- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Reminder to switch browsers if you haven’t already!
- Google Chrome is starting to phase out older, more capable ad blocking extensions in favor of the more limited Manifest V3 system.
- The Manifest V3 system has been criticized by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation for restricting the capabilities of web extensions.
- Google has made concessions to Manifest V3, but limitations on content filtering remain a source of skepticism and concern.
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Long live Firefox.
hear ye
Pretty great outcome for firefox really.
I don’t think firefox numbers will get a huge & immediate bump, but I think that over time it will support a reputation for firefox as being cool different and just plain better.
I can’t imagine raw-dogging the internet without an ad blocker in 2024. I’m aware that most people aren’t bothered by ads, but surely… surely some people might be interested in blocking them if they become aware that it’s possible and easy.
After bingeing that show, I have a constant fear that he’s been standing behind me the whole time, just waiting for me to catch a glimpse of him.
Been here since Kevin helped the project out?
I’m sorry. I’ve seen this so many times today and I can’t stand it anymore.
I hate this article photo. What the fuck is that shit?? Gloveless fingers? Digit warmer? Turtlefinger sweater?
Finger sweatbands for epic googling activities
The 80s are back! Sweatbands for everyone!
Agreed, but also
How can you not kinda love it
i’m with you it’s really camp
I use Firefox everywhere which means I have ads blocking everywhere, including and especially on Android. All my tabs are synced and are easily transferred between devices.
While I dont use Firefox itself any more I am using librewolf on my PC, which sadly doesnt exist for phones yet. Also, GOS comes with its own privacy oriented chromium fork called vanadium, so I’m using that in the mean time.
I also use librewolf and have settled for iceraven on my phone. the list of installable extensions is much longer (even if not everything is working yet, depending on how far mozilla has come along) and it has about:config support, which gives me a pretty close approximation of my desktop browser.
I’ve found the Mull browser (which can be found through the DivestOS repository on F-Droid) works great as a privacy-focused firefox fork, similar to LibreWolf. I hear Fennic F-Droid is also a pretty good but less extreme alternative, but I’d imagine you don’t care much about that if you use LibreWolf.
If we want to be honest, Firefox on Android has way worse performance than Chrome.
(But I still use it instead of Chrome)
I use both on a Pixel 7 Pro.
Can’t confirm that.I use it on a Pixel 5 and even there it is fluid while browsing. Only on Youtube there is the slightest stutter for HD Videos. Heavy sites like Discourse fora or Cryptpad or such work flawlessly.
TIL Cryptpad.fr is just one instance apparently
Yeah wow nice that’s fantastic
I use both on a Galaxy Fold 5 and can confirm Chromium based browsers are smoother. Although I still use Waterfox on my phone. I just keep a Chromium based browsers in case a website doesn’t work when I visited it using Waterfox.
It depends I think. I found Chrome to be a tiny bit faster but then ads bogged the page down so most of the time, Firefox is faster for me.
In some very rare cases when I need to disable ads blocking, Chrome is indeed faster but I’d rather abandon websites rather than disable ads blocking.
So if you love ads, Chrome is better. If you hate ads like I do, Firefox is miles ahead.
There are other ways to block ads. Adguard does a great job on Android. It establishes a local VPN, so it can do HTTP[S] content filtering in addition to DNS blocking.
Can’t use my VPN and adguard at the same time iirc, unless android has two active VPN “slots” now. Can’t bring a pihole with me 24/7 either as much as I would like to.
There’s always nextdns.io that can be configured to use ad blocking filters on the dns level. You can set it up on your phone as well
Can I use it in conjunction with my normal VPN? AFAIK android has only one active VPN slot available at a time.
Ive been using Firefox on Android for years but it really needs some TLC. It doesn’t support scaling to a tablet/desktop UI at all so it doesn’t work well in DeX or anything larger than a phone. I also recently had to swap to Brave because I noticed Firefox was draining a lot of battery all of a sudden. There’s some kind of leak or running process that isn’t sleeping properly. In a few months I’ll re-install and try again.
