here's to magic

✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨✨

[probablysomethingtm]

Lmao we have to fucking destroy this company are you fucking kidding me with this shit

Google Search as you know it is over | TechCrunch

Google is transforming Search from a list of links into an AI-powered experience filled with conversational answers, autonomous agents, and

[afusionoffandoms]

Reminding everyone that this exists, and you can make it your default search engine (as explained here)

[to-magic]

SEASON'S GREASON'S

[tripleennui]

The X-Files is truly a subversion of the damsel in distress trope because this is a damsel in distress if I’ve ever seen one

[solipses]

discord is rolling out age verification starting in march and it's either accepting forms of ID like a drivers license or birth certificate or it allows you to do a "video selfie scan" which makes an age inference based off what you look like (using AI, of course).

and it also says that it will make age inferences based off of how active you are on discord and what games you play and "other behavioral signals"

which is also not to forget the data leak that happened back in october about this very same subject.

this isn't just going to restrict you from age restricted channels or servers, but you're also not going to be allowed to speak in live stages or see any content or images that discord deems "graphic or sensitive" (which is also probably going to be AI inference).

[animentality]

[transformativeworks]

AO3 Celebrates 15 Million Fanworks

AO3 now has over 15 million works! Celebrate with us, and tell us how you engage with fandom at https://otw-news.org/2p8nuunt

[3liza]

matt just fired half the remaining tumblr support staff lmao

[3liza]

WordPress maker Automattic lays off 16% of staff | TechCrunch

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce, and a range of other online services, is reducing its workforce. The layo

[3liza]

from my sources adjacent to tumblr--from which i can spread rumors and insider information freely because i dont give a fuck about ever working in the tech sector--im hearing this round of firings was focused on purging the senior staff, and not just from support but from the entire remaining tumblr workforce. i'm hearing there are about 25 people left.

[valoisfulcanellideux]

This is important, people. Please don't scroll past this one.

While I don't think that Tumblr is about to shut down anytime soon, as a fandom old who lost my community and my people when the fandom diaspora happened from LiveJournal, I want to urge that you do something NOW:

Get your backup account(s) elsewhere NOW

Let your moots know your username(s) at those places NOW

Follow your moots at their places NOW

I mean this with all my heart. Get this done now. Get set up and find your people now. Tumblr is the home of fandom now, just as LiveJournal was the home of fandom way back. And you could end up losing your fandom home just as easily and quickly as us old LJ people did way back then.

It's a horrible feeling, and most old LJ users still mourn the loss of it to this day.

The rest of this gets a bit long, so it needs to go behind a cut, but please take a moment out of your scrolling to read it.

TUMBLR IS FANDOM. It's where we all are. Yes, many of us probably have random accounts here or there - a Pillowfort, a BlueSky, a website set up at some free, ad-supported place, etc - but if you are active on Tumblr, then this is where your people are. This is where your community is.

Just like my people and community were on LiveJournal. We lived through a lot of shit together (seriously, look up LiveJournal on Fanlore or Wikipedia sometime) but in the end we all ended up scrambling to try and find both a new place and each other too late.

And, when you find your 'backup places' don't just stick a link to your Carrd or Linktree in your Tumblr profile. Actively tell your moots in a post (reblog it occasionally, too) where they can find you, and encourage them to find and follow you there, too. They're not going to have that link in your profile if Tumblr suddenly shuts off the lights, so make sure you actively let people know where to find you elsewhere.

Some suggestions:

Pillowfort and/or BlueSky

If you're the kind of Tumblr user who is a 'thought-vomiter' (i.e., you post a LOT, and it's often random observations and brain farts, short quickfire stuff throughout your day) try either Pillowfort (which is still in open beta and currently has a rolling waitlist to join) or BlueSky. Both are Twitter/X type sites in their layout. (And avoid Twitter/X like the fucking plague. Just, seriously, don't go there.)

