drdabbles@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 00:30
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I’m curious to see what Mozilla will do with the shopping assistant portion. Lots of browser extensions, and potentially even some of the Mozilla sponsors offer these types of features, and if Mozilla just stamps them out all at once by integrating that feature, it might lose them some financial support.
On the other hand, I do hope they don’t start amassing huge amounts of training data from their uses. It would be a real bummer to not have a decent browser option anymore.
Zarxrax@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 00:37
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I’ve already been using the fakespot extension for a few years, and honestly, it feels pretty useless. I’ve seen it give A and B scores for products that I know have fake reviews. And on Amazon or Walmart and similar sites, we already know that the reviews are bullshit, so what difference does it really make for it to tell me that? It’s not like I have any better option in most cases.
HidingCat@kbin.social
on 11 Oct 2023 01:29
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Eh, Fakespot has been decent enough for me. I think it works best when there are a lot of reviews, it's not very helpful when it's like 5-10 reviews on a product.
They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account…
Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.
danc4498@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 04:00
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What does “techniques” mean?
Mongostein@lemmy.ca
on 11 Oct 2023 04:10
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TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
on 11 Oct 2023 10:58
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stahp
ppl gonna stop answering my real questions and I’ll be tech illiterate firebrand
Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
on 11 Oct 2023 11:02
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Heuristics.
ubermeisters@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 01:35
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Probably ai lol
AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 01:46
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It could be something like that (hint: they already deployed an offline neural network in Firefox with which you can translate web pages), and the idea would be to detect AI-generated content.
ubermeisters@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 01:51
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Well I hope they’re going to do better at detecting AI content than anyone ever has before because nobody’s done it well at all so far.
There’s an inherent problem here that AI produces results similar to what it’s trained on and it was not trained on robotic input it was trained on natural human language online.
xantoxis@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 02:25
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Well it will be, because it’s detecting AI-generated content indirectly. What it’s directly detecting are bot posters, which are much easier to spot.
“AI detectors” have the uphill job of having to figure out whether something is generated by looking only at what was generated. Fakespot and tools like it get to use the metadata, which has many telltales that bots aren’t even trying to hide.
ubermeisters@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 02:49
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I think for me personally they can fuck right off with this. It’s unwarranted and invasive. Maybe some fat asses need to get off the couch and stop ordering so much shit online. ( any perceived negativity here is my disappointment in Mozilla not negativity directed at you)
Draghetta@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 03:30
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IDK chief. It seems like one of those things that are hard to do in theory as you said, but relatively easy in practice.
I mean just about any human who has played a bit with ChatGPT nowadays is able to identify ChatGPT generated paragraphs within a few words. I don’t suppose it would be much harder for a machine.
ubermeisters@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 03:52
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Therein lies the issue though. If its not hard to detect, then right after that, its hard to detect again, because the previous fix has been trained out/around. The harder we work to develop detection, the harder we work to ensure detection avoidance is advanced in parallel.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 12 Oct 2023 15:40
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Elsewhere in this thread someone explained that its just integrating FakeSpot into the browser, which uses basic email spam detection techniques to detect fake reviews by analyzing how the reviewer posts. Is there a set schedule they post reviews by, what else have they reviewed, how new is the account, etc. A 2 day old account with 20 reviews would be an obvious source of fake reviews for example
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 01:15
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I’m literally the only person I know that does reviews on amazon.
That’s including a circle of a dozen plus relatives I’m friendly enough with to make small talk, three good friends, my wife, my disability/chronic pain support group, the volunteer group I take part in, and a handful of online friends.
Like, you’d think one other person would get bored in the middle of the night and do reviews of stuff that they buy.
But there’s always a shit ton of ai generated or copy/paste dreck you have to wade through to get to real people, and even then they may be shills or have been paid to change a review (no shit, I’ve been offered double and triple the original cost to change bad reviews).
RheingoldRiver@kbin.social
on 11 Oct 2023 02:05
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I'd do it if you could leave fully anonymous reviews. But I'm not about to review products with my real name attached to them, even if it's just first name.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 03:06
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My account is old enough it doesn’t have my real name attached.
Someology@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 04:53
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I know two, plus one other who only reviews when it is very bad. Just always look at middle and low end reviews, and be very extremely choosy about sellers, and roll the dice.
magnetosphere@kbin.social
on 11 Oct 2023 01:24
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I’m confused. Teachers/professors have said that using AI to detect papers written by AI is highly unreliable. How can this work effectively with a much smaller sample of text to work with (even when it looks for “similarities” between multiple reviews)? What happens in a week when Amazon starts writing fake reviews in different tones/“voices”/styles that are intentionally difficult or impossible to compare?
PoopMonster@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 01:33
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It’s more than just bots, a lot are copy pasted 5 star reviews on shitty products. Or take for instance when sellers are allowed to completely change the listing but still have old reviews from a totally different product. Hopefully this is what they will filter out.
magnetosphere@kbin.social
on 11 Oct 2023 01:37
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Damn. Me too.
ubermeisters@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 01:37
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ok GPT, please rewrite this review in the style of a [(agerange),(sexual orientation),(occupation),(locale)] who is satisfied with the performance of the product being reviewed.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 03:18
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I’m confused. Teachers/professors have said that using AI to detect papers written by AI is highly unreliable.
Probably 99% of fake reviews have not been written by AI. Just copy/paste bots or cheap copy/paste workers.
monotremata@kbin.social
on 11 Oct 2023 05:38
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Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it's a bit of an arms race. They don't just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from "review farms" that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don't have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren't easy for manipulate.
ugh, stop adding bloat to my browser. I don’t want your shitty shopping assistant Mozilla as much as I don’t want it in Edge or Chrome. Once extension support in Epiphany is good enough for KeePassXC I’m switching away from Firefox entirely…
SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
on 11 Oct 2023 03:38
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It’s got great performance on Linux. Better to have more rendering engines than less. Chromium, Gecko (FireFox), and WebKit. The more the merrier!
SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
on 11 Oct 2023 03:58
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Fair
yiliu@informis.land
on 11 Oct 2023 01:57
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Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It’s manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.
someguy3@lemmy.ca
on 11 Oct 2023 02:09
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Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.
Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 12 Oct 2023 15:30
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That was my understanding of why Amazon Basics was started, cheap not garbage to set a floor for prices and try to stop the race to the bottom
xkforce@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 02:37
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And unfortunately Firefox is sitting at 2 to 3% so even if Amazon were dependant on fake reviews, they have little to fear due to the low marketshare.
joemo@lemmy.sdf.org
on 11 Oct 2023 03:09
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I would assume the whole point of a feature like this is to help them get new users.
Ubermeisters@discuss.online
on 11 Oct 2023 03:27
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Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 14:29
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Well I’ll always use Firefox, no question about it. There is incredible value in using a browser with no alterior motivations, no additional products to sell you, no reason to spy on you.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 03:13
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Why would this hurt Amazon?
A product with 2002 reviews suddenly has only 2 reviews, and they are not the nicest ones… Whole Amazon with 2002 gazillion reviews suddenly has only 2 gazillion… :-)
Seriously:
I guess they own several of these “companies” where you can buy fake reviews for your product. And now these are facing their revenues sinking.
Do you have any evidence of that? I used to work for Amazon (as a programmer working on financial data, not delivering packages or anything), and they took review quality pretty damn seriously. They knew full well that customers losing faith in the quality of products on Amazon, it could crater their business.
If some product with 2002 reviews suddenly drops to 2 reviews, 1.5 stars average…it’ll sink to the bottom of pages of results, and people will click on a different one, with better reviews. It’s not like they only have a couple products to offer, and they make money on more or less all of them.
Plavatos@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 05:48
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I think he’s just suggesting that the plugin filters it down to what an algorithm considers legitimate. These plugins usually only filter when you click the item so it wouldn’t necessarily move the result down, just reduce potential purchases (which would eventually drop the result.
E: I’m probably stating the obvious above but the damage to bottom line might be after repeat findings until a user ultimately decides Amazon is mostly untrustworthy.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 06:28
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I guess
Do you have any evidence of that?
LOL
I_Comment_On_EVERYTHING@lemmings.world
on 11 Oct 2023 07:20
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I can’t even begin to count how many times I have come acrossa slew of 5 star reviews for something COMPLETELY unrelated to the listed item at the very top of search results. Product: Wood Headphone Stand. Review: This kitchen whisk is so amazing, it saved my marriage, 23 out of 5 stars.
OH and don’t forget the reviewer that when you access their profile you see that they have posted 76 reviews in a single day and every single one of them is 5 stars with the title "Great ‘X’! " where x is the product title.
Don’t get me wrong, I used Amazon back when it only sold books and I’ve been using Prime since it came out non-stop but the quality of the items, the search results, and the trust I have in the platform has gone waaaaaaaaaay down.
That’s basically an exploit. Different ‘products’ can be related, and the reviews are supposed to be useful across them. The most obvious examples are just different colors of socks, or different sizes of shirt. Sometimes it’s variants on a product: one with a handle and one without, or different models of TV with the same screen, or whatever.
But it’s not Amazon who makes those connections, it’s the companies entering product data. Some of them abuse it, and say products are related when they’re not at all. Since there’s millions of products listed, it takes time to identify and fix the false associations. In the meantime: people looking for headphone stands see reviews for whisks.
But yeah, quality has gone down. It hits some product categories a lot worse than others: cheap electronics is a shitshow.
Furedadmins@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 03:58
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Amazon makes a lot of money facilitating the sales of counterfeit goods.
Sure. But they’d make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.
They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon’s market share.