Laughs in Firefox
How long until the majority of the Internet is inaccessible to non-Chromium browsers because the pages “don’t support them”?
Honestly the way the internet is going do you need access to the majority of the internet? I feel like its pretty dead as it is now already.
Lemmy will still work because we mostly use Firefox, and i bet the same will hold true for many others.
Basically the moment mainstream internet becomes google only you will see nerds build new websites specifiably to cater to the non google crowd and i trust random internet nerds a hack of a lot more than a monopoly corporation.
BRING IT ON GOOGLE!, YOU CAN INITIATE THE PUSH TO CREATE A NEW BETTER INTERNET. ~create demand for better trough your suppressive ideals~
Oh yeah nothing bad could ever happen from effectively removing an entire section of the population from certain parts of the Internet completely.
I can’t imagine that ever going badly.
That’s already the case. Facebook etc have been walled gardens (or prisons if you prefer) for decade and a half now.
I don’t think that’s going to be the case. People will find workarounds. The whole point of these alternative browsers is to use the web in whatever way the developers think their user base wants to use it. If the web is inaccessible to non-chromium browsers then people will spoof their browser to the site to look like a chromium browser. I don’t think there’s a slippery slope for this, but if sites and AWS start really forcing browsers and the users to see a bunch of ad garbage and tracking then the web as we know it has come to an end and there is no safe place.
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If we get to the point where the corporatocracy can force us into a limited set of compliant browsers then the web as we know it has ended. I don’t think they’ll go that far unless they decide to go whole hog. That level of control will likely look to wipe out any useful plugins like ad-blockers or other privacy features. I didn’t want to go down the slippery slope argument, but that’s pretty much what will happen if they go that direction.
We’re kind of already there - there’s Chromium, Webkit and Gecko and that’s about it, two of which are controlled by the biggest ad companies in the world, and the third is heavily subsidised by the first. Mozilla was effectively forced into implementing DRM into the browser already, and there’s plenty of other “””standards””” published and approved by Google that Mozilla is pressured into implementing but doesn’t want to for security and privacy reasons.
I definitely expect it’ll get worse.
But most of those only give you a few bits of data. Like if there’s only one technique that succeeded, you might have the same fingerprint as everyone with your exact phone with the rest randomized
If it don’t work on Firefox I won’t use it. There are better FOSS options anyways
Sure as long as it’s not my bank or my employer or the gov official website for accessing my taxes…
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“WebUSB is a JavaScript application programming interface specification for securely providing access to USB devices from web applications”
Holy Hannah, NO!!!
Might as well allow a website to direct write to your hard drive unprompted again.
Does noone see how BAD this stuff is?
Stop creating attack vectors with glowing neon signs on them.
Except it’s a very good thing for 2FA USB keys which prevent people from gaining access unless they have physical access to the key. Also useful for USB gamepads etc
Web engines are nearly OSs at this point. It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks with a webpage. Most apps are also already rendered in browser engines anyway, that includes things like steam. The APIs might sound evil until your favorite FOSS project uses them to make your life better.
Unfortunately, if Mozilla refuses to implement stuff like PWAs or advanced APIs it’s locked out of that side of innovation both good and bad.
It’s aready possible to flash a phone ROM in two clicks
That’s precisely the kind of access that a web browser should NEVER, EVER have.
If you think 2 stage download keylogger apps getting into app stores is bad, wait until it can be done with a banner ad. Or by viewing a comment on a post.
I would close my bank account and such to a different bank. It takes literally 5 minutes to open one online.
And yes, I would not work for a company that doesn’t support Firefox
I would also keep pestering support of the government website, that one I will have to give to you
This is getting more common. Whatever dev accepted that when sizing the story should hang their head in shame. “No, you don’t size for a poor solution, you size for a good solution and let the PMs chip at the things they understand, keeping some things sacrosanct”.
I remember the “works best on IE” warnings of old, looks like we might be heading back there.
For this reason, we must still take a stand against this stuff.
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Then I guess people will use the web less and less.
They do some now, but user agent switcher gets me to all of those with no problem.
