Apple attempting to stop investigation into its practices involving browsers

>>samwil+(OP)
I’m truly scared of Chrome.

It pushes proprietary features, from what I know it starts enforcing some analytics/ads without possibility to block it out and there are other thing too, but since I’m not really an user I don’t track them deeply.

Based on my personal experiences with IE, ActiveX, Adobe Flash and not being able to fill my taxes without Microsoft license (that was around 800$ back then for me not adjusted for inflation) I am afraid the same will happen with Chrome once it gets enough ground.

“Hey, sorry but we can’t sell you toothbrush because you’re using Safari/Firefox/Vivaldi/whatever. Please switch to Chrome and continue with your tracked and dissected purchase route.”

Is there any other anti-Chrome bastion than iOS’ Safari?

Old E2E runner installed Google Chrome on my machine (didn’t even ask but that’s user space on dev machine so whatever) which grew into my MacOS machine. It cannot run in background but there is another daemon that constantly updates it. Multiple times a day I get notification that new service has been installed to run in background.

I’m not sure if that’s something I want to fight for.

>>xlii+5h
Fighting Apple's monopoly behaviour around Safari is not fighting for chrome.

Since you asked, Firefox is the browser to use if you do not want chrome.

>>onli+Xh
https://gs.statcounter.com/

Firefox is not a serious competitor at this point and its tiny 4% of the market has already slipped to 3% in the last year.

That’s inching close to the “can we please drop IE11” sort of numbers from some years ago.

>>leland+xo
Statcounter is in the list[0] firefox uses to block trackers, it also seems like Edge use the same list [1], so the 3% is more FF-users who are not using the build in tracking protection

[0]https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti... [1]https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection#trackers-we-block

>>rypska+ft
Firefox doesn't block statcounter or other analytics trackers by default. You'd have to go into "Settings > Enhanced Tracking Protection" and change it from "Standard" ("Balanced for protection and performance. Pages will load normally.") to "Strict" ("Stronger protection, but may cause some sites or contact a break.") While I expect Firefox users are much more likely than users of other browsers to do this, I'd also expect a large majority leave settings at the default.

You can test behavior on this tracker here: https://www.jefftk.com/test/statcounter

>>jefftk+2a1
Thanks for the tester, on Firefox I just see:

    <html><head></head><body><img src="https://statcounter.com/" vt9kpu8nj="">
    </body></html>

but uBlock Origin with default settings blocks the image.

>>LeifCa+Xf1
Looking in the browser networking panel is probably the easiest way to see whether it actually sends a request.

>>jefftk+ti1
The above poster is right. If you have uBlock Origin, it blocks it by default. I tested the following:

1. Plain install: Not blocked 2. With uBlock Origin: Blocked 3. Strict Enhanced Tracking Protection: Blocked 4. 2+3: Still blocked (unsurprisingly)

I would expect knowledgeable and concerned users (i.e. installing at least uBlock Origin) and people on systems managed by such people (e.g. family members of people in the first group who let that person manage their system) to be a higher percentage of Firefox users than other browsers.

I don't think Firefox has say a 10% share, but I do think that data derived from statcounter.com is going to underrepresent the share of Firefox users. As Google continues to make larger moves to fight ad-blocking, I expect that gap will widen.

zlacker