UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by resonanttoe » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:14 AM UTC

zenincognito wrote: post #6

On Linux Mint I get Error:Dependency is not satisfiable:libavcodec-ffmpeg56(>=7.2.4)|libavcodec-ffmped-extra56(>=7:2.4) Suggestion - The repo does not provide install instructions. For a highly not tech privacy enthusiast, I find it difficult to install for linux.

For what its worth, Linux Mint is generally considered a Frakendebian and pretty bad. I used to use it until I did a bit of reading in to debian distros and Mint's practices. It made me sad.

https://lwn.net/Articles/676664/ https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

The nice compromise that I've found is Ubuntu Mate, which seems to do away with Ubuntu's Bloat and Unity crapness, but still maintaining a Debian distro that operates properly (everything comes upstream from Ubuntu repo's)

Just something to consider. People might have some other opinions on Mint which would be good to hear too.

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

#142

Post by hlandau » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:26 AM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #32

superkuh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for Mozilla's policy of trying to making Firefox race Chrome to be the best browser for the lowest common denominator. You can't even edit your addons in Firefox anymore. They have to be signed by Mozilla. > And using an unmaintained addon is dangerous. And this is the kind of thinking I'm talking about. Firefore/Chrome/etc are all about protecting tech ignorants from themselves rather than allowing adept user…

> And this is the kind of thinking I'm talking about. The kind of thinking that says "security-sensitive software with no active maintenance and regular updates is a security hole waiting to happen"? Letting users install and run unmaintained software is dangerous. They'll get exploited. (And they'll blame the browser for that, and rightfully so.) You can still do what you want; it's entirely possible to install loca…

>Letting users install and run unmaintained software is dangerous.

Which is... exactly what Windows and Linux still do, rightly.

>And they'll blame the browser for that, and rightfully so.

Not at all rightfully so. Moreover the supposed security gain from this is absurd. So a user can't accidentally install a malicious extension... but they can install malicious software. Which, being that it has full access to the system, could patch Firefox if it liked to disable the signing check.

I won't use a browser which implements restrictive code signing practices.

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

#143

Post by hlandau » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:32 AM UTC

shabbyrobe wrote: post #132

ams6110 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Firefox on Android, with uBlock Origin plugin. It's not perfect. There are deviations from the usual "Material Design" UI standards. Some sites don't render properly. It's slower. But it's worth it to me.

A user agent switcher helps too. Google intentionally hobble their own websites (can't access search tools, for example) if you use Firefox, but changing the user agent made things work well for me. YMMV of course, but I used the "Android Phone" setting in the "Phony" extension for years and had far fewer problems than I had using a Firefox user agent.

>Google intentionally hobble their own websites (can't access search tools, for example) if you use Firefox

Do you have more information on this?

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

#144

Post by gnarbarian » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:35 AM UTC

tnone wrote: post #138

Frondo wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eich resigned because his political views made it difficult for him to continue doing his job. He wasn't imprisoned, nothing was done to him with the force of law. He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views. I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those…

Funny how at the same time, those spouting this tired refrain scream bloody murder when this logic is applied to themselves rather than the usual punching bags. "Never" is a strawman, but I imagine that would be a world where academia doesn't feel a need to protect its students from ideas, and where people of different viewpoints can work alongside each other instead of shaming groupthink into existence.

Because according to @the_moviebob "there is (almost) no such thing as a bad tactic - only bad TARGETS".

AKA the ends justify the means.

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

#145

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:35 AM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #128

gnarbarian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fired a founder for retroactive wrongthink (post ex facto). That's pretty disturbing. Hard to trust someone like that. Meanwhile, Google doesn't return results for guns in the shopping section. So I get to search a bunch of sites and call people like i'm on astalavista in 1998. Sad Truth: both companies inject a brand of exclusionary (read: discriminatory) politics into their products. I don't trust either.

Eich resigned because his political views made it difficult for him to continue doing his job. He wasn't imprisoned, nothing was done to him with the force of law. He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views. I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those…

So you want a view where everyone with a controversial view to loose their job? And who decides what a controversial view is, or if it is or is not controversial enough to lose their job?

In the end, I don't think one's views outside of the workplace should necessarily relate to their work performance. Eich was close to a public figure, that doesn't make the witch-hunt any better.

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

#146

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:48 AM UTC

bobajeff wrote: post #113

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).