It is not that simple. These are cat and mouse games. Whack a mole. Whatever you’d like to say.
If I can’t access a site with firefox, i won’t deal with online. I’ll call them and waste an employee’s time, or send payment in the mail. I’m not using chrome or an app and i don’t care.
Laughs in Waterfox
Laughs in earthfox
Laughs in airfox
Laughs in long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony fox
Laughs in Captain Planetfox
Wait, wrong 5 elements
With your powers combined, I am Internet Explorer 7!
Laughs in avatarfox
Laughs in electrofox
laughs in icefox
Chrome is the new Internet Explorer.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
Always has been.
Firefox is a good option.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox. Been using it for over a year now and enjoy it.
Firefox’s marketshare is small enough relative to Chrome’s that some websites might just block it at this point, if Chrome users mean ad revenue and Firefox users don’t.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Firefox has 2.88% marketshare.
Chrome has 65.34% marketshare.
It’s gonna be interesting to see what happens…
Firefox blocks statcounter tracking by default. It’s an inherently flawed metric, though Firefox is definitely in the minority still vs Chrome
It doesn’t necessary cost a meaningful amount to a site to allow Firefox users to view it; it does however cost to make it compatible with non-chromium browsers. For most viewing that’s a non issue (I mean, most crms are going to work) but specific sites might stop working (YouTube already got caught throttling firefox, and tbf, streaming would cost more than reading an article or something).
User agent switcher
Based and
incognitoprivate mode pilled
The numbers may be indicative of the general trend, but every single privacy oriented browser and so forth is spoofing the user agent, pretending to be the most widespread and popular os and browser.
Which is why privacy checks on my Linux+librewolf PC return win10 with chrome.
My worry is what the EU changes might mean for the mobile web and beyond. With iOS’s market share and only the same rendering engine Apple used in Safari being available, sites/apps had to support more than just Chrome. If forcing iOS users to Chrome is an option (either through pointing them to the browser or an app built with that rendering engine), then there’s even less of an incentive to test with anything else. It’s great that users get more choice but if providers use it as an opportunity to reduce support for other browsers then it might not be a great benefit after all.
Firefox and WebKit for all!
I did have some issues on firefox om some sites.
But I will raise people one more. Waterfox
Never heard of it, I prefer LibreWolf
https://librewolf.net/#what-is-librewolfbut I’m gonna list some other popular forks
TOR Browser (anti-censorship enhanced fork, bundled with TOR network)
https://www.torproject.org/GNUzilla IceCat (GNU version)
https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/Pale Moon (able to use old XUL based extensions)
https://www.palemoon.org/Mullvad Browser (a security hardened fork, IIRC based on TOR, made by Mullvad VPN company)
https://mullvad.net/en/browserANDROID
Fennec F-Droid (Fenned version available on F-Droid, clean of propietary blobs)
https://f-droid.org/packages/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid/
https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuildMull (hardened fork of Fenix)
https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenixIceRaven (yet another hardened fork of Fenix)
https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
Well I will sound like an old bore but throughout the nearly 20 years Firefox is out I never looked at anything else. Seen the rise and fall of Internet Explorer seeing the rise and fall of chrome.
Even Firefox in its dreadfully slow era (2010-2016) it did not made me change. And let me be clear Firefox is far from perfect. But for my use cases (privacy and security balance over certain conveniences) I would not change for any commercially backed Browser.
Moral of the story. It’s better to donate to Mozilla and enjoy the freedom of your browser than giving yourself in on the erratic behavior of the big tech companies.
dont donate to moz lmfao if you look at the source code they collect absolutely everything, just use librewolf + betterfox.js/arkenfox.js
- Firefox doesn’t “collect absolutely everything”.
- DO donate to Mozilla as without them the Firefox, Tor, Mullvad, Floorp, Mull, Waterfox AND Librewolf browsers wouldn’t exist.
- Librewolf disables SafeBrowsing, which is a security must-have for anyone installing a browser for friends/family - and in many cases even for yourself.
- Even the Librewolf developers say “Safe Browsing is still a good security tool and Mozilla’s implementation is privacy respecting.”