But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it’s hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say…they make money either way, so it’s not the highest-priority problem to fix–though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they’ve tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.
But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that’s fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too–likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 17:45
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I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don’t show it with the amount they spend on it.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 19:16
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There are some things you can really only buy there. Which is why I bigly agree with the US government that they’re a bigly monopoly bigly abusing their monopoly power (bigly).
yiliu@informis.land
on 12 Oct 2023 01:00
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Got any examples? Between Walmart, Etsy, AliExpress, Best Buy, MonoPrice, Home Depot, and Wayfair, plus the fact that nearly every major store has online shopping and delivery…I really can’t think of anything I could only get on Amazon. To be quite frank, I think the US government’s case is sorta ridiculous.
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 04:49
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Of course you do, you post like some type of Amazon shill.
I was looking for hardware at home depot and the dude recommended I buy what I was looking for on Amazon.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 12 Oct 2023 15:28
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It extra sucks for rural America where you might only have a handful of stores to pick from and all are discount stores like Walmart and Dollar General. Makes it hard to buy better quality/up market items
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 20:04
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buy better quality/up market items
I find this to be a challenge in general. Amazon and Walmart killed recognizable name brands as quality markers. Walmart forced their suppliers (some of which were name brands) down in quality and prices in order to maintain shelf space, and Amazon is just a haven for rip-off and junk goods.
But the only places you can find quality with good warranty periods in my experience is ultra-high end suppliers in very top line stores. For instance, I’m trying to buy a leather jacket and everywhere I look both online or in person seems like a junk expo…except if you look at very high end stuff (800+ minimum, 1-2k median).
I’ve had similar problems with furniture, and even home goods recently. The only place I’ve had any luck at all is Costco.
PS: I do agree that small town America gets even more screwed because they don’t have the high end stores to speak of.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 13 Oct 2023 03:10
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Regarding furniture, check the Amish furniture stores! They make stuff that your grandkids will resent receiving as inheritance because they’ll be how many decades old and still in perfectly serviceable condition
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 13 Oct 2023 06:10
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I’m in CA, I dunno if that’s around here. But it is good advice if you have local Amish.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 13 Oct 2023 15:27
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So if there’s a Lancaster in your state (which there is) there’s a good chance there is an Amish population, and they do tend to open showrooms in major cities to facilitate ordering. Do some googling and you should be able to find some (I did). The Amish have some incredibly skilled carpenters and if you’re willing to spend the cash you’ll get some absolutely wonderful furniture
Daisyifyoudo@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 05:06
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It won’t. It’s clickbait. It’s dumb.
Edit- tHeY’rE iN TrOuBle isn’t clickbait? Fuck off. This might dip into their profits, slightly, but Amazon is hardly in trouble. FFS.
somape9743@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 02:11
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Why doesn’t mozilla stop adding politically correct shit like this no one asked instead of tab groups and other features?
cereal_killer@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 02:12
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How is this political correctness?
ChippedIn@kbin.social
on 11 Oct 2023 02:38
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Maybe they read too fast and thought it said "fake news" instead?
Gotta love reading opinions from people who don't know what they're talking about.
gastationsushi@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 02:20
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I bought an 4.7 rated amplifier on Amazon that broke the first day. Looking at the reviews closer, I noticed they were 100% paid reviewers.
When I tried to leave a negative review, Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product. This product is still out their with a high rating and no way for actual purchasers like me to warn other customers.
detalferous@lemm.ee
on 11 Oct 2023 03:34
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That’s appalling customer service.
Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product
Can you elaborate? I’ve never experienced this and would like to understand how they do it.
drekly@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 03:45
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I’ve had this multiple times.
Tried to leave a big detailed helpful negative review and it gets flagged for being suspicious, with no copy of the review attached so I have to write it all again. And then it gets removed again.
I just looked in my emails. The exact phrasing was “We have reviewed our decisions and concluded that the product you received is authentic. As a result, we removed your review specific to this product. This ensures other customers see reviews that reflect the current shopping experience.”
Most recently it happened with a body trimmer, where I never questioned the inauthenticity, and then a zojirushi travel mug that I genuinely believe was a fake, and attached a lot of evidence.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 04:35
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kumatomic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Oct 2023 08:08
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They’ve blocked my review on a shower chair that was absolutely not rated for what they said. I nearly fell on my butt and my skinnier partner said it was too wobbly. They’ve blocked the negative review 5 times saying I questioned the authenticity of the product and they have confirmed it. I knew it was Medline brand. I’ve had to file a FTC complaint which I expect to be worthless.
Engywuck@lemm.ee
on 11 Oct 2023 05:37
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I’ve gotten into the habit of never buying anything from Amazon
FTFY. I don’t even have an account there.
sheogorath@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 05:59
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I only use it for 2 dollar Amazon prime video + gaming sub that I got when Apple App Store glitched.
MetaChat@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 13:38
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How do these analyzers determine if a review is fake?
aesthelete@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 17:15
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It’s some ML/AI thing that analyzes the review content.
I honestly have no idea how accurate it is either, but I guess if it gives a strong ranking back you’d probably be best to take that into consideration.
No… 2 to 4 star reviews are more realistic. 5 star reviews are either fake or they got lucky and nothing bad happened. 1 star reviews usually are from people that were PISSED OFF while 2 to 4 star reviews are generally from people with more nuanced opinions than “this product cured my cancer” or “this product set fire to my cat and stole my significant other”
flossdaily@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 02:49
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This is nothing to get excited about. Like so many other things there will be constant innovations on both sides. It’s an arms race between the scammers and the scam detectors.
reddig33@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 03:45
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Can we please stop with the browser bloat? This is something that should be a plug-in, not a kitchen sink feature.
RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ca
on 11 Oct 2023 03:48
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Agreed. This is well outside the scope of native browser functions. Firefox already has a rich extensions ecosystem. They can just include the extension with the browser by default for all I care, but as a native feature, this makes no sense.
jackalope@lemmy.ml
on 11 Oct 2023 04:51
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Firefox extension platform frontend is a mess and has been for years.
MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
on 11 Oct 2023 05:01
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They do that. Screenshot upload and so on are handled as extensions.
1984@lemmy.today
on 11 Oct 2023 05:09
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I actually don’t agree, and the reason is - non tech people. You and me can install plugins but ordinary people don’t do that. So the default experience must be good, offering improvements to the experience over Google Chrome.
Otherwise all privacy features could also be plugins. Imagine if that was true. Firefox would have no identity and you would have to install plugins and make it your own.
So some features should be built in. Maybe the ability to get pop-ups about false reviews will actually make users go “wow that is so useful”.
Engywuck@lemm.ee
on 11 Oct 2023 05:36
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Now, let’s talk about adblockers… Oh, wait, Google would get upset if FF had an inbuilt adblocker and could stop giving us those $weet money…
Honytawk@lemmy.zip
on 11 Oct 2023 11:05
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If Google stopped sponsoring, Mozilla would go down and Google would get slammed with anti-monopoly lawsuits from the EU.
So Mozilla can do whatever they want and Google won’t stop sending them money. Since that is a lot more profitable in the long run.
Sure, as long as we still have options to disable their blocker and use a 3rd party one if we choose. It’s astounding how many users don’t bother to install an adblocker and it would be a massive improvement for those users who don’t know better.
There’s been more than one occasion that I’ve used a family member’s PC and they have Firefox installed without a single extension, they didn’t even know that extensions existed.
netchami@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 15:22
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Use LibreWolf. It’s Firefox with pre-installed uBlock Origin and pre-configured privacy settings. It also doesn’t have any of the Firefox bloat like Pocket
Blockers need to be an extension, keeps everyone honest.
neshura@bookwormstory.social
on 11 Oct 2023 06:00
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Compromise: Develop it as a Plugin and then install it by default. That way people who don’t want the feature can easily remove it completely. That approach would likely also reduce the number of Firefox forks whose sole purpose is to remove the new features some consider bloat.
Lepsea@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 06:51
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Or make it so that people have a choice to add some of the extension features when installing the browser. Debloating is not fun
neshura@bookwormstory.social
on 11 Oct 2023 07:15
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True, also wouldn’t be too much work. Just some additional dialogues on first start up asking you which plugins you’d like installed
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
on 11 Oct 2023 08:35
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Sometimes it feels like debloating is a hobby to people with little to show for it
Aceticon@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 11:20
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Well, the whole point of debloating is to end up with little in the way of stuff instead of lots of stuff ;)
I do get that and used to do a lot of it myself, but usually the results are just fairly minor. That’s what I meant by it seeming more like a hobby than something hugely beneficial
Aceticon@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 12:39
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I suspected so, but the way you worded it was just asking (neigh, demanding) to be “misunderstood” for humouristic purposes :)
I think it’s just me not being a native speaker and being lazy with my wording
Aceticon@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 14:19
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Not a criticism.
As far as I can tell (not a native speaker myself) it was properly worded and I only acted as if I had misunderstood it for humouristic purposes.
I’ve done it for actual expressions used by native speakers by simulating language ignorance and interpreting them in a literal way, for fun, just like I did here.
Sorry if it sounded like a criticism - I meant to just take the piss in a friendly way.
Probably handle it similarly to how Chrome handles an extension asking for new permissions. It disables the add-on and gives the user a small non-intrusive notification on the options menu. Opening the notification notified the user about the change in permissions and asks them if they want to re-enable the add-on or remove it from Chrome.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute
on 11 Oct 2023 07:56
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That’s actually what Firefox usually did for these kind of features. They’re usually delayed as system add-ons.