I use Firefox on my phone. I am more comfortable with it for privacy reasons. It's a pretty nice browser outside of that. However I'm using a pretty beefy phone whereas when I used my Moto G it wasn't quite the best browser in terms of resources however a lot has changed since then. (Like Chrome no longer having tabs integrated into the task manager. That feature was great for devices with not too much RAM and horrib…

I loved the integrated tabs.. having to drag down (oops, not fast enough, try again) then a click and a swipe to close the tap instead of click/swipe alone... also it's just nasty after getting used to it... it's why I wish VS Code would go back to the pre-tab behavior, it was just so much better once you got used to it.

I find that firefox is a little funky on Android though... the integration with lastpass is weird, have to copy/paste, at least site identification works now, there have been a few other oddities too... I notice a lot of sites improperly detect a lack of video support, or it may just be format that's the problem.

I tend to like/use chrome and prefer it... but I do think there's been some weird behavior in/from google... just finding out about chrome apps being killed off irks me to no end, considering it's the first actually decent write once run everywhere option. I'm guessing the recent hangouts change was because of this, as they'll likely move to electron on the desktop.

I'm glad Firefox is still an option though... I also appreciate what they've done to further the platform... Though I do chuckle a bit of how much easier web components, and even react might have come in if e4x had been implemented in other browsers.

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

#147

Post by gnarbarian » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:49 AM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #128

gnarbarian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fired a founder for retroactive wrongthink (post ex facto). That's pretty disturbing. Hard to trust someone like that. Meanwhile, Google doesn't return results for guns in the shopping section. So I get to search a bunch of sites and call people like i'm on astalavista in 1998. Sad Truth: both companies inject a brand of exclusionary (read: discriminatory) politics into their products. I don't trust either.

Eich resigned because his political views made it difficult for him to continue doing his job. He wasn't imprisoned, nothing was done to him with the force of law. He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views. I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those…

Thought experiment: I think excessive welfare does more harm than good. Should I politically screen my employees to ensure that they don't hold views that contradict mine?

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

#148

Post by RubyPinch » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:53 AM UTC

ashark wrote: post #131

alphapapa wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, just look at the recent "3rd Generation bug" story here on HN, a bug which was originally reported by a man who is deceased, and is now affecting his grandchildren. There are plenty of 10-15 year-old bugs on Bugzilla. And we all know how Mozilla is fond of pulling the "advocacy" card and locking bug reports. "To the forums with you!" they say--where discussions can be ignored and deleted even more easily. On…

People who loved Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox lost their browser when 2.0 came out. I still trusted the project then, but in hindsight it's clear that was the turning point. They got too feature-hungry and changed too much at once, adding tons of bloat in the process. There's no well-supported multi-platform lightweight open-source browser now. Just doesn't exist. I'm hoping Servo's allowed to fill that niche at least fo…

qutebrowser? its mainly hotkey centric (vim-ish specifically) but its pretty nice

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

#149

Post by duskwuff » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:53 AM UTC

foob wrote: post #69

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…

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.

Firefox's extension system was arguably too powerful. Back when I ran Firefox, I regularly ran into extensions that conflicted because they monkeypatched the same parts of the browser UI.

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

#150

Post by smsm42 » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 4:58 AM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #128

gnarbarian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fired a founder for retroactive wrongthink (post ex facto). That's pretty disturbing. Hard to trust someone like that. Meanwhile, Google doesn't return results for guns in the shopping section. So I get to search a bunch of sites and call people like i'm on astalavista in 1998. Sad Truth: both companies inject a brand of exclusionary (read: discriminatory) politics into their products. I don't trust either.

Eich resigned because his political views made it difficult for him to continue doing his job. He wasn't imprisoned, nothing was done to him with the force of law. He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views. I struggle to see how the world could be arranged such that we could all hold forth with controversial views, but such that there was never a consequence to holding those…

> Eich resigned because his political views made it difficult for him to continue doing his job.

This is a very disingenuous way of describing it. More proper way to describe it would be that a group of political activists put pressure on Mozilla to fire Eich because of his political views, for political reasons, and Mozilla as organization caved. There was no instance of Eich's views ever influencing anything on his job, and no single instance or evidence of any problem with his job. It was a political decision that being friends with political activists is better than keeping Eich.

For me, that ruins the trust in the organization. If they are ready to sacrifice their own top management, would they really stand up for me as a user if that would cost them anything? I don't think so.

> He just had/has unpopular views and accepted the consequences of holding those views.

And now Mozilla has to accept consequences of being the organization which will fire you because you hold unpopular political views. As a person who holds plenty of unpopular views (different from Eich's but still largely unpopular) I want to do as little as possible with such organization.