- Yes, if you know what you’re doing use Librewolf. For everyone else, Firefox is a great move.
They collect everything? I’m on mint. I want extensions, and not have to run my browser like I need to tweak an OS. I just want it to work. What do I use?
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox
if user.js editing is too much of a pain then get plain librewolf, go to settings and enable history-saving:
search bar ‘history’ > scroll to ‘history’ > disable ‘clear history when librewolf closes’.
supports extensions just fine too! :)
https://librewolf.net/installation/linux/ installation for mint
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F I R E F O X already
Good thing I exclusively use Firefox.
Now we gotta have websites developing for all web browsers instead of Google Chrome like it’s Internet Explorer 2.0.
There are effectively only two web browsers: Chrome and Firefox. Literally everything else, aside from some really niche things that can’t render modern webpages, is a fork of one of those two that uses the same rendering engine.
Not to toot the kagi Horn, but they are talking about releasing thier webkit based Orion Browser on Linux. Ive been following that one closely since it has firefox extension support.
I mean, if folks really want something like that, I’d say they shouldn’t have let KDE’s KHTML (which is what WebKit was forked from) die.
I’ve become very skeptical of anything Kagi, wishing they’d just focused on making one thing good instead of getting distracted by mediocre AI and a browser they can’t realistically support while their search is still subpar. Illusions of grandeur.
Subpar Search?
Yeah, wtf is he/she talking about there :)
Iirc the browser is older than their search engine. If anything that is their og product
What about Apple’s WebKit? Does it count?
You mean KHMTL, born in KDE’s Konqueror. That spawned WebKit (Safari), that spawned Blink (Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc). The whole thing then finally came full-circle when Konqueror dropped KHTML due to lack of development, now you have the choice between WebKit and Blink (via Qt WebEngine).
Then there’s Gecko (Firefox) and Servo which had a near-death experience after Mozilla integrated half of it into Gecko but by now development is alive and kicking again. Oh and then there’s lynx, using libwww, tracing its lineage back straight to Tim Berners Lee.
No, they don’t mean KHTML. KHTML is an ancestor of WebKit and Blink, but WebKit forked from it over 2 decades ago. They meant WebKit.
They also didn’t mean lynx and yet I mentioned it. How come? Might the distinct possibility exist that I used the opportunity to draw a wider picture, and “you mean X” has to be understood as internet brain-rot rhetorics, not literally?
Just a suggestion.
Nope, it doesn’t count. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I’m sure they’ve diverged enough for it to be pretty significant compared to the Chromium browsers
They’ve been separate for over a decade, and even before that they were heavily customizing it. They’re cousins, but absolutely not close enough at this point to be considered the same.
So it wasn’t, like, forked hard enough that now after the years it counts as a different browser? Expect it to render pages ‘n’ stuff pretty much like Chrome?
I admit, I haven’t really looked into it. It’s possible Apple implemented new HTML/CSS/JS standards independently, but it’s also possible that Apple continued to backport Google’s changes. Unless they had a business goal of being independent (or NIH syndrome) I would guess that they’d do mostly the latter, but you’d have to go read the code to know for sure.
They are definitely still more related to each other than either is to Gecko (which is to say, not related at all), though.
haha Safari would like a word.
What word? I spoke the truth: there are only two rendering engines. The only reason Safari/WebKit isn’t considered a fork of Chrome/Blink is that Chrome/Blink is a fork of Safari/WebKit instead.
I deleted my original comment before you replied because I am not really in the mood to defend this but the OP was talking about the pain of developing for different browsers and I don’t care what is a fork of what, this is a fact: Chrome, Firefox and Safari all render differently and have to be catered to individually.
Also, Safari, between desktop and mobile, has 30% of the market to Firefox’s 8%.
It’s about browser architecture and not silly names (“Safari”, “Firefox”, “Chrome”). The point is that there are only two actual variants.
Not when you have to make a web app render identically in them, which is what the OP was about.
No, you still have three rendering engines. WebKit and Blink are different. Since the second is an (old) fork of the other one, they are similar but far from being the same. They are pages that work in one but not the other, even if you change the user agent.