Amazon only operates in 58 countries, so it’s basically useless for everyone else. But the company they acquired (fakespot) seems to do more than amazon, but that still does not make it worth packaging it with the browser
csm10495@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 06:14
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+1. When Edge added a price tracker / financing thing, the same people threw a fit.
If you were pro that, you should be pro this.
kumatomic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Oct 2023 08:05
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I agree and I worry about what options they’ll remove from about:config next to make room for or force the acceptance of new features like they have a habit of doing.
netchami@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 15:24
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There’s LibreWolf. It allows you to disable many things that you can’t disable in normal Firefox. It also has uBlock Origin pre-installed and it’s pre-configured for privacy.
netchami@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 15:20
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soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id
on 11 Oct 2023 16:13
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Librewolf isn’t just a debloated version of Firefox. It’s built with a completely different goal of being extra locked down for privacy. More so than the defaults of Firefox. Also, it doesn’t even include auto update functionality unless you’re using a package manager.
netchami@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 16:19
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It’s built with a completely different goal of being extra locked down for privacy. More so than the defaults of Firefox.
That’s good, isn’t it?
Also, it doesn’t even include auto update functionality
I completely forgot this was even as thing because I exclusively use Linux and install/update everything with a package manager. You can also use Chocolatey on Windows or Homebrew on macOS. I feel like more people should use package managers, by using them you avoid having to download some random executables from shady websites and your system doesn’t get bloated up by 423942389 update daemons that are constantly running in the background.
soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id
on 11 Oct 2023 16:51
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That’s good, isn’t it?
It is, but it’s also not for everyone
Also, I strongly don’t expect everyday users to use package managers. And personally, I like having notifications in the app whenever it’s time to update so I can take action right there.
netchami@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 16:54
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It is, but it’s also not for everyone
Why? Pretty much every website works fine on LibreWolf.
I like having notifications in the app whenever it’s time to update
I mean, yeah, sure, it would be great if LibreWolf had an auto-update functionality, for me it’s not a deal breaker though.
I’d say these should be “recommended plug-ins” but imho FF/Moz embarassed themselves on that front with the whole “Pocket” thing.
alphacyberranger@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 04:04
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Looks like it’s an another job for big daddy EU to take care of.
Fedizen@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 04:06
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I guess this is the approach to how AI can be used effectively.
Vanguard@lemmings.world
on 11 Oct 2023 04:30
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With the amount of false posts all over the web I cannot wait.
Zaddy@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 04:50
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I would switch to Firefox the instant they let me group my tabs. This fragile stability I get with my browser is embarrassingly important to managing my ADHD.
1984@lemmy.today
on 11 Oct 2023 05:05
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There are many plugins for this…
LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 05:25
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You should switch to Firefox instantly then, because the amount of add-ons capable of doing that for you are endless.
uranibaba@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 05:49
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Zak8022@artemis.camp
on 11 Oct 2023 11:26
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Yea, this is what I use and it’s the best FF alternative. Not perfect, for me, cuz I have too many steps to switch from one group to the next. At least when compared to Chrome’s native grouping all in one window.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com
on 11 Oct 2023 06:07
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Get something like Tab Wrangler that will close tabs for you. You’ll learn to use bookmarks very quickly after that.
chrishazfun@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 05:41
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Where the tabs are on the side of the desktop screen instead of the top.
Zerfallen@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 11:09
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And i just want a tab bar on Android tablets/foldables like every other browser.
murtaza64@programming.dev
on 11 Oct 2023 12:21
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I’ve been using Sidebery with some userchrome to hide the top tabs, and it’s a workable solution, but far from ideal.
I also wish keybindings were configurable. For example, with the “/” search, ctrl-g/G to go to next/prev match is really weird
chrishazfun@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 13:51
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Tried Sidebery too with some basic hidden UI CSS but having to keep it up to date makes it clunky at times, leagues away from Edges implementation where it’s just a toggle away.
fiveoar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 11 Oct 2023 06:01
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I must admit that I do like the built in page translation, which I guess was made by a similar team using ML and all. Maybe I will like this too? Feels a bit… niche. Maybe it’s a stepping stone to any misinformation at some point?
Edit This actually might not be coming as a browser feature at all. Mozilla is trying to increase the size of their Mozilla.ai team, so perhaps it’s really looking for people with AI knowledge with web tech and a track record of using it for a ethical purpose. This team would be well placed to build pretty much any AI based tool for the firefox ecosystem.
phonyphanty@pawb.social
on 11 Oct 2023 10:07
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It’s not even just AI. It’s also real people being paid to leave fake reviews.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 12 Oct 2023 15:33
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Plenty of fake reviews are AI written now too. For a while you could go on any product page and Ctrl+F for “as a large language model” and spot several copy/pasted reviews with no proofreading that out themselves
lloram239@feddit.de
on 11 Oct 2023 08:26
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Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with? The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. “Thing arrived and box looked pretty” is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn’t make a difference. Even a review that puts effort into itself, is largely useless when the writer didn’t have multiple competing products at hand to compare. And on top of that you have the issue that products will frequently change under the hood, so even if the product was good a year ago, there is no guarantee you are getting the same thing when you order it today.
The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.
Zacryon@feddit.de
on 11 Oct 2023 08:35
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Stiftung Warentest is such a thing in Germany.
snek@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 10:28
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Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with?
I feel like this is the case. Whenever I have a new hobby and need to make a purchase, I rely a lot on reviews of others because it’s impossible to guarantee the quality of anything. Look at Doc Marten’s today, they fucking suck, and this is a “known” brand. Now how about buying all sorts of weird shit from other countries or small companies that aren’t well known enough.
Yes for consumers this is a problem.
The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.
IverCoder@lemm.ee
on 11 Oct 2023 10:33
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The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. “Thing arrived and box looked pretty” is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn’t make a difference.
But-But how are we supposed to know how handsome/beautiful the delivery rider who delivered the parcel is???
PM_ME_FEET_PICS@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 10:46
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If Amazon had visible seller reviews, I would be more inclined to agree.
Then again, if people would actually say who their sellers were, I would be less inclined to agree.
grue@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 13:04
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Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with?
For me, the answer is mostly “no” because I just assume everything (except certain name-brand items that I did my homework on elsewhere) on Amazon/Ebay/Aliexpress/etc. is marginally-functional crap and adjust my expectations accordingly.
If anything, the only signals I go by on those sites are the number of ratings and reviews (not their content) as indications of popularity, following the “wisdom of crowds.”
ByGourou@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 13:21
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Photos from people who received the product are useful, you never know with the marketting bs.
And I would argue that random people review are important, but they are so bad right now that you got used not to look at them.
Of course some will be stupid (1/5, came late), you just have to read them. Which is impossible with the 50.000 fake on every product.
I like the reviews that say “I’ve owned this for 20 minutes and it works great!” I assume most reviews are from people who just received the product (because that’s when they’ll think to write a review) and are therefore pretty useless as a guide to quality.
ByGourou@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 16:56
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Yeah if you want in depth review it’s not the way to go for sure. Independant reviewer on youtube or, if you’re really desperate, reddit are better.
floofloof@lemmy.ca
on 11 Oct 2023 13:41
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With Amazon there’s also the problem of them combining reviews of entirely different products into a single product’s page. I have no idea why they do this. There are also sellers who switch the product on the page while keeping the positive reviews for an earlier product.
PutangInaMo@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 15:24
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This right here. It should be illegal to do this. I discovered this I think last year and it blew my mind, it’s straight up misleading the consumer.
I avoid those as soon as I notice the signs, but I’ve found less and less instances over time (which is a relief since there used to be loads of pages like that). I thought I read somewhere it’s against Amazon’s own rules to do this. Not 100% sure though.
Snapz@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 14:03
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Of course they are a problem? The real issue is the star ratings in aggregate of course, but the value in individual reviews is detecting patterns - “didn’t like the lock thing” “latch was loose” “maybe it’s just me, but the latch didn’t feel solid” “the lock broke off within a week”. You start to see trouble spots if you know how to skim actual reviews.
So to get that value, you don’t restrict input, you leave it open, the “pretty box” people aren’t ideal, but it’s fine because it allows for the breadcrumbs that tell the larger truth. It’s ridiculous to expect normal, busy people to do “consumer reports” style reviews for every small kitchen sponge and packet of stickers sold online?
Socsa@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 20:09
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Yeah I think it’s pretty easy to work around fake reviews. Seems like a skill issue tbh.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 19:36
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I love the reviews that say “I haven’t gotten it yet but I’m sure it is good” or they review UPS instead “Package arrived damaged”. They are as useful as those idiotic unpacking videos.
If I use reviews I look for ones with specific information and what the general range of negative ones are. If there are a mess of negatives ones and they are recent with details included then I pay attention.
ByGourou@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 13:17
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I think aliexpress is pretty good with reviews. I don’t see obvious fakes, and a lot of people leave pictures, which is the only things that really matter.
systemglitch@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 13:44
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AliExpress is the epitome of fake reviews to me, I see them all over. Sometimes with different reviewers using the same image lok
ByGourou@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 16:53
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Is it ? I regularily shop on aliexpress and I never saw dupplicate images from different reviewer. And generally most products have little review that all seems really legitimate.
Maybe it depend what you are shopping for ? But I would expect everyone from lemmy to buy tech like me.
I know that the results we get from the us are very different from in europe, maybe this has something to do with it ?