Dreamwidth

If you're the kind of Tumblr user who needs more than a couple of hundred characters for some (or many) of your posts, and you really relish community and interaction, head to Dreamwidth. While I have accounts on all three of the platforms I've just linked you to, it'll be Dreamwidth where I make my home if Tumblr goes down the tubes. Yes, its backend user interface looks a bit late-2000s, but that's because it was built out of the LiveJournal diaspora, off the back of (and improved upon) the old open source LJ code, and it has all the incredible features that LJ had (and still has, if you don't mind accepting that hateful ToS and never mentioning anything to do with LGBTQ+ at all over there). Crucially, Dreamwidth is committed to remaining ad-free, and it is incredibly easy to find your fandom/people over there (as long as they are over there) using the interests search. It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it's well worth it for the incredibly customisable reading list, which acts like the Tumblr dashboard, and the granularity with which you can set your posts. It's had communities since the very start, and you can even set up custom filters for different groups of people you want to post to, so your Marvel-loving moots can see your Marvel stuff, your Minecraft-loving moots can see your Minecraft stuff, and your closest friends who you trust with anything are the only people who can see the deeply personal stuff you've posted to the group you've set up just for them. Want to post with different icons? You've got 15 of them completely free. There is so much to Dreamwidth, and I wish more people knew about it and used it.

But what about Discord?

By all means find and join Discord servers for your fandom, but please do not let fandom disappear into thousands of completely separate, unsearchable, unfindable Discord servers. Find a place where people can find you easily, and where you can find other people easily if/when you leave your current fandom for whatever reason at some point in the future and get into a new fandom. Imagine if there was no Tumblr right now. It's just gone. Poufs overnight. And you've just got into an incredibly good new TV show/movie/book/etc., and you need to find your people for it. How would you do that, if they're all sitting in their own private Discord servers, possibly invite-only and not listed anywhere like Disboard? You can't. So - while Discord is great if you already have that all-important URL to join the server - it's a lot harder to find your people if you've no idea where to get that URL.

Image hosting

It's important to note that none of the sites I've linked to have native image-hosting (as yet - that's why Tumblr is ad-supported, because image hosting costs a shit ton of money), so you'll need to find some kind of image-hosting site out there if you're someone who posts a lot of visuals. Fandom artists will likely already have their spaces for that, but there are plenty of free image hosts out there.

Closing thoughts

Did this post (and the linked article - if you even read it rather than just glancing at the headline) alarm you? Make you feel anxious? Well, I'm sorry for that, but honestly? It should. Anxious is how I felt, as well as completely lost and cast adrift, when I lost my online home and my fandom peeps all those years ago. And this long-arsed post is my way of trying to help you prevent those feelings for yourself if this latest round of layoffs at Tumblr and other places owned by Automattic eventually leads to our current fandom home shutting down.

Do I think that Tumblr will close anytime soon? No, I don't. I think it would continue limping along until it came to the point where it's making too much of a loss to make any kind of business sense for it to be kept on life support any longer. After all, fanfction.net is still struggling along - riddled with bot and scam comments and with absolutely no support for any of its users who are enduring them - to this day. But is it a home? Hell no.

Don't let apathy take the wheel for you over this. Don't think, "I'll get around to doing that later. Tumblr's not going anywhere soon," and then forget about it until that point where you wish you had done it all that time ago. It takes a handful of minutes to secure an account (or, in the case of Pillowfort, to get on the waitlist) so get your accounts set up now, even if you never use them afterwards.

If you do, then you may be very grateful to your current self sometime in your future.

Better to have them now, with all your friends and moots already following you and knowing where to find you, than to be left standing there like Confused Travolta with your coat over your arm and wondering where the fuck you find your fandom home again as it once again enters a new diaspora.

To my own moots who may be reading this, look out for a post from me shortly, where I'll let you know my other online locations.

Love to all, no matter who or where you are. <3

[racethewind10]

[to-magic]

Check here for a great post about how to backup your Tumblr blog contents

[artbugjuice]

Happy 20 years of New Who : )

[willgrahamscock]

I cannot believe there's absolutely no way to watch free shows and movies anymore, there are too many paid streaming platforms and pirating websites have viruses and ads preventing you from watching it uninterrupted((.)) id rather follow the rules and purchase media moving forward because it is too inconvenient. Seriously, free and no ads or viruses with 1080p streaming is DEAD.

[part-time-zombie]

Exactly! It's freaking annoying when I want to watch movies but I would have to subscribe to like 24 different services . Just to watch the shows that I like.

[someones-here-for-sure]

Oh and wouldn’t it be nice for cartoons? Just anything animated. I just wanna stream things without getting conned. Must I be cartoonless forever?

