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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

#151

Post by SimeVidas »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #116
hgf888 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if it's open source - it's an issue of trust. Firefox has never secretly downloaded binary blobs in the background which listen to my microphone without my permission or knowledge.[1] Chromium lost all my trust that day, even if none of my private conversations/data made it to Google that particular time. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922

If anything, the whole Sponsored Tiles push ( https://twitter.com/dherman76/status/433320156496789504 https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish... ) and attempts to justify ads in the browser as "user-enhancing" made me very wary of Firefox. Moreso than Chromium.

Why? From what I’ve read, it was completely harmless. I smell FUD :-)

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

#152

Post by RubyPinch »

eloston wrote: post #58
Retr0spectrum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a tor URL. I assume it's simply a lazy way of stopping requests to google services by replacing the domains with invalid ones. Edit: see https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/8dd86477d...

Yes, it is a lazy way of stopping requests. I also modified Iridium's "trk" scheme code to pick up domains ending in qjz9zk so I can notify the user.

Could probably make use of the .invalid TLD for this. Should definitely result in less confusion, and it provides something a bit more searchable if people are concerned

    - doubleclick([A-Za-z\-]*)\.net#60u613cl1c4\1.qjz9zk
    + doubleclick([A-Za-z\-]*)\.net#doubleclick\1.g.invalid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.invalid

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

#153

Post by cpeterso »

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.

Microsoft Edge is also adopting a Chrome-compatible WebExtension API:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/21/microsoft_edge_exten...

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

#154

Post by Manishearth »

alphapapa wrote: post #77
callahad wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, usi…

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…

> There are plenty of 10-15 year-old bugs on Bugzilla

How does this make it hard to contribute to Firefox? It just means that there's no guarantee that your bug will get fixed immediately?

Which ... is true for basically any open source product out there. And many closed source ones too.

I mean, yeah, it's disheartening to see your bug not get fixed. And as someone who is contributing by filing bugs and triaging, that isn't any fun. But, again, this is pretty standard for many open source projects.

> they had the manpower to write the bad design in the first place

That's not how software works. Software evolves over time, and requirements themselves change, leading to bad architecture. The session save stuff used to be json based probably because folks didn't/couldn't have that many tabs open for it to matter, but it does now.

> On the recent discussion here about the Session Saver code, one Mozilla dev said that it needs rearchitecting, but that the issue is "manpower."

This, again, has nothing to do with contributing? If anything the dev offered to mentor someone who wanted to work on it. There's activity on that bug, too, which shouldn't discourage contribution.

Bugs don't exist in a vacuum. There are priorities. And there are people who know enough to tackle the bug, who may have different priorities; you can't just randomly assign someone to a bug.

If you listened to everyone who said "you should make X your highest priority", nothing would get done.

> rather than maintaining Firefox's useful, unique features.

Example of this? I suppose you're talking about extensions here (that's the only example I can think of). There's a reason behind the direction Firefox is taking with extensions; the old extension model sucked. There was no API there, addons just reached in and tinkered with Firefox code. This means that improving Firefox by rearchitecting things was hard, for example addons were a big pain point for the electrolysis project that made firefox multiprocess. You were complaining about bad design before, this is an incredibly bad design (may have made sense at the time, but doesn't now). Fixing this involves replacing it with an API. The best direction to go in here is probably to have a standardised base for the API, which is Web Extensions. Firefox isn't planning on sticking to Chrome's feature set; it intends to make the API handle many of the needs of existing extensions. So Firefox still intends to maintain this unique feature, just in a different way.

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

#155

Post by smsm42 »

byuu wrote: post #65
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. Than…

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

Yeah as voluntarily as those politicians resigning to spend more time with their families really resign to spend more time with their families. It's not fooling anybody else, and I have very hard time believing it's fooling you. He resigned because he was asked to resign. That's how top management firing is done.

> He could have stayed if he wanted to.