For me Amazon is by far the worst, 50 000 all fake reviews talking about another product
Snapz@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 13:56
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Does anyone know the split of Amazon’s mobile app versus mobile web and desktop use? This won’t have an impact on their proprietary app and that’s a shame.
federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 14:02
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i’ve found that firefox on android is one of my favorite apps, even replacing native apps in many cases.
iopq@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 14:41
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Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 12 Oct 2023 15:11
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I also entirely watch YouTube through Firefox. I’ve had no need to consider a different app for YouTube because of it
ohlaph@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 15:09
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Same. I even browse Lemmy in Ff.
federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 15:10
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i like jerboa for handling any actual conversations i get into, but the search is worthless so i have some custom search engines configured just for lemmy:
boatswain@infosec.pub
on 11 Oct 2023 15:37
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The question you’re responding to isn’t about the mobile app for Firefox; it’s about the mobile app for Amazon. Apparently lots of other people misread that too, so at least you’re in good company.
federatingIsTooHard@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 15:41
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i know it’s about the mobile app for amazon. i’m trying to suggest that people who use firefox are more likely to skip the amazon app anyway.
Supanova@lemm.ee
on 11 Oct 2023 14:04
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We’re switching to Firefox!
Substance_P@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 17:30
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Just did it.
MaxPower@feddit.de
on 11 Oct 2023 14:59
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Good. But remember when Firefox was supposed to be a lean alternative to other browsers? I remember.
I do not, please inform me, since as far as I know Firefox was always trying to be featurefull browser.
CAVOK@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 15:12
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It was a fork off the Netscape Navigator which included a news reader, an email client, a browser and a kitchen sink, from what I remember. They took the browser part out and created Firefox, but it was called something else at first. Firebird maybe? Can’t recall.
Maybe they mean lean compared to internet explorer toolbars? But yeah, it’s never been minimal. And I doubt this would really add that much bloat memory-wise while running.
Mozilla Application Suite contained an email client and a HTML editor, among other things. Firefox was supposed to “just a browser”, so to speak:
Firefox was created in 2002 under the code name “Phoenix” by members of the Mozilla community who desired a standalone browser rather than the Mozilla Application Suite bundle.
According to the downvotes, hardly anyone remembers, even Mozilla is falling for feature creep again.
0oWow@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 15:31
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Might be easier to just disable reviews on Amazon if you’re trying to block fake reviews lol.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 11 Oct 2023 15:58
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The dedicated websites to check amazon reviews like fakespot.com have been almost completely beaten. What is Firefox going to do differently?
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 16:36
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I have a Firefox extension from this website, and another one… So I’ve had this all along. I guess it’s great to hear they are building something into the product itself, though.
I’d really prefer it stay as an extension, honestly. The whole of the userbase does not need this and I hate software bloat.
random65837@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 20:20
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Given the amount of malicious extensions that have slips through the cracks over the years, I’d rather it baked in. Something like that is very much inline with what Mozilla is all about in the end. Useful features that many would want isn’t bloat.
Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
on 12 Oct 2023 16:32
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Yeah. Fakespot is no better at all. The best thing to do right now is know if a product has only been listed for less than a couple months and has hundreds of reviews, it’s BS.
Next up; go to the review section, sort by newest, and read those reviews. Usually the fake reviews are flooded in early and you get more real ones in later. I’ve seen things rated at like 4.5 stars with 500 reviews, but then half of the 10 most recent reviews will rate it 1 star.
Yeah it doesn’t seem too difficult to me to see when reviews seem fishy. I have never tried fakespot myself.
Another thing to check is that the reviews match what the product is for - I have seen a lot of Amazon listings where the seller will have a product up for a long time, get a lot of positive reviews, then change the listing to something else. So it looks like the listing has been up for a long time with good reviews but it’s really a different item. Then note the seller and don’t buy anything from them lol.
crossfadedragon@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 16:10
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If there’s anything I’d want built in more than anything it would be vertical tabs like what the existing sideberry extension provides. I also use Vivaldi which has it native, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
Edit: and tab manager plus. Same functionality and interface but native.
The existing extensions are fine, but if they are wanting to add things already provided by a third party, those two are my must haves for a modern browsing experience.
timicin@lemmygrad.ml
on 11 Oct 2023 16:33
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Vivaldi browser is known to collect and sell your data on your usage like everything else except Firefox and chromium (not chrome); in case you didn’t already know
crossfadedragon@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 16:55
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A web search shows others showing concerns on various sites, and dev/staff responses.
I’d be more concerned about brave, your own isp, tiktok. Then the whole deal with backdoors in Intel chips and running minix. Don’t remember if amd has the same deal.
Vivaldi is fine. From what I’ve seen they mainly check out things like what os I am running, things of that nature. I can live with that. Steam from valve knows my hardware too. Heck the oil shop knows my vin, mileage, make, and model, as far as my car goes. I can live with that as well.
The only knock against Vivaldi is it being closed source.
seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org
on 11 Oct 2023 21:10
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How are vertical tabs better than horizontal ones?
Vii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 11 Oct 2023 22:06
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easier to scroll and read and works good in wider monitors
plus tabs don’t get so small you can’t read the title anymore cause its just a fixed space
Mossheart@lemmy.ca
on 11 Oct 2023 22:22
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Cause after I have 60 tabs open I can still tell what they are cause I can read the title, not just see the fav icon.
Praise Vivaldi
crossfadedragon@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 02:46
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These two pretty much explained my reasons for switching to vertical. It did take a day or so to become accustomed to it, but now it feels pretty natural.
Vertical tabs to me are perfect next step in browser gui, just like when tabs became a thing to begin with.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
on 12 Oct 2023 15:03
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For people who always right click and select “open in new tab” like myself vertical tabs make my 10s or hundreds of tabs manageable
In this case, I would check out the Floorp browser. It is a Firefox fork that plans to be more like Vivaldi and have lots of features, including vertical tabs.
crossfadedragon@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 14:44
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Thanks, will do
soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id
on 11 Oct 2023 16:17
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We literally just want passkeys and native PWA’s (add-ons do not count), and an interface optimized for Android tablets. And I refuse to use Firefox again until these things are added.
This is incredibly out of scope for a browser feature set.
turbowafflz@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 22:26
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I mean I don’t particularly like firefox either (although it’s still probably the browser I dislike the least), but firefox needs users to keep google from having complete control over the web.
soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id
on 12 Oct 2023 13:21
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but firefox needs users to keep google from having complete control over the web.
Okay, but then what does that make Apple with Safari powered by WebKit (and it’s mandated use on iOS)? In addition to the few and between browsers that make use of it like GNOME Web.
I don’t see why. Fake reviews don’t benefit Amazon. The review information is a value-add for them, and fake reviews detract from that.
Hell, if it actually is able to reliably detect fake reviews on Amazon – which I doubt, but let’s roll with it – Amazon might buy the company that does the fake review detection to get it so that they can filter it.
isles@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 18:54
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I don’t agree with the assertion that fake reviews don’t benefit them, but I may be missing something. Reviews help drive consumer behavior and more reviews lead to more sales from those who are unable or unwilling to be more discerning. (Amazon takes a cut)
For others, it the idea or presence of fake reviews might drive them to a “trusted” Amazon Basics alternative, also leading to sales with a higher margin for Amazon.
Additionally, recycling listing ASINs is a common tactic that Amazon could stop and is a source of “fake” (or at least, irrelevant in content and misleading in score) reviews. There’s minimal enforcement of rules for review integrity, such as verified purchases or quid pro quo “warranties” and “free gifts” for 5 star reviews.
All the evidence I see points to Amazon preferring the status quo.
Dagrothus@reddthat.com
on 12 Oct 2023 19:27
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I tried posting a negative review that mentioned a quid pro quo (offered a gift card in exchange for a 5 star review) and Amazon removed it for not being relevant to the product. So baseless 5 star reviews are allowed but not 1 star reviews.
random65837@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 20:19
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I’ve had that happen as well, but technically they’re right, bitching about the seller isn’t relevant to the end product. That’s why there needs to be a seller rating section for them, with independent reviews / scores based on them as sellers which shows next to their seller names, same idea as eBay feedback.
FunnyUsername@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 19:08
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“Brushing” scams seem way too common and easily executed through Amazon in order for them to not be turning a blind eye about it, imo. My mom was sent random LED lights for months through their return program despite never ordering them or hardly using amazon at all before she figured out what was happening. It feels like at least 5% of all my purchases come with a policy breaking email from the seller contacting me asking me for a five-star review in exchange for a free gift. Or even just contacting me 6 months later from a totally unrelated purchase and offering me a gift for no reason in exchange for a five-star review. Oh, they’ll sure reimburse the money it costs to buy it! Because they really just want that five-star review! And Amazon seems to be happy allowing five-star reviews for products that are given away for free and even has a tag to let other users know, but just this method is frowned upon? I doubt it.
N00dle@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 19:28
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I’ve been using fakespot for a few months now and it seems hit or miss a lot of times. I’m hoping that Mozilla has been making changes to improve the implementation of how it checks reviews.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 20:06
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This will work for 15 microseconds before people start deploying it as an adversarial training aid.
alsu2launda@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 17:34
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Came here to say this.
pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
on 12 Oct 2023 20:45
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Guess it’ll have to be a live service that is constantly running and updating what a wonderful world
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 11 Oct 2023 22:33
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That makes me want to use firefox less.
I don’t need a nanny-control to tell me what’s fake and what’s real.
Gullible@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 22:44
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Sifting through reviews to find real criticism is tedious. I never asked for this feature expecting it to become a reality, but I won’t turn my nose at time saved at 0 expense. As long as it isn’t used for marketing or fingerprinting, what’s the issue? Note: I might be missing your sarcasm, I’m tired.
WheeGeetheCat@sh.itjust.works
on 11 Oct 2023 22:50
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This has the same energy as someone who says they want to drive a car less because it has seatbelts installed.