[tinypaperwindmill]

i like using streaming apps but there are waaaay too many and they're all stealing my data .i wish there was a secure and organized way to have millions of shows and movies available one one app. but alas. we've truly gone full circle back to cable + now it spies on you. its a real shame. i dont want to fill my device storage with tons of boring and stupid cash grabs.

[quarsonist]

i know, it's so annoying for everything to be paid nowadays, especially movies and tv shows. it would be perfect if i could watch them without getting infected by some virus or some shit. i'm fine with ads, they gotta run themselves somehow, but i want to watch stuff and .live! if they have to use different domains i'm okay with that too, because free media is .top dog either way.

[shadowsfavlatina]

for mobile users, it especially sucks, because you can't just use websites and you have to not only pay, but you have to download a billion apps just to find what the thing you wanna watch is on. it doesn't help that the streaming services take up...so much space. so much.

[to-magic]

Look, if you want to watch movies 2 relax in your free time, get netflix . to us upstanding citizens that's the right choice.

[azspot]

Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

Chrome now directly tracks users, generates a "topic" list it shares with advertisers.

Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built directly into the Chrome browser. It’s been in the news previously as “FLoC” and then the “Topics API,” and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.

Use Firefox.

[goodnightmoonvale]

This is a response to the laws that eliminate or severely limit third party tracking cookies. Since Google makes so much money on advertising, it had to figure out other ways to get your data. It’s already been tracking people who use the web while logged into Google, but now they’re baking it into Chrome.

As someone who works in advertising, the reason I new use Firefox is because I heard the industry rumblings about this for the last 3 years. It’s finally here, so if you care about making it harder to be tracked/advertised to, switch to Firefox.

[to-magic]

it's weenter

[santapau]

Remind me later.

[bakanokiwami]

TOP 10 TV SHOWS ON FANFICTION.NET BASED ON NUMBER OF FANFICTION (1999-2022)

To make this bar chart race, all series titles in the TV Section on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.

In 1999, fanfiction weren’t divided into sections like Anime/Manga, TV, Books, etc. yet. It was just a small list of mixed fandoms.

Originally, the fanfiction list was sorted alphabetically too, but was changed to number of fics at around early 2013.

By November 2013, FFN started abbreviating numbers above 1,000 to K, so exact numbers aren’t available for series with more than 1,000 fanfiction.

This bar chart was made with the assumption that the numbers listed in the TV section are correct. I can’t seem to get the same numbers for some of these series when I go to the specific series’ page and toggle ratings, other filters, and language to All though… I’m not sure where the discrepancy is coming from. 

For example, Supernatural currently has 127k fanfiction, but if you go to Supernatural’s page and toggle ratings, other filters, and language to All, you’ll only get 121k fics. Supernatural also has 11.5K crossover fanfiction, but adding 121k and 11.5k is 132.5k…

Please refer to this post for more bar chart races.

Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏

[trutown-the-bard]

I’m surprised that despite it being the number one drama of 2004 with loads and loads of fan theories and speculation, Lost never made it to the top 10.

[pillarofawesome]

I wouldn’t have guessed Glee. Totally forgot that show existed until now.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

>silk stalkings

Huh.

[marinemas]

Did not expect Gilmore Girls to be in the top 10 at any point in time

[0sbrain]

alternatives for ai to design ocs

hero forge

picrew

the fucking sims 4

your local furry artist

bitmoji

shitty photoshoped collage

DeviantArt bases

zepeto

making edits of your favorite character

searching "dress up game" on the app store

learning how to draw

[brendering]

I want to add that lots of artists sell character packs for super cheap! And artists do custom quick portraits for super cheap! It's been a while since I made an updated list so lemme just make this a resource update post.

Places you can get free or insanely affordable art instead of stealing/using AI

PICREWS - FREE

Picrew Hell by @brightgoat - Lots of skin tones (light and dark, both human and fantastical!), tons of horns/wings/ears, head coverings, fun BG options, etc.! Ex:

2. Tiefling Maker by @crowesn - this one is incredible. SUCH cool clothes, so many multi-tone skin options, tons of horns, tons of really nice braid/curl/dreadlock options, etc. Great for tieflings but also great for orcs, fairies, etc. Ex:

3. Avatar Maker by Baydews - I feel like this one is famous at this point. Lots of combinable hair and also has horns, special ears, etc. Ex:

4. Fantasy Girl by spotchy_pooch - this one doesn't have as many skin options but the outfits are super cute and everything is very geared to specifically fantasy outfits and items. Ex:

There are tons of other Picrews and free online doll makers, both for humanoids and specific creatures. @obi-troll-kenobi has kindly compiled a massive list with links here.