Physically - yes, I guess, until they call security and carry him out :) Seriously - no, when Powers That Be in your org ask you to resign, you resign.

> Because yes, I and many others care very much if the CEO of a product donates to strip a minority of equal rights.

So if somebody who thinks firing people because they have different political opinion than you is wrong, would arrange to get you fired from your job - you'd be completely ok with that, according to your beliefs? Or it's only your political enemies that have to lose their jobs for their politics, but never you?

> Mozilla did not cave to the protests,

Mozilla absolutely, totally and completely caved to the protests.

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

#156

Post by trollian »

callahad wrote: post #64
trollian wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, usi…

I worked on Mozilla related tech for about eight years, mostly niche open source browsers. I couldn't even get patches that fixed known bugs that lost Firefox user data accepted. Important decisions seemed to take place in closed meetings, on closed wikis, on private IRC networks. Eventually I gave up. The Mozilla culture was insular rather than open. The further I've been from MoCo the happier I've been.

It's been a few years now, perhaps things are better? I'm not interested in returning to that world to find out.

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

#157

Post by chongli »

gnarbarian wrote: post #147
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…

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?

No, because screening your employees is an action on your part. Mozilla took no action against Eich; he chose to resign himself. He could have elected to stay on, instead choosing to accept all of the consequences his views may or may not have for the company.

The equivalent situation in your case is having your views on welfare known and your employees (and anybody else transacting with your company) deciding whether or not they want to associate with you. Others' views on welfare would not be a valid reason to fire or refuse to hire them.

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

#158

Post by Zarel »

hgf888 wrote: post #35
sunnyps wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that it's not easy to contribute to Chromium? Also the "last truly open-source" browser is hyperbolic given that Chromium is both open-source and is also developed in the open[1][2][3]. If anything over the past few years it has become more open-source as many components have been upstreamed (e.g. pdfium, android/ios stuff, etc.) [1] Chromium bug tracker: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/lis…

It doesn't matter if it's open source - it's an issue of trust. Firefox has never secretly downloaded binary blobs in the background which listen to my microphone without my permission or knowledge.[1] Chromium lost all my trust that day, even if none of my private conversations/data made it to Google that particular time. [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922

The source you link to explicitly says that it does not listen to your microphone without your permission or knowledge:

> First and foremost, while we do download the hotword module on startup, we do not activate it unless you opt in to hotwording. If you go into "chrome://settings", you will see a checkbox "Enable "Ok Google" to start a voice search". This should be unchecked by default, and if you do not check it, the hotword module will not be started.

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

#159

Post by gnarbarian »

chongli wrote: post #157
gnarbarian wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, because screening your employees is an action on your part. Mozilla took no action against Eich; he chose to resign himself. He could have elected to stay on, instead choosing to accept all of the consequences his views may or may not have for the company. The equivalent situation in your case is having your views on welfare known and your employees (and anybody else transacting with your company) deciding whethe…

>Mozilla took no action against Eich; he chose to resign himself. He could have elected to stay on, instead choosing to accept all of the consequences his views may or may not have for the company.

That is a very convenient interpretation of how things went down. They forced him to resign.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=smsm42

said it best:

>... 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.

>The equivalent situation in your case is having your views on welfare known and your employees (and anybody else transacting with your company) deciding whether or not they want to associate with you. Others' views on welfare would not be a valid reason to fire or refuse to hire them.

It certainly would be a valid reason to not hire them if I had to fear them ousting me from my company for holding opinions unpalatable to them.

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

#160

Post by Manishearth »

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 intends to keep many of the powerful feature in its version of the extension API. The previous API was powerful because it let addons reach in to the guts of Firefox's UI and tweak whatever they wanted. This meant that some parts of the browser were frozen from being changed, and extensions broke every release. There was no public-private distinction. It seems like the plan is to add most of the capabilities that were used by the old addons in the new API, so most of the useful Firefox-only addons should still work.
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