Like fine - its a useful tool that might prevent you being scammed which just displays information you can easily ignore- better run away.
EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
on 13 Oct 2023 04:23
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This has the same energy as someone who says they want to drive a car less because it has seatbelts installed.
A seatbelt is an actual safety device that works and isn’t being controlled by some other company.
That’s not the same thing.
Doug7070@lemmy.world
on 11 Oct 2023 22:54
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Then you can ignore/turn it off? It’s also a function to protect users from malicious online behavior, dunno how that could be interpreted as a nanny, unless you also insist browsers shouldn’t warn you when accessing known malware links or similar. If you really insist on having the absolute freedom to not be advised about it when you’re being scammed then go off I guess.
random65837@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 20:17
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Amazon’s not “in trouble” because they’re not fake reviews. They’re real reviews left by purchasers, which get bribed to leave them in most cases.
OneClappedCheek@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 20:32
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So it’s a real review when someone receives cash to say good things about the product, gotcha.
random65837@lemmy.world
on 12 Oct 2023 20:48
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Stay in context, genius, you know exactly what I mean. Not bot or algorithm can do anything about a review, left by a real customer, with a real acct and purchase history, so yes, it’s “real”. Not being truthful is another thing.
Yeah basically if you want free stuff, then you’re incentivized to leave good reviews so that they are more likely to send you free stuff. Plus, there’s a cognitive bias where you didn’t pay for it so even if you would have been critical you’re more likely to say something positive.
firefox hitting homeruns on user-friendliness with actually useful features that protect you online, while all other browser just wanna put more ads in front of your face.
threaded - newest
I’m curious to see what Mozilla will do with the shopping assistant portion. Lots of browser extensions, and potentially even some of the Mozilla sponsors offer these types of features, and if Mozilla just stamps them out all at once by integrating that feature, it might lose them some financial support.
On the other hand, I do hope they don’t start amassing huge amounts of training data from their uses. It would be a real bummer to not have a decent browser option anymore.
I’ve already been using the fakespot extension for a few years, and honestly, it feels pretty useless. I’ve seen it give A and B scores for products that I know have fake reviews. And on Amazon or Walmart and similar sites, we already know that the reviews are bullshit, so what difference does it really make for it to tell me that? It’s not like I have any better option in most cases.
Eh, Fakespot has been decent enough for me. I think it works best when there are a lot of reviews, it's not very helpful when it's like 5-10 reviews on a product.
.
LibreWolf will probably have us covered.
It’s a fork of Firefox without Mozilla telemetry, and defaults set to “privacy on” basically.
I switched a couple months ago and am perfectly happy with it after well over a decade with Firefox.
I’m skeptical… how are the fake reviews identified and how do you avoid flagging real ones?
They’re just building Fakespot into the browser so the same way Fakespot does, by analyzing the user who posted the review
What does “analyzing” mean?
They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account…
Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.
What does “techniques” mean?
It’s that Lego that’s slightly more advanced
Algorithms.
What does “algorithms” mean?
stahp
ppl gonna stop answering my real questions and I’ll be tech illiterate firebrand
Heuristics.
Probably ai lol
It could be something like that (hint: they already deployed an offline neural network in Firefox with which you can translate web pages), and the idea would be to detect AI-generated content.
Well I hope they’re going to do better at detecting AI content than anyone ever has before because nobody’s done it well at all so far.
There’s an inherent problem here that AI produces results similar to what it’s trained on and it was not trained on robotic input it was trained on natural human language online.
Well it will be, because it’s detecting AI-generated content indirectly. What it’s directly detecting are bot posters, which are much easier to spot.
“AI detectors” have the uphill job of having to figure out whether something is generated by looking only at what was generated. Fakespot and tools like it get to use the metadata, which has many telltales that bots aren’t even trying to hide.
I think for me personally they can fuck right off with this. It’s unwarranted and invasive. Maybe some fat asses need to get off the couch and stop ordering so much shit online. ( any perceived negativity here is my disappointment in Mozilla not negativity directed at you)
IDK chief. It seems like one of those things that are hard to do in theory as you said, but relatively easy in practice.
I mean just about any human who has played a bit with ChatGPT nowadays is able to identify ChatGPT generated paragraphs within a few words. I don’t suppose it would be much harder for a machine.
Therein lies the issue though. If its not hard to detect, then right after that, its hard to detect again, because the previous fix has been trained out/around. The harder we work to develop detection, the harder we work to ensure detection avoidance is advanced in parallel.
Elsewhere in this thread someone explained that its just integrating FakeSpot into the browser, which uses basic email spam detection techniques to detect fake reviews by analyzing how the reviewer posts. Is there a set schedule they post reviews by, what else have they reviewed, how new is the account, etc. A 2 day old account with 20 reviews would be an obvious source of fake reviews for example
I’m literally the only person I know that does reviews on amazon.
That’s including a circle of a dozen plus relatives I’m friendly enough with to make small talk, three good friends, my wife, my disability/chronic pain support group, the volunteer group I take part in, and a handful of online friends.
Like, you’d think one other person would get bored in the middle of the night and do reviews of stuff that they buy.
But there’s always a shit ton of ai generated or copy/paste dreck you have to wade through to get to real people, and even then they may be shills or have been paid to change a review (no shit, I’ve been offered double and triple the original cost to change bad reviews).
I'd do it if you could leave fully anonymous reviews. But I'm not about to review products with my real name attached to them, even if it's just first name.
My account is old enough it doesn’t have my real name attached.
I know two, plus one other who only reviews when it is very bad. Just always look at middle and low end reviews, and be very extremely choosy about sellers, and roll the dice.
I’m confused. Teachers/professors have said that using AI to detect papers written by AI is highly unreliable. How can this work effectively with a much smaller sample of text to work with (even when it looks for “similarities” between multiple reviews)? What happens in a week when Amazon starts writing fake reviews in different tones/“voices”/styles that are intentionally difficult or impossible to compare?
It’s more than just bots, a lot are copy pasted 5 star reviews on shitty products. Or take for instance when sellers are allowed to completely change the listing but still have old reviews from a totally different product. Hopefully this is what they will filter out.
Damn. Me too.
Probably 99% of fake reviews have not been written by AI. Just copy/paste bots or cheap copy/paste workers.
Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it's a bit of an arms race. They don't just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from "review farms" that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don't have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren't easy for manipulate.
ugh, stop adding bloat to my browser. I don’t want your shitty shopping assistant Mozilla as much as I don’t want it in Edge or Chrome. Once extension support in Epiphany is good enough for KeePassXC I’m switching away from Firefox entirely…
Webkit, yikes
It’s got great performance on Linux. Better to have more rendering engines than less. Chromium, Gecko (FireFox), and WebKit. The more the merrier!
Fair
Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It’s manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.
Agreed. Might actually give more faith in using Amazon.
Hmm their Amazon basics might suffer. I think Amazon basics true offering is cheap but not scam.
That was my understanding of why Amazon Basics was started, cheap not garbage to set a floor for prices and try to stop the race to the bottom
And unfortunately Firefox is sitting at 2 to 3% so even if Amazon were dependant on fake reviews, they have little to fear due to the low marketshare.
I would assume the whole point of a feature like this is to help them get new users.
I'll be switching to libre wolf because of this.
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Well I’ll always use Firefox, no question about it. There is incredible value in using a browser with no alterior motivations, no additional products to sell you, no reason to spy on you.
A product with 2002 reviews suddenly has only 2 reviews, and they are not the nicest ones… Whole Amazon with 2002 gazillion reviews suddenly has only 2 gazillion… :-)
Seriously:
I guess they own several of these “companies” where you can buy fake reviews for your product. And now these are facing their revenues sinking.
Do you have any evidence of that? I used to work for Amazon (as a programmer working on financial data, not delivering packages or anything), and they took review quality pretty damn seriously. They knew full well that customers losing faith in the quality of products on Amazon, it could crater their business.
If some product with 2002 reviews suddenly drops to 2 reviews, 1.5 stars average…it’ll sink to the bottom of pages of results, and people will click on a different one, with better reviews. It’s not like they only have a couple products to offer, and they make money on more or less all of them.
I think he’s just suggesting that the plugin filters it down to what an algorithm considers legitimate. These plugins usually only filter when you click the item so it wouldn’t necessarily move the result down, just reduce potential purchases (which would eventually drop the result.
E: I’m probably stating the obvious above but the damage to bottom line might be after repeat findings until a user ultimately decides Amazon is mostly untrustworthy.
LOL
I can’t even begin to count how many times I have come acrossa slew of 5 star reviews for something COMPLETELY unrelated to the listed item at the very top of search results. Product: Wood Headphone Stand. Review: This kitchen whisk is so amazing, it saved my marriage, 23 out of 5 stars.
OH and don’t forget the reviewer that when you access their profile you see that they have posted 76 reviews in a single day and every single one of them is 5 stars with the title "Great ‘X’! " where x is the product title.
Don’t get me wrong, I used Amazon back when it only sold books and I’ve been using Prime since it came out non-stop but the quality of the items, the search results, and the trust I have in the platform has gone waaaaaaaaaay down.
That’s basically an exploit. Different ‘products’ can be related, and the reviews are supposed to be useful across them. The most obvious examples are just different colors of socks, or different sizes of shirt. Sometimes it’s variants on a product: one with a handle and one without, or different models of TV with the same screen, or whatever.
But it’s not Amazon who makes those connections, it’s the companies entering product data. Some of them abuse it, and say products are related when they’re not at all. Since there’s millions of products listed, it takes time to identify and fix the false associations. In the meantime: people looking for headphone stands see reviews for whisks.