CHARACTER PACKS

Ginny Di makes characters with downloadable character sheets and photos. The packs are available on her Patreon and occasionally she posts selected characters for free.

2. @za-ra-h makes monthly npcs and pcs you can use in your own games, available on Patreon in her stunning painterly style. She also does custom commissions!

Get more from ZARA H on Patreon

creating Digital art

3. @offbeatworlds creates gorgeous, fully-painted character portrait packs with ready-made icons that you can get on Patreon. They're also posted on Tumblr.

OffbeatWorlds

Portrait Packs for TTRPGs! Other portrait packs also available but not pictured 11 - Equine Kin 12 - Celestial Children 13 - Dwarves 14 - C

4. @rosieelfgirl has a dark elf pack with 8 character portraits and descriptions of optional lore, items, etc. There's also a cheaper art-only option if you're planning to do the backstory and things yourself!

rosieelfgirl

✨Noteworthy NPCs: Dark Elf Denizens✨ My first character pack is here! Eight portraits, tokens, profiles, plot hooks and quests for your TT

5. @topbanana-art makes character posts for sale on Kofi for around £2/pack, or downloadable for patrons on Patreon.

You can search 'character pack' or 'npc pack' on Tumblr, Kofi, or Patreon to find more artists that make these packs.

CUSTOM COMMISSIONS

A great way to directly support artists and also get custom art is through commissions! I'm featuring @yourdndstories at the top here since they do $25 doodle commissions and +$5 character token commissions:

Your D&D Stories

Sorry for spam, but I'm doing ONE LAST BUMP on this, because the brakes on my car went out unexpectedly and that was a $500 repair I did not

Below are a few other artists who take commissions at various price points. Just checked and comms are currently listed as open for:

45liza109

annteya

astrozure

aukkenopsia

coffee-bard

dire / portentous-offerings

eren

janedoe297-art

rossysculpts

selann

starrycove

varis art

vicious-mongrel

This is just a sampling so feel free to add any artists I missed for Picrews/doll makers, character packs, or commissions!

[donjuaninhell]

So You've Finally Switched to Firefox: a Brief Guide to a Some Very Useful Add-Ons.

This post is inspired by two things, the first being the announcement by Google that the long delayed Manifest V3 which will kill robust adblocking will finally roll out in June 2024, and the second, a post written by @sexhaver in response to a question as to what adblockers and extensions they use. It's a very good post with some A+ information, worth checking out.

I love Firefox, I love the degree of customization it offers me as a user. I love how it just works. I love the built in security features like DNS over HTTPS, and I love just how many excellent add-ons are available. It is a better browser than Chrome in every respect, and of the many Chromium based browsers out there, only Vivaldi comes close.

There are probably many people out there who are considering switching over to Firefox but are maybe putting it off because they've got Chrome set up the way they like it with the extensions they want, and doing all that again for Firefox seems like a chore. The Firefox Add-on directory is less expansive than the Chrome Web Store (which in recent years has become overrun with garbage extensions that range from useless to active malware), but there is still a lot of stuff to sift through. That's where this short guide comes in.

I'm presently running 33 add-ons for Firefox and have a number of others installed but disabled. I've used many others. These are my picks, the ones that I consider essential, useful, or in some cases just fun.

Adblocking/Privacy/Security:

uBlock Origin: The single best adblocker available. If you're a power user there are custom lists and scripts you can find to augment it.

Privacy Badger: Not strictly necessary if you're also running uBlock, but it does catch a few trackers uBlock doesn't and replaces potentially useful trackers like comment boxes with click-to-activate placeholders.

Decentraleyes: A supplementary tool meant to run alongside uBlock, prevents certain sites from breaking when tracker requests are denied by serving local bundled files as replacement.

NoScript: The nuclear option for blocking trackers, ads, and even individual elements. Operates from a "trust no one" standpoint, you will need to manually enable elements yourself. Not recommended for casual users, but a fantastic tool for the power user.

