This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Found this notification this morning on my pixel 6.
As of the latest Chrome update on PC, they have dropped support for uBlock. You can still technically enable it, but they disabled it by default once you update.
That got me back to Firefox with breakneck speed.
Hopefully soon Librewolf, Fennec F-droid and other forks will become mainstream.
I haven't switched to Librewolf on pc yet; hoping that turning off the telemetry/etc options in ff is enough, but I'm starting to think it might not be long.
So if Mozilla wants to monetize location data, what does this mean for all the custom ROMs that use Mozilla's location provider instead of Google's?
This might mean that we would have no true free location provider left.
Edit: just was thinking, what does this mean for Firefox forks that also use Mozilla's location service?
wait, mozilla has a location provider? maybe there is open street map, idk what's the difference between a map and a location provider
My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.
So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.
Been using Libre Wolf, no issues so far. Fuck Firefox
Does libre wolf have an android app?
Even if this isn't entirely true, you know Google wouldn't pass up the opportunity to reduce Firefox market share to scare everyone back to Chrome.
There's no need to reduce Firefox marketshare. Most people don't even consider using anything else than whatever is default in their device.
Also, it's not a Google scare tactic or a flex. Every application on the Play Store must disclose the general outlines of their data policy, including the sharing of data. Lying with those checkbox is not a good idea but they are completely informative and put there by the publishing party, so the people responsible for publishing Firefox on mobile just updated these, and this is what is shown when an app publisher say their app is sharing data with third parties.
tl;dr: it's very likely that not a single soul at Google even looked at this, as this is just the regular behavior of the Play Store with apps that changes their data policy or indicate sharing user data with third parties.
There isn't to much to reduce. I don't think Google is scared or afraid by Firefox, like at all.
Lol if Google really wanted to kill FF they would just stop paying them half a billion a year.
Like chrome does something different?
Yes, chrome is doing something different. It is even worse!
That's not the point they're trying to make I think. It's more of an attack on perfection. Like "the alternative is not perfect either so why not just stay with Chrome". It's not a very strong argument in general but it might be enough to keep people from switching.
the alternative is not perfect either so why not just stay
It does work for a lot of people. Seeing they need to change and adapt if they do change, and it seemingly seems to be as bad as what they're using now, why change and face headaches and hassle.
FWIW I'm not seeing this on the Play Store for Firefox 136.0.1 on my Pixel 8a, and I'm not seeing any warnings on Beta or Nightly either:
I don't see it from installs direct via Obtainium, either.
use ironfox or fennec
God damn why's the world so shit
This is the Bad Place
It really is. Literally everything is shit and I'm so fucking over it.
