oh and don't forget about them going woke, which lead to the creation of brave browser.

It's a weird time, that's for sure.

So I've been looking for new browsers and stumbled across Orion Browser. Cross platform, "super light weight", fast browser using webkit. A big bonus for me is it can use the majority of both firefox and chrome extensions.

I'm slowly switching away from Firefox, I like to do things slowly to make sure I don't miss anything and forget about it. I'll report how it goes a little later after my travels.

I have long told people, search for airline tickets in private browser windows, do not log into the sites until you're ready to purchase or put a hold on the ticket.

I was just doing a search in chrome on aa.com for flights to montreal for Easter. At first I was going to pay with miles which meant two things, 1 I had to login and 2 I had to buy extra miles to get the ticket. Initially I would of needed about 66k miles to get to montreal with mediocre seats and with multiple stops along the way. Adversely, I could pay extra for an upgrade in miles and get more direct flights. I think the total for the initial miles i needed were 1000$ which did not include the miles I already had in my account. Upgraded would of been close to 1500$.

Literally 2 minutes later I repeated the search but this time in a private firefox window, without login in and simply asked for a price of the ticket instead of going the miles route.
I got direct flights for 200$ less than my search in Chrome.

Below are screen grabs of both windows.





This is absolutely criminal. People, use private windows or at least multiple browsers when looking for tickets!

What the hell is going on? According to the beta test of the HTML5 compliance test, IE9 is the most HTML5 compliant.

The thing that surprises me the most is that webkit (safari, chrome) who are the big pushers of HTML5 are some of the lowest scores. Doesn't make sense to me.

from OSNews

I'm happy to let announce this. Firefox has launched their beta for version 4 of the browser. why is this important? well, simply put it brings life back into the firefox name. most recent articles you'll read have been comparing Safari v Chrome on speed test, internet explorer getting stands for v9 and even Opera hitting v10.

thanks to my job, i need to stay relatively on top of these things because they influence my work. so aside from a slimmed down user interface ala chrome and safari the latest version of the browser also offers:



some interesting things to note are the support for video in html 5. there's been a lot of debate over whcih codec will become the standard in html 5. apple and the other big wigs are pushing for the closed format of h264. makes sense since apple has a lot to do with it and stand to lose a lot if it's not the standard. Google has introduced another standard called WebM which compares to Apple's h264 in compression and quality and also has open standards with better (in my opinion) copyright protection.

so of course all the big companies are going towards h264 for the copyright stuff.

so far the browser seems to be a lot more responsive than v3.6 and hasn't crashed. even with all the debug code in and doing it's thing the browser is really fast. i'm quite impressed.

Apple announced today that safari has more than 11 millions downloads in 3 days. pretty impressive.



excuse the marketing in the second half of that.
i'm sure a lot of people will be going back to firefox after they try safari simply because of the amount of addons and extensions available. i think i'll stick with safari 4 for a while. it's fast, light weight and renders pages properly. until they release firefox 4 that is.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Version Market Share

hmm, the graph doesn't seem to want to work here, so just click on the link above if anything.

pretty cool, and check out europe, pretty awesome to see firefox move ahead of explorer.

and while you at it check out antartica