Webmail Ad Blocker: The first of many webmail related add-ons from Jason Saward I will be recommending. Removes all advertising from webmail services like Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Popup Blocker (Strict): Strictly blocks ALL pop up/new tab/new window requests from all website by default unless you manually allow it.

SponsorBlock: Not a fan of listening to your favourite YouTuber read advertisements for shitty products like Raycons or BetterHelp? This skips them automatically.

AdNauseam: I don't use this one but some people prefer it. Rather than straight up blocking ads and trackers, it obfuscates data by injecting noise into the tracker surveillance infrastructure. It clicks EVERY ad, making your data profile incomprehensible.

User-Agent Switcher: Allows you to spoof websites attempting to gather information by altering your browser profile. Want to browse mobile sites on desktop? This allows you to do it.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden has been my choice of password manager since LastPass sold out and made their free tier useless. If you're not using a password manager, why not? All of my passwords look like this: $NHhaduC*q3VhuhD&scICLKjvM4rZK5^c7ID%q5HVJ3@gny I don't know a single one of them and I use a passphrase as a master password supplemented by two-factor-authentication. Everything is filled in automatically. It is the only way to live.

Proton Pass: An open source free password manager from the creators of Proton Mail. I've been considering moving over to it from Bitwarden myself.

Webmail/Google Drive:

Checker Plus for Gmail: Provides desktop notifications for Gmail accounts, supports managing multiple accounts, allows you to check your mail, read, mark as read or delete e-mails at a glance in a pop-up window. An absolutely fabulous add-on from Jason Saward.

Checker Plus for Google Drive: Does for your Google Drive what Checker Plus for Gmail does for your Gmail.

Checker Plus for Google Calendar: The same as the above two only this time for your Google Calendar.

Firefox Relay: An add-on that allows you to generate aliases that forward to your real e-mail address.

Accessibility:

Dark Reader: Gives every page on the internet a customizable Dark Mode for easier reading and eye protection.

Read Aloud: A text to speech add-on that reads pages with the press of a button.

Zoom Page WE: Provides the ability to zoom in on pages in multiple ways: text zoom, full page zoom, auto-fit etc.

Mobile Dyslexic: Not one I use, but I know people who swear by it. Replaces all fonts with a dyslexia friendly type face.

Utility:

ClearURLs: Automatically removes tracking data from URLs.

History Cleaner: Automatically deletes browser history older than a set number of days.

Feedbro RSS Feed Reader: A full standalone reader in your browser, take control of your feed and start using RSS feeds again.

Video Download Helper: A great tool for downloading video files from websites.

Snap Link Plus: Fan of Wikipedia binge holes? Snap Link allows to drag select multiple hyperlink and automatically open all of them in new tabs.

Copy PlainText: Copy any text without formatting.

EPUBReader: Read .epub files from within a browser window.

Tab Stash: A no mess, no fuss way to organize groups of tabs as bookmarks. I use it as a temporary bookmark tool, saving sessions or groups of tabs into "to read" folders.

Tampermonkey/Violentmonkey: Managers for installing and running custom user scripts. Find user scripts on OpenUserJS or Greasy Fork, there's an entire galaxy out there of ingenious and weird custom user scripts out there, go discover it.

Browsing & Searching:

Speed Dial 2: A new tab add-on that gives you easy access to your favourite sites.

Unpaywall: Whenever you come across a scholarly article behind a paywall, this add-on will search through all the free databases for an accessible and non-paywalled version of the text.

Web Archives: Come across a dead page? This add-on gives you a quick way to search for cached versions of the page on the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, Archive.is and others.

Bypass Paywalls: Automatically bypasses the paywalls of major websites like those for the New York Times, New Yorker, the Financial Times, Wired, etc.

Simple Translate: Simple one-click translation of web pages powered by Google Translate.

Search by Image: Reverse search any image via several different search engines: Google Image, TinEye, Yandex, Bing, etc.

Website Specific:

PocketTube: Do you subscribe to too many YouTube channels? Would you like a way to organize them? This is your answer.

Enhancer for Youtube: Provides a suite of options that make using YouTube more pleasant: volume boost, theatre mode, forced quality settings, playback speed and mouse wheel volume control.

Augmented Steam: Improves the experience of using Steam in a browser, see price histories of games, take notes on your wishlist, make wish listed games and new DLC for games you own appear more visible, etc.

Return YouTube Dislikes: Does exactly what it says on the package.