That’s…not true at all.
And safari, although it’s a cousin/uncle to Chrome at this point.
Not that I use it, but still.
The silver lining here is that you’d hope that more people will simply adopt Firefox. It’s user share has been too low for too long given how great it is
They messed up 10 years ago when for some reason it took ages for Firefox to load compared to Chrome, and sadly it never really recovered the user base even though the performance is vastly improved.
To be fair, even in 2006 the Mozilla corporation was never going to outspend Firefox
Especially not given how much Mozilla wastes on executive compensation ;)
I think you’re ignoring the functional aspect of the integration of Chrome into the Android platform. A lot of people’s entire online life is stored within the walls of the Chrome ecosystem. And moving all of that to a completely different browser that is not fully integrated with Android is daunting to say the least.
What’s the new chrome integration?
Didn’t say new, I’m assuming they refer to the WebView that many apps use which is chromium based. However if you have a calyx- or graphene- compatible phone the WebView will be non-g chromium.
Their user share was pretty okay for a while, but bombed when Chrome first released because it was much more performant. Unfortunately, that stigma never quite fell off and they lost a huge opportunity to overtake the market.
How was it more performant? As I remember it, Chrome was loading websites not noticeably faster than Firefox, as website loading speed depended and still depends mainly on your internet connection anyway.
As I remember it, Chrome exploded because it was pushed onto users at every possible opportunity while Firefox depended (and still depends) on users actively looking for it.
Used Google or Google products? Get ads for Chrome. Wanted to download Google Earth? You had to activly uncheck a box such Chrome wasn’t going to be installed as well. Meanwhile no ads and not the same amount of exposure for Firefox.
That way they achieved a critical mass and snowballing did the rest. There so many users using it that it was considered a good choice just because it was used by many people.
Regarding the performance aspect, if there even was a noticeable difference, it was worse than Firefox. Where else did the “Chrome eating RAM” memes come from?
I was a Firefox user at the time, using adblockers, and the swap was a huge improvement to my browsing experience. I can’t even remember all the ways, since this was a decade ago. But at the time, Firefox was in a lul.
Things likely swapped pretty fast, but I wasn’t aware of it at the time because I was already using Chrome.
No ads swayed me, no Google specific sites, it wasn’t side loaded with anything.
The Chrome eating ram memes came much later, after the enshitification process reached the third step. You seem to be compressing the entirety of both browsers into a single moment, and that’s not really how time works.
I understand that you made such an experience, but I can’t share it though. I’ve been a Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox exists, which is almost two decades. (I think I joined somewhere between 2005-2007). I’ve tried other browsers, sometimes I had to. However, I didn’t notice any benefits compared to Firefox. Especially not in performance. Even though benchmarks have always shown clear differences, they weren’t significant enough for me to consider switching, as the difference really didn’t impact my browsing experience.
Regarding the memes: That was just a random annectode which I found suitable here. I don’t claim it has been that way since the beginning. (Can’t relate to that anyway.) But given that it has been around for a while, I don’t see how performance can be an argument in favour of Chrome in this.
I think you are misremembering. Chrome won at the start because it was fast as fuck and Firefox was not. Firefox caught back up in the 2016 time frame iirc and they’ve been back and forth ever since.
Ironically chrome was named so as a goal was to reduce the chrome of the UI and focus on the web content, something recent versions of chrome and Firefox have abandoned in favor of massive swaths of whitespace and giant chrome buttons (on Firefox you can enable “unsupported” compact mode to reclaim some of the space if you’re on a laptop)
I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has existed. So I’m probably a bit biased. However, when I used other browsers, and if it wes just to try them out, I didn’t notice any benefits in terms of loading websites and executing their scripts. This includes Chrome. In benchmarks there are obviously differences visible, but to me as a user they didn’t matter. I wasn’t so short on time that I needed those microseconds. So I really don’t get how performance could be an argument in this.
agreed. chrome was bare ones and super fast when it was released. over the last two years it’s a fucking monster memory hog
I just remember Firefox around that time and for like over a decade just felt bloated and super slow in comparison. No idea if it’s better these days or what.
