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UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

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Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#61

Post by Etzos »

hartator wrote: post #46

Firefox is not really a good company anymore, they care more about politics than doing something awesome. Cf. the firing of their CEO.

Two relatively minor nit picks about what you've said:

1. The company is Mozilla, not Firefox 2. They did not fire Eich, he stepped down amid the controversy and left to avoid any more conflict

Now, while I can understand not being happy that they (Mozilla) did not step out in defense of their choice of Eich, I think it's a tad duplicitous to say they fired him.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#62

Post by yuhong »

nathancahill wrote: post #27
foob wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly tangential, but on the topic of browser extensions: the Chrome extension API served as the basis for Mozilla's somewhat recent Web Extension API [0]. Many, if not most, Chrome extensions can run in Firefox out of the box right now (there's even a Firefox extension that lets you install these from the Chrome Store [1]). This has been an incredible development for anybody doing cross browser extension developm…

"Web Extension API" is exactly the issue at stake here. Chrome develops a new API for extensions. Everyone jumps on it. Firefox abandons it's powerful (although insecure) extension API, and re-writes it to follow Chrome's. There's a lot of marketing-speak around the reasons FF did that, but it really boils down to: Chrome is winning in the extension ecosystem, let's make them all compatible with FF too. At the loss o…

Another reason is Servo.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#63

Post by AckSyn »

FT_intern wrote: post #44
technion wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about "Internet Explorer", is that using IE Edge, I often run into websites that demand I "Upgrade" to Chrome and won't let me use them. Fudging the user agent however, allows that website to work perfectly fine. Not testing in IE is one thing. Presenting an nonintrusive message warning you don't test in IE is another. Paying money to advertise your website, then, when I click your link, greeting me with a…

To be fair, that notification is for the benefit of the everyone. Users are too lazy/ignorant to switch browsers. The notification pushes them over the edge and prompts them to switch. They get a more secure and overall better browser. On the other side, developers can spend more time developing features instead of fixing IE compatibility bugs.

It's really not. If developers would code to the standards with minimal tweaks there's absolutely no reason someone couldn't write a site without those spammy notifications to downgrade to chrome.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#64

Post by callahad »

trollian wrote: post #28
NeutronBoy wrote: post #4

While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).

Have you ever tried contributing to Firefox from outside Mozilla Corp? My experience was not positive.

Could you please tell me more about your experience?

The core Firefox / Gecko repos can be a bit conservative and slow to accept patches, but subprojects like Firefox Accounts / Sync, Devtools, Rust / Servo, browser.html, TestPilot, etc. tend have much lower friction while still affecting the direction of Firefox.

As an example, we recently replaced the JavaScript debugger with one written in HTML instead of XUL, using React, etc. All on GitHub and super accessible to outside contributions: https://github.com/devtools-html/debugger.html

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#65

Post by byuu »

hartator wrote: post #46

Firefox is not really a good company anymore, they care more about politics than doing something awesome. Cf. the firing of their CEO.

He was not fired. Straight from Mozilla themselves:

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

"On April 3, 2014 Brendan Eich voluntarily stepped down as CEO of Mozilla."

He could have stayed if he wanted to. Yes, it would have hurt their brand if he did, and yes it should have. Because yes, I and many others care very much if the CEO of a product donates to strip a minority of equal rights. Thanks to people like Eich, for seven years me and my husband had to lie and check "single" on all of our federal and state forms. For seven years we had to worry about being denied hospital visitation should one of us fall ill. We had to worry about how we'd handle inheritance should one of us pass. And on and on.

So yes, everyone is entitled to their own voice. Eich had a right to make that donation. And other people had a right to protest and boycott over it. Mozilla did not cave to the protests, so there was no free speech violation here.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#66

Post by eloston »

Hey guys, I'm the developer. I was really surprised to see the number of stars on GitHub suddenly skyrocket, and I think I found why. Thank you all for your interest in my project!

Feel free to make an issue (for questions, suggestions, or bug reports) or a pull request anytime. I might respond to a few more comments here before calling it a day.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#67

Post by callahad »

alexbecker wrote: post #52
nathancahill wrote: post #5

Great start. Although I think we need to reverse the trend of Chrome becoming the single browser web developers use. The amount of sites that unnecessarily[0] work only in Chrome is growing daily. And that's not even counting browser extensions. I think this, more than anything else, will determine if Chrome becomes the "Internet Explorer"[1] of this decade or not. Skipping testing in IE is one thing. Skipping testin…

I work on Firefox compatability for a major website, and while obviously I agree that we need to stop building websites that only work in Chrome, it isn't always as easy as you suggest. A large web app is almost guaranteed to run into one of Firefox's many long-open bugs. But the biggest reason in my experience is performance. Gecko's rendering engine is poorly-optimized, to the point where I regularly see a DOM modi…

If you can isolate that DOM performance bottleneck or point me to a live example, I'm happy to pare it down to a minimal test case and make sure it gets fixed.

(We have some enormous architectural changes inbound which should help, but I'd still love to make sure we have a test to prevent regressing)

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#68

Post by [deleted] »

yuhong wrote: post #62
nathancahill wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Web Extension API" is exactly the issue at stake here. Chrome develops a new API for extensions. Everyone jumps on it. Firefox abandons it's powerful (although insecure) extension API, and re-writes it to follow Chrome's. There's a lot of marketing-speak around the reasons FF did that, but it really boils down to: Chrome is winning in the extension ecosystem, let's make them all compatible with FF too. At the loss o…

Another reason is Servo.

[deleted]

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#69

Post by foob »

nathancahill wrote: post #27
foob wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly tangential, but on the topic of browser extensions: the Chrome extension API served as the basis for Mozilla's somewhat recent Web Extension API [0]. Many, if not most, Chrome extensions can run in Firefox out of the box right now (there's even a Firefox extension that lets you install these from the Chrome Store [1]). This has been an incredible development for anybody doing cross browser extension developm…

"Web Extension API" is exactly the issue at stake here. Chrome develops a new API for extensions. Everyone jumps on it. Firefox abandons it's powerful (although insecure) extension API, and re-writes it to follow Chrome's. There's a lot of marketing-speak around the reasons FF did that, but it really boils down to: Chrome is winning in the extension ecosystem, let's make them all compatible with FF too. At the loss o…

Firefox's extension system was powerful but there was next to no chance that XUL based UI was ever going to be adopted in the other major browsers. I'm sure that tapping in to the Chrome extension ecosystem was a big factor in the decision but I would argue that the Chrome extension API was also a far better suited candidate for cross browser standardization.

Re: UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency

#70

Post by armitron »

NeutronBoy wrote: post #4

While I applaud the effort that's gone into this, I urge people to consider (and use and contribute to!) Firefox. It's one of the last truly open-source browsers - both in terms of source code visibility (which Chrome(ium) has), and in terms of being able to contribute (which Chrome(ium) has not).

Unfortunately for everyone that cares about security, using Firefox (or Safari or old IE) is a colossal mistake since it's orders of magnitude easier to exploit (with almost no serious anti-exploitation mitigations) than Chrome.

Spidermonkey in particular (Firefox's Javascript engine) is laughably bad when it comes to vulnerabilities. This is also the reason why the Servo browser that some folks think will be a lot more secure (due to Rust) is mostly smoke & mirrors. They're planning to keep using Spidermonkey there too!

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