BlueBlocker: Hate seeing the absolute dimmest individuals on the planet have their replies catapulted to the top of the feed because they're desperate to suck off daddy Elon sloppy style? This is for you, it automatically blocks all Blue Checks on Twitter. I've used it to block a cumulative 34,000 Blue Checks.

Batchcamp: Allows for batch downloading on Bandcamp.

XKit Rewritten: If you're on Tumblr and you're not using whichever version of XKit is currently available, I honestly don't know what to say to you. This newest version isn't as fully featured as the old XKit of the golden age, but it's been rewritten from the ground up for speed and utility.

Social Fixer for Facebook: I once accidentally visited Facebook without this add-on enabled and was immediately greeted by the worst, mind annihilating content slop I had ever had the misfortune to come across. Videos titled "he wanted her to get lip fillers and she said no so he had bees sting her lips", and AI photos of broccoli Jesus with 6000 comments all saying "wow". Once I turned it on it was just stuff my dad had posted and updates from the Radio War Nerd group.

BetterTTV: Makes Twitch slightly more bearable.

Well I think that's everything. You don't have to install everything here, or even half of it, but there you go, it's a start.

[donjuaninhell]

Addendum!

I forgot to add, Firefox has skins and themes! And many of them are good! And of the many small creators making themes and skins for Firefox, my favourite is MaDonna an 85 year old great grandmother who's just making browser skins for fun. She's made thousands of them. I'm using one of her creations at this very moment, Dark Polygon.

[emdeejaydraws]

figured this one could use an update, so here it is in all its full colour glory

click for better quality

[teabree-shark]

in b4 95% of all websites in june 2024 announce that "for security" they will only work with browsers that use manifest v3

[470nanometers]

Google Chrome will limit ad blockers starting June 2024

The "Manifest V3" rollout is back after letting tensions cool for a year.

Just use Firefox.

[evilsoup]

The more people who use Firefox the better! It's got versions for the desktop, android, and iphone, all free. In addition to ublock origin there are thousands of addons. You could also consider using one of Mozilla's paid products, such as their VPN, or donating to the Mozilla Foundation, in order to ensure they're able to keep going.

Internet for people, not profit

Mozilla is the not-for-profit behind the lightning fast Firefox browser. We put people over profit to give everyone more power online.

Mozilla Foundation

Mozilla is a global nonprofit dedicated to keeping the Internet a global public resource that is open and accessible to all.

[pikestaff]

Not to be Old on main but I remember this exact thing happening in the late 90s and early 00s. I remember it very well. Microsoft pushed out all the browser competition with Internet Explorer, at which point both browser and web innovation stagnated for years because why fix something that's broken if everyone is using the broken thing anyway because there are hardly any other options. If you want to know how bad it was, Internet Explorer did not have browser tabs and it certainly did not have any sort of adblock. And everyone just lived with it.

I am watching the exact same thing happen with Chrome in real time today and that's why I always reblog these posts and sometimes am extra annoying and add on to them. I don't want to see it happen again because it sucked. Please use Firefox. Use it on mobile too (it has browser extensions!!! Including ad blockers!!!) And reminder that Edge/Brave/Vivaldi are all built on Chromium and you should not be using those either. Those browsers will show up as Chrome on tracking analytics and it does not help the overall project, which is showing web developers that Chrome is not the only browser people are using.

[anotherdayforchaosfay]

Your passwords and other useful things transfer to Firefox, btw. Go make the switch. You have nothing to lose.

[cellarspider]

Most websites that tell you they need Chrome to work are lying, even if they block you from accessing them if you're not using Chrome. They just do not want to support the dev work to optimize for anything else, or may have a special deal with Google.

Fortunately, there are Firefox extensions that just basically tell websites "yeah, I'm definitely Chrome. don't worry about it"

User-Agent Switcher and Manager – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Download User-Agent Switcher and Manager for Firefox. Spoof websites trying to gather information about your web navigation—like your browse

Chameleon – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Download Chameleon for Firefox. Spoof your browser profile. Includes a few privacy enhancing options. A WebExtension port of Random Agent S

Please note I have not used either of these, because adblockers and script blockers are good enough at disabling those annoying messages.

[to-magic]

I have Firefox with the ublock origin add-on on my phone as well and haven't seen a YouTube ad in 5 years hahahha