But yeah, quality has gone down. It hits some product categories a lot worse than others: cheap electronics is a shitshow.
Amazon makes a lot of money facilitating the sales of counterfeit goods.
Sure. But they’d make similar amounts of money (possibly more) by selling non-counterfeit goods.
They want their market to be open to third parties, because otherwise those third parties are gonna launch competing platforms. Better if they stick with Amazon, and Amazon gets a cut of the sale. There are thousands and thousands of Chinese companies selling products on Amazon, and many of them are fantastic deals. If Amazon blocks them, they all move to AliExpress, and maybe that really takes off and bites into Amazon’s market share.
But when you consider the sheer number of products offered on Amazon, it’s hard for them to separate the good-but-cheap from the crap counterfeit bullshit. And as you say…they make money either way, so it’s not the highest-priority problem to fix–though as I said in another comment, they are aware that if enough products are crap, people will lose faith in Amazon as a whole, so they’ve tried different techniques to block bullshit reviews in the past.
But if somebody else wants to put in the work to filter shitty knockoffs from the results page? Well, that’s fine with them! They make money selling you the real deal products, too–likely more, because their cut of a more expensive original product is gonna be higher.
Lol, as of this hasn’t already happened
I mean, if people have lost faith in Amazon, they sure don’t show it with the amount they spend on it.
There are some things you can really only buy there. Which is why I bigly agree with the US government that they’re a bigly monopoly bigly abusing their monopoly power (bigly).
Got any examples? Between Walmart, Etsy, AliExpress, Best Buy, MonoPrice, Home Depot, and Wayfair, plus the fact that nearly every major store has online shopping and delivery…I really can’t think of anything I could only get on Amazon. To be quite frank, I think the US government’s case is sorta ridiculous.
Of course you do, you post like some type of Amazon shill.
I was looking for hardware at home depot and the dude recommended I buy what I was looking for on Amazon.
It extra sucks for rural America where you might only have a handful of stores to pick from and all are discount stores like Walmart and Dollar General. Makes it hard to buy better quality/up market items
I find this to be a challenge in general. Amazon and Walmart killed recognizable name brands as quality markers. Walmart forced their suppliers (some of which were name brands) down in quality and prices in order to maintain shelf space, and Amazon is just a haven for rip-off and junk goods.
But the only places you can find quality with good warranty periods in my experience is ultra-high end suppliers in very top line stores. For instance, I’m trying to buy a leather jacket and everywhere I look both online or in person seems like a junk expo…except if you look at very high end stuff (800+ minimum, 1-2k median).
I’ve had similar problems with furniture, and even home goods recently. The only place I’ve had any luck at all is Costco.
PS: I do agree that small town America gets even more screwed because they don’t have the high end stores to speak of.
Regarding furniture, check the Amish furniture stores! They make stuff that your grandkids will resent receiving as inheritance because they’ll be how many decades old and still in perfectly serviceable condition
I’m in CA, I dunno if that’s around here. But it is good advice if you have local Amish.
So if there’s a Lancaster in your state (which there is) there’s a good chance there is an Amish population, and they do tend to open showrooms in major cities to facilitate ordering. Do some googling and you should be able to find some (I did). The Amish have some incredibly skilled carpenters and if you’re willing to spend the cash you’ll get some absolutely wonderful furniture
It won’t. It’s clickbait. It’s dumb.
Edit- tHeY’rE iN TrOuBle isn’t clickbait? Fuck off. This might dip into their profits, slightly, but Amazon is hardly in trouble. FFS.
Why doesn’t mozilla stop adding politically correct shit like this no one asked instead of tab groups and other features?
How is this political correctness?
Maybe they read too fast and thought it said "fake news" instead?
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“Presenting a view of reality that removes lies and bullshit” is left-wing
I would certainly hope so, lmao
Anything I don’t like is overt political correctness
Gotta love reading opinions from people who don't know what they're talking about.
I bought an 4.7 rated amplifier on Amazon that broke the first day. Looking at the reviews closer, I noticed they were 100% paid reviewers.
When I tried to leave a negative review, Amazon stopped me, giving a generic message about fake reviews on this product. This product is still out their with a high rating and no way for actual purchasers like me to warn other customers.
That’s appalling customer service.
Can you elaborate? I’ve never experienced this and would like to understand how they do it.
I’ve had this multiple times.
Tried to leave a big detailed helpful negative review and it gets flagged for being suspicious, with no copy of the review attached so I have to write it all again. And then it gets removed again.
I just looked in my emails. The exact phrasing was “We have reviewed our decisions and concluded that the product you received is authentic. As a result, we removed your review specific to this product. This ensures other customers see reviews that reflect the current shopping experience.”
Most recently it happened with a body trimmer, where I never questioned the inauthenticity, and then a zojirushi travel mug that I genuinely believe was a fake, and attached a lot of evidence.
Give it 2 stars instead of 1.
And never read the 5-star reviews.
Amazing. Thanks for the description.
They’ve blocked my review on a shower chair that was absolutely not rated for what they said. I nearly fell on my butt and my skinnier partner said it was too wobbly. They’ve blocked the negative review 5 times saying I questioned the authenticity of the product and they have confirmed it. I knew it was Medline brand. I’ve had to file a FTC complaint which I expect to be worthless.
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FTFY. I don’t even have an account there.
I only use it for 2 dollar Amazon prime video + gaming sub that I got when Apple App Store glitched.
How do these analyzers determine if a review is fake?
It’s some ML/AI thing that analyzes the review content.
I honestly have no idea how accurate it is either, but I guess if it gives a strong ranking back you’d probably be best to take that into consideration.
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Do you mean Vine? I can tell you a few things about that.
Yep vines, never paid attention to them until this happened.
Are they all fake or something?
Customers who were sent free products “to honesty review”
It is very nice to see Mozilla doing quite useful/helpful projects from time to time.
Yeah and they ignore their browser in exchange for all this
The article is about a feature they’ve brought to their Firefox
Always sort by 1 star. And if the comments share similar issues. Do not buy.
No… 2 to 4 star reviews are more realistic. 5 star reviews are either fake or they got lucky and nothing bad happened. 1 star reviews usually are from people that were PISSED OFF while 2 to 4 star reviews are generally from people with more nuanced opinions than “this product cured my cancer” or “this product set fire to my cat and stole my significant other”
This is nothing to get excited about. Like so many other things there will be constant innovations on both sides. It’s an arms race between the scammers and the scam detectors.
Can we please stop with the browser bloat? This is something that should be a plug-in, not a kitchen sink feature.
Agreed. This is well outside the scope of native browser functions. Firefox already has a rich extensions ecosystem. They can just include the extension with the browser by default for all I care, but as a native feature, this makes no sense.
Firefox extension platform frontend is a mess and has been for years.
They do that. Screenshot upload and so on are handled as extensions.
I actually don’t agree, and the reason is - non tech people. You and me can install plugins but ordinary people don’t do that. So the default experience must be good, offering improvements to the experience over Google Chrome.
Otherwise all privacy features could also be plugins. Imagine if that was true. Firefox would have no identity and you would have to install plugins and make it your own.
So some features should be built in. Maybe the ability to get pop-ups about false reviews will actually make users go “wow that is so useful”.
Now, let’s talk about adblockers… Oh, wait, Google would get upset if FF had an inbuilt adblocker and could stop giving us those $weet money…
If Google stopped sponsoring, Mozilla would go down and Google would get slammed with anti-monopoly lawsuits from the EU.
So Mozilla can do whatever they want and Google won’t stop sending them money. Since that is a lot more profitable in the long run.
So… What are they waiting for? Are they going to rely on gorhill for ever?
You want Mozilla choosing what gets blocked?
Sure, as long as we still have options to disable their blocker and use a 3rd party one if we choose. It’s astounding how many users don’t bother to install an adblocker and it would be a massive improvement for those users who don’t know better.
There’s been more than one occasion that I’ve used a family member’s PC and they have Firefox installed without a single extension, they didn’t even know that extensions existed.
Use LibreWolf. It’s Firefox with pre-installed uBlock Origin and pre-configured privacy settings. It also doesn’t have any of the Firefox bloat like Pocket
No way I’m giving market share to gecko and, thus, to Mozilla. I just point how how hypocrite they are. I’ll keep satisfyingly using Brave.
Blockers need to be an extension, keeps everyone honest.
Compromise: Develop it as a Plugin and then install it by default. That way people who don’t want the feature can easily remove it completely. That approach would likely also reduce the number of Firefox forks whose sole purpose is to remove the new features some consider bloat.
Or make it so that people have a choice to add some of the extension features when installing the browser. Debloating is not fun
True, also wouldn’t be too much work. Just some additional dialogues on first start up asking you which plugins you’d like installed
Sometimes it feels like debloating is a hobby to people with little to show for it
Well, the whole point of debloating is to end up with little in the way of stuff instead of lots of stuff ;)
I do get that and used to do a lot of it myself, but usually the results are just fairly minor. That’s what I meant by it seeming more like a hobby than something hugely beneficial
I suspected so, but the way you worded it was just asking (neigh, demanding) to be “misunderstood” for humouristic purposes :)
I think it’s just me not being a native speaker and being lazy with my wording
Not a criticism.
As far as I can tell (not a native speaker myself) it was properly worded and I only acted as if I had misunderstood it for humouristic purposes.
I’ve done it for actual expressions used by native speakers by simulating language ignorance and interpreting them in a literal way, for fun, just like I did here.
Sorry if it sounded like a criticism - I meant to just take the piss in a friendly way.