Its much better, and indistinguishable from a usage standpoint against chrome (I use Google garbage at work and they deliberately hamstring it in Firefox, so I use both browsers side by side)
Biggest Firefox win is containers and privacy. Chrome probably has better absolute security (based purely on the concept that non-private security is Google’s whole schtick, not based on data) and in the last year it’s gotten better memory management (via sleeping tabs) that Firefox just hasn’t caught up with…but there’s an addon for that ;)
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I remember it as, Firefox was fast enough, but Chrome was shipping a weirdly quick JS engine and trying to convince people to put more stuff into JS because on Chrome that would be feasible. Nowdays if you go out without your turbo-JIT hand-optimized JS engine everyone laughs at you and it’s Chrome’s fault.
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For work, I use Chrome, but only because Firefox’s profile management is (more or less) nonexistent. Once they have that, which I understand isn’t too far out, I’m ditching Chrome entirely.
Have you thought about installing a Firefox fork? On my Work PC I use Firefox for work and Floorp for personal browsing.
What’s this, you say? Floorp? Sounds like you’re setting me up for a Futurama joke, or something.
I’ll see what’s up, as long as it doesn’t require admin rights.
Fortunately I at least have Firefox on Linux. But then when I need to use Windows for something… well look at that, also Firefox!
won’t stop pihole
It’s still DNS level only, right? That wouldn’t stop YouTube ads, or remove annoyances.
Love my PiHole but you’re hella correct
You can block ads from being served to you.
But the flip side is that the website developer can make a website that won’t function if it can’t load the ads being served.
And most users are gonna want a functional website.
Somebody’s going to need to write a web site with a very, very compelling function to make me give enough of a shit to not just click away if it is deliberately coded to not work with Firefox/adblockers. Like, gives me a million dollars per page load functionality.
Man for real.
And they never will.
You sweet summer child.
How long do you think Chrome will let DoH be opt-in?
You sweet summer child
How are they going to get past my firewall rules?
Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Nerd fight! Show 'em your bionicles collection!
By using the same hostnames that you need for wanted content.
By refusing to load
Personally, I’d like to see them force in-browser DoH down my throat with my computer powered off. They’ll never see it coming.
It’s not up to Chrome.
The day they do their own DoH in-browser it is definitely up to them. It’s already opt-in if you want to see how well your pi-hole won’t work with it enabled.
Next step is to do DoH by default, and finally making it compulsory.
Chrome already does have DoH enabled by default from what I can tell.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10468685
By default, Secure DNS in Chrome is turned on in automatic mode. If Chrome has issues looking up a site in this mode, it’ll look up the site in the unencrypted mode.
They can do it all they want but it won’t work…
If I “opt in” it falls back to non doh immediately because using doh on my network is not up to Chrome.
use-application-dns.net + nxdomain for any known doh provider
I don’t use pihole but doh blocking works great on my network.
Switched to Firefox at work today. Looks like I still need Chrome to do the VPN handshake, but the more of us there are, the more pressure we have on IT!
If you still need Chrome, consider Ungoogled Chromium!
Is that project going to maintain Manifest V2 support?
I don’t have official information, but I doubt it. They tend to stick as closely to the Chromium experience as possible, with the exception of the ungoogled part, of course. Maintaining Manifest V2 support would also just be a massive amount of work, for which they likely don’t have the manpower.
I have no idea. I’d guess not, as it’s not a strong fork like other Chromium-based browsers. Its main selling point is that it’s nearly identical to Chrome, but with a lot of the Google garbage stripped out. I don’t use it as a daily driver, but only when I need something Chromium-based like the use case mentioned by @[email protected]. It’s very likely to work wherever Chrome does.
I’m still confounded by workplaces that run the old nineties way of VPN handshake by browser. Clunky, clumsy just straight up bad digital workplace setup.
There is no reason to not do it the modern way where all the handshaking and connecting is done under the hood, hidden from the user. At the most you as a user should only see the tiny little systray icon switch how it looks.