No worries, I didn’t take it in a bad way
Most people don’t want a 45th prompt when they just want to install firefox to check facebook and their mail
Good solution, perhaps two simple options at browser install: Default / Custom. That way you don’t have to uninstall all the stuff at the end.
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Probably handle it similarly to how Chrome handles an extension asking for new permissions. It disables the add-on and gives the user a small non-intrusive notification on the options menu. Opening the notification notified the user about the change in permissions and asks them if they want to re-enable the add-on or remove it from Chrome.
That’s actually what Firefox usually did for these kind of features. They’re usually delayed as system add-ons.
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Reminds me of gnome.
Amazon only operates in 58 countries, so it’s basically useless for everyone else. But the company they acquired (fakespot) seems to do more than amazon, but that still does not make it worth packaging it with the browser
+1. When Edge added a price tracker / financing thing, the same people threw a fit.
If you were pro that, you should be pro this.
I agree and I worry about what options they’ll remove from about:config next to make room for or force the acceptance of new features like they have a habit of doing.
There’s LibreWolf. It allows you to disable many things that you can’t disable in normal Firefox. It also has uBlock Origin pre-installed and it’s pre-configured for privacy.
Just use LibreWolf if you want debloated Firefox
Librewolf isn’t just a debloated version of Firefox. It’s built with a completely different goal of being extra locked down for privacy. More so than the defaults of Firefox. Also, it doesn’t even include auto update functionality unless you’re using a package manager.
That’s good, isn’t it?
I completely forgot this was even as thing because I exclusively use Linux and install/update everything with a package manager. You can also use Chocolatey on Windows or Homebrew on macOS. I feel like more people should use package managers, by using them you avoid having to download some random executables from shady websites and your system doesn’t get bloated up by 423942389 update daemons that are constantly running in the background.
It is, but it’s also not for everyone
Also, I strongly don’t expect everyday users to use package managers. And personally, I like having notifications in the app whenever it’s time to update so I can take action right there.
Why? Pretty much every website works fine on LibreWolf.
I mean, yeah, sure, it would be great if LibreWolf had an auto-update functionality, for me it’s not a deal breaker though.
I’d say these should be “recommended plug-ins” but imho FF/Moz embarassed themselves on that front with the whole “Pocket” thing.
Looks like it’s an another job for big daddy EU to take care of.
I guess this is the approach to how AI can be used effectively.
With the amount of false posts all over the web I cannot wait.
I would switch to Firefox the instant they let me group my tabs. This fragile stability I get with my browser is embarrassingly important to managing my ADHD.
There are many plugins for this…
You should switch to Firefox instantly then, because the amount of add-ons capable of doing that for you are endless.
This is best addon I have found for this. github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups
Yea, this is what I use and it’s the best FF alternative. Not perfect, for me, cuz I have too many steps to switch from one group to the next. At least when compared to Chrome’s native grouping all in one window.
Get something like Tab Wrangler that will close tabs for you. You’ll learn to use bookmarks very quickly after that.
I just want native vertical tabs lmao
github.com/ranmaru22/firefox-vertical-tabs
what’s a vertical tab
Where the tabs are on the side of the desktop screen instead of the top.
And i just want a tab bar on Android tablets/foldables like every other browser.
I’ve been using Sidebery with some userchrome to hide the top tabs, and it’s a workable solution, but far from ideal.
I also wish keybindings were configurable. For example, with the “/” search, ctrl-g/G to go to next/prev match is really weird
Tried Sidebery too with some basic hidden UI CSS but having to keep it up to date makes it clunky at times, leagues away from Edges implementation where it’s just a toggle away.
I must admit that I do like the built in page translation, which I guess was made by a similar team using ML and all. Maybe I will like this too? Feels a bit… niche. Maybe it’s a stepping stone to any misinformation at some point?
Edit This actually might not be coming as a browser feature at all. Mozilla is trying to increase the size of their Mozilla.ai team, so perhaps it’s really looking for people with AI knowledge with web tech and a track record of using it for a ethical purpose. This team would be well placed to build pretty much any AI based tool for the firefox ecosystem.
It’s definitely coming as a browser feature, Mozilla has confirmed it :) …mozilla.org/…/review-checker-review-quality
So how much do I have to pay to boost the Fakespot rating of my product listing?
And so it begins, the marketing world has got its claws in AI.
I mean, Fakespot already does the same thing. They rate the product based on the quality of reviews (whether or not they’re fake).
Yeah sorry, I wasn’t aware the AI wars already spread into marketing-land
It’s not even just AI. It’s also real people being paid to leave fake reviews.
Plenty of fake reviews are AI written now too. For a while you could go on any product page and Ctrl+F for “as a large language model” and spot several copy/pasted reviews with no proofreading that out themselves
Are fake reviews even a problem worth bothering with? The far bigger problem is that most reviews are just devoid of useful information. “Thing arrived and box looked pretty” is what most of them boil down to. If they are fake or not doesn’t make a difference. Even a review that puts effort into itself, is largely useless when the writer didn’t have multiple competing products at hand to compare. And on top of that you have the issue that products will frequently change under the hood, so even if the product was good a year ago, there is no guarantee you are getting the same thing when you order it today.
The whole online shopping landscape is a complete mess and fake reviews are really just the tiny tip of the iceberg. To really improve the situation you’d need some “Consumer Reports”-type effort that objectively evaluates a products performance and compares it to the competition. Depending on random people on the Internet to do the reviewing is kind of a lost cause to begin with.
Stiftung Warentest is such a thing in Germany.
I feel like this is the case. Whenever I have a new hobby and need to make a purchase, I rely a lot on reviews of others because it’s impossible to guarantee the quality of anything. Look at Doc Marten’s today, they fucking suck, and this is a “known” brand. Now how about buying all sorts of weird shit from other countries or small companies that aren’t well known enough.
Yes for consumers this is a problem.
This would be a welcome solution.
Isn’t that what Which? Magazine does?
But-But how are we supposed to know how handsome/beautiful the delivery rider who delivered the parcel is???
There is also the question section.
“How big is the item itself”
Some idiot: I don’t know. Bought it as a gift
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The unfortunate thing is that the weak-minded people most likely to succumb to that pressure are also the least competent to give good answers.
No. They get an email asking “Can you answer this?” Not a product survey.
My favourite is someone who rates it 1 star because they got it late.
You’re reviewing the item you wet wipe, not Katie who works for Evri/Hermes…
If Amazon had visible seller reviews, I would be more inclined to agree.
Then again, if people would actually say who their sellers were, I would be less inclined to agree.
For me, the answer is mostly “no” because I just assume everything (except certain name-brand items that I did my homework on elsewhere) on Amazon/Ebay/Aliexpress/etc. is marginally-functional crap and adjust my expectations accordingly.
If anything, the only signals I go by on those sites are the number of ratings and reviews (not their content) as indications of popularity, following the “wisdom of crowds.”
Photos from people who received the product are useful, you never know with the marketting bs. And I would argue that random people review are important, but they are so bad right now that you got used not to look at them. Of course some will be stupid (1/5, came late), you just have to read them. Which is impossible with the 50.000 fake on every product.
I like the reviews that say “I’ve owned this for 20 minutes and it works great!” I assume most reviews are from people who just received the product (because that’s when they’ll think to write a review) and are therefore pretty useless as a guide to quality.
Yeah if you want in depth review it’s not the way to go for sure. Independant reviewer on youtube or, if you’re really desperate, reddit are better.
With Amazon there’s also the problem of them combining reviews of entirely different products into a single product’s page. I have no idea why they do this. There are also sellers who switch the product on the page while keeping the positive reviews for an earlier product.
This right here. It should be illegal to do this. I discovered this I think last year and it blew my mind, it’s straight up misleading the consumer.
I avoid those as soon as I notice the signs, but I’ve found less and less instances over time (which is a relief since there used to be loads of pages like that). I thought I read somewhere it’s against Amazon’s own rules to do this. Not 100% sure though.
Of course they are a problem? The real issue is the star ratings in aggregate of course, but the value in individual reviews is detecting patterns - “didn’t like the lock thing” “latch was loose” “maybe it’s just me, but the latch didn’t feel solid” “the lock broke off within a week”. You start to see trouble spots if you know how to skim actual reviews.
So to get that value, you don’t restrict input, you leave it open, the “pretty box” people aren’t ideal, but it’s fine because it allows for the breadcrumbs that tell the larger truth. It’s ridiculous to expect normal, busy people to do “consumer reports” style reviews for every small kitchen sponge and packet of stickers sold online?
Yeah I think it’s pretty easy to work around fake reviews. Seems like a skill issue tbh.
I love the reviews that say “I haven’t gotten it yet but I’m sure it is good” or they review UPS instead “Package arrived damaged”. They are as useful as those idiotic unpacking videos.
If I use reviews I look for ones with specific information and what the general range of negative ones are. If there are a mess of negatives ones and they are recent with details included then I pay attention.
I think aliexpress is pretty good with reviews. I don’t see obvious fakes, and a lot of people leave pictures, which is the only things that really matter.
AliExpress is the epitome of fake reviews to me, I see them all over. Sometimes with different reviewers using the same image lok
Is it ? I regularily shop on aliexpress and I never saw dupplicate images from different reviewer. And generally most products have little review that all seems really legitimate.
Maybe it depend what you are shopping for ? But I would expect everyone from lemmy to buy tech like me.
I know that the results we get from the us are very different from in europe, maybe this has something to do with it ?
For me Amazon is by far the worst, 50 000 all fake reviews talking about another product
Does anyone know the split of Amazon’s mobile app versus mobile web and desktop use? This won’t have an impact on their proprietary app and that’s a shame.
i’ve found that firefox on android is one of my favorite apps, even replacing native apps in many cases.
I watch YouTube without ads all through Firefox
You should look into Revanced.
Or NewPipe or LibreTube
I also entirely watch YouTube through Firefox. I’ve had no need to consider a different app for YouTube because of it
Same. I even browse Lemmy in Ff.
i like jerboa for handling any actual conversations i get into, but the search is worthless so i have some custom search engines configured just for lemmy:
lemmy.world/search?q=%s&type=All&listingT…
The question you’re responding to isn’t about the mobile app for Firefox; it’s about the mobile app for Amazon. Apparently lots of other people misread that too, so at least you’re in good company.
i know it’s about the mobile app for amazon. i’m trying to suggest that people who use firefox are more likely to skip the amazon app anyway.
We’re switching to Firefox!
Just did it.
Good. But remember when Firefox was supposed to be a lean alternative to other browsers? I remember.
I do not, please inform me, since as far as I know Firefox was always trying to be featurefull browser.
It was a fork off the Netscape Navigator which included a news reader, an email client, a browser and a kitchen sink, from what I remember. They took the browser part out and created Firefox, but it was called something else at first. Firebird maybe? Can’t recall.
Maybe they mean lean compared to internet explorer toolbars? But yeah, it’s never been minimal. And I doubt this would really add that much bloat memory-wise while running.
Mozilla Application Suite contained an email client and a HTML editor, among other things. Firefox was supposed to “just a browser”, so to speak:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox
According to the downvotes, hardly anyone remembers, even Mozilla is falling for feature creep again.
Might be easier to just disable reviews on Amazon if you’re trying to block fake reviews lol.
The dedicated websites to check amazon reviews like fakespot.com have been almost completely beaten. What is Firefox going to do differently?
I have a Firefox extension from this website, and another one… So I’ve had this all along. I guess it’s great to hear they are building something into the product itself, though.
I’d really prefer it stay as an extension, honestly. The whole of the userbase does not need this and I hate software bloat.
Given the amount of malicious extensions that have slips through the cracks over the years, I’d rather it baked in. Something like that is very much inline with what Mozilla is all about in the end. Useful features that many would want isn’t bloat.
Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved
Yeah. Fakespot is no better at all. The best thing to do right now is know if a product has only been listed for less than a couple months and has hundreds of reviews, it’s BS.
Next up; go to the review section, sort by newest, and read those reviews. Usually the fake reviews are flooded in early and you get more real ones in later. I’ve seen things rated at like 4.5 stars with 500 reviews, but then half of the 10 most recent reviews will rate it 1 star.
Yeah it doesn’t seem too difficult to me to see when reviews seem fishy. I have never tried fakespot myself.
Another thing to check is that the reviews match what the product is for - I have seen a lot of Amazon listings where the seller will have a product up for a long time, get a lot of positive reviews, then change the listing to something else. So it looks like the listing has been up for a long time with good reviews but it’s really a different item. Then note the seller and don’t buy anything from them lol.
If there’s anything I’d want built in more than anything it would be vertical tabs like what the existing sideberry extension provides. I also use Vivaldi which has it native, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
Edit: and tab manager plus. Same functionality and interface but native.
The existing extensions are fine, but if they are wanting to add things already provided by a third party, those two are my must haves for a modern browsing experience.
Vivaldi browser is known to collect and sell your data on your usage like everything else except Firefox and chromium (not chrome); in case you didn’t already know
I disagree wholeheartedly.
forum.vivaldi.net/topic/62387/data-collection?lan…
A web search shows others showing concerns on various sites, and dev/staff responses.
I’d be more concerned about brave, your own isp, tiktok. Then the whole deal with backdoors in Intel chips and running minix. Don’t remember if amd has the same deal.
Vivaldi is fine. From what I’ve seen they mainly check out things like what os I am running, things of that nature. I can live with that. Steam from valve knows my hardware too. Heck the oil shop knows my vin, mileage, make, and model, as far as my car goes. I can live with that as well.
The only knock against Vivaldi is it being closed source.
How are vertical tabs better than horizontal ones?
easier to scroll and read and works good in wider monitors plus tabs don’t get so small you can’t read the title anymore cause its just a fixed space
Cause after I have 60 tabs open I can still tell what they are cause I can read the title, not just see the fav icon.
Praise Vivaldi
These two pretty much explained my reasons for switching to vertical. It did take a day or so to become accustomed to it, but now it feels pretty natural.
Vertical tabs to me are perfect next step in browser gui, just like when tabs became a thing to begin with.
For people who always right click and select “open in new tab” like myself vertical tabs make my 10s or hundreds of tabs manageable
In this case, I would check out the Floorp browser. It is a Firefox fork that plans to be more like Vivaldi and have lots of features, including vertical tabs.
Thanks, will do
We literally just want passkeys and native PWA’s (add-ons do not count), and an interface optimized for Android tablets. And I refuse to use Firefox again until these things are added.
This is incredibly out of scope for a browser feature set.
I mean I don’t particularly like firefox either (although it’s still probably the browser I dislike the least), but firefox needs users to keep google from having complete control over the web.
Okay, but then what does that make Apple with Safari powered by WebKit (and it’s mandated use on iOS)? In addition to the few and between browsers that make use of it like GNOME Web.
Its not a technology issue so I dont think amazon will be in trouble at all
So, this sounds like just another AI-authorship detector, which haven’t been very successful so far.
I don’t see why. Fake reviews don’t benefit Amazon. The review information is a value-add for them, and fake reviews detract from that.
Hell, if it actually is able to reliably detect fake reviews on Amazon – which I doubt, but let’s roll with it – Amazon might buy the company that does the fake review detection to get it so that they can filter it.
I don’t agree with the assertion that fake reviews don’t benefit them, but I may be missing something. Reviews help drive consumer behavior and more reviews lead to more sales from those who are unable or unwilling to be more discerning. (Amazon takes a cut)
For others, it the idea or presence of fake reviews might drive them to a “trusted” Amazon Basics alternative, also leading to sales with a higher margin for Amazon.
Additionally, recycling listing ASINs is a common tactic that Amazon could stop and is a source of “fake” (or at least, irrelevant in content and misleading in score) reviews. There’s minimal enforcement of rules for review integrity, such as verified purchases or quid pro quo “warranties” and “free gifts” for 5 star reviews.
All the evidence I see points to Amazon preferring the status quo.
I tried posting a negative review that mentioned a quid pro quo (offered a gift card in exchange for a 5 star review) and Amazon removed it for not being relevant to the product. So baseless 5 star reviews are allowed but not 1 star reviews.
I’ve had that happen as well, but technically they’re right, bitching about the seller isn’t relevant to the end product. That’s why there needs to be a seller rating section for them, with independent reviews / scores based on them as sellers which shows next to their seller names, same idea as eBay feedback.
“Brushing” scams seem way too common and easily executed through Amazon in order for them to not be turning a blind eye about it, imo. My mom was sent random LED lights for months through their return program despite never ordering them or hardly using amazon at all before she figured out what was happening. It feels like at least 5% of all my purchases come with a policy breaking email from the seller contacting me asking me for a five-star review in exchange for a free gift. Or even just contacting me 6 months later from a totally unrelated purchase and offering me a gift for no reason in exchange for a five-star review. Oh, they’ll sure reimburse the money it costs to buy it! Because they really just want that five-star review! And Amazon seems to be happy allowing five-star reviews for products that are given away for free and even has a tag to let other users know, but just this method is frowned upon? I doubt it.
I’ve been using fakespot for a few months now and it seems hit or miss a lot of times. I’m hoping that Mozilla has been making changes to improve the implementation of how it checks reviews.
This will work for 15 microseconds before people start deploying it as an adversarial training aid.
Came here to say this.
Guess it’ll have to be a live service that is constantly running and updating what a wonderful world
That makes me want to use firefox less.
I don’t need a nanny-control to tell me what’s fake and what’s real.
Sifting through reviews to find real criticism is tedious. I never asked for this feature expecting it to become a reality, but I won’t turn my nose at time saved at 0 expense. As long as it isn’t used for marketing or fingerprinting, what’s the issue? Note: I might be missing your sarcasm, I’m tired.
This has the same energy as someone who says they want to drive a car less because it has seatbelts installed.
Like fine - its a useful tool that might prevent you being scammed which just displays information you can easily ignore- better run away.
A seatbelt is an actual safety device that works and isn’t being controlled by some other company.
That’s not the same thing.
Then you can ignore/turn it off? It’s also a function to protect users from malicious online behavior, dunno how that could be interpreted as a nanny, unless you also insist browsers shouldn’t warn you when accessing known malware links or similar. If you really insist on having the absolute freedom to not be advised about it when you’re being scammed then go off I guess.
Amazon’s not “in trouble” because they’re not fake reviews. They’re real reviews left by purchasers, which get bribed to leave them in most cases.
So it’s a real review when someone receives cash to say good things about the product, gotcha.
Stay in context, genius, you know exactly what I mean. Not bot or algorithm can do anything about a review, left by a real customer, with a real acct and purchase history, so yes, it’s “real”. Not being truthful is another thing.
Yeah basically if you want free stuff, then you’re incentivized to leave good reviews so that they are more likely to send you free stuff. Plus, there’s a cognitive bias where you didn’t pay for it so even if you would have been critical you’re more likely to say something positive.
firefox hitting homeruns on user-friendliness with actually useful features that protect you online, while all other browser just wanna put more ads in front of your face.