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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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

I think it's only fair to tell people when they've been downvoted.

I downvoted you because that smug sarcastic smiley really set my teeth on edge.

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

#202
This is awesome.

One of my biggest gripes with Chrome is the inability to stop a rogue site from playing audio (on top of the music I'm listening to in another tab). CNN is one of the worst, as soon as I find the freaking video on the page and try to pause/mute it, the video controls slide away. Why can't Chrome allow me to just turn off audio on that tab? I have assumed Google doesn't give us that because it will interfere with their advertising or something.

(maybe there is an extension that will help? I haven't found one)

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

#203
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not extreme at all. All you have to do is install a distro with a good packaging system. Arch is wonderful, and I've heard good things about Void and Gentoo. Depends what you classify as criteria for a "good packaging system". Arch didn't even sign their packages until a few years ago, and the build system for their packages is not very good IMO. What makes Arch great is the fact that they have a large library…

Right. I'm not advocating for one particular distro. I'm just advocating that people stop using distros with bad package management. Thanks for the list of other stuff to check out, by the way.

FWIW, I do agree that snappy is the wrong solution to the problem. The correct solution is backing proper package managers. So I think we're in agreement. :P

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The single largest issue is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1159042, but as another comment mentioned, there are many different cases that trigger performance bottlenecks.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally I prefer Firefox on my Android, because it has plugins, like HTTPS Everywhere and uBlock Origin, without which a mobile browser is IMHO unusable.

I also like the quick sharing actions, remembering the last 3 apps used for sharing. And the local search in your history it does, avoiding roundtrips to the search engine. Although to be fair this functionality appears to work better on the desktop.

> the integration with lastpass is weird

On Android the defacto standard for password managers is to use custom keyboards. Ironically, the custom keyboard I found most usable for this purpose has been Keepass2Android [1], precisely because if it loses focus it still remembers the last account selected and I've tried both Lastpass and 1Password. Along with KeeWeb on my desktop, it's way better than Lastpass imho and free.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=keepass2androi...

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which people? Reich and the guy from oculus who supported the trump group. > Riddle me this What is a "cake for a gay wedding" compared to any other kind of wedding cake? Is there same-sex marzipan I'm not aware of? A baker refusing to bake a cake for someone because they're gay/Jewish is discrimination, and bigotry/racism (religious discrimination if you consider Judaism purely a religion and not an ethnicity/race…

>Also, you're in the wrong direction anyway. A business refusing service isn't the same as a consumer refusing to use a business. I'm trying to establish an objective rule for what kinds of discrimination you believe should be legal. You described each situation but you didn't actually make a value judgement (which was the whole point of the question).

Being gay/black/female/disabled/etc isn't a choice, therefore I don't believe businesses should be able to discriminate on that basis. Being a neo-nazi, a racist, a nudist, a hippy, a Michael Jackson fan, etc are choices, therefore it doesn't make sense for the government to make laws protecting such groups imo.

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

#207

This is awesome. One of my biggest gripes with Chrome is the inability to stop a rogue site from playing audio (on top of the music I'm listening to in another tab). CNN is one of the worst, as soon as I find the freaking video on the page and try to pause/mute it, the video controls slide away. Why can't Chrome allow me to just turn off audio on that tab? I have assumed Google doesn't give us that because it will in…

> Why can't Chrome allow me to just turn off audio on that tab

Well this feature is built into Chrome. Just right click the rogue tab and click "Mute Tab"

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

#208
Removing Google's binary blobs is mitigating one issue, but replacing it with an entire binary blog from an anonymous github user might be introducing new ones.

On that note - can you tell us more about the project? ie. if you plan on keeping this updated long terms (i've watched a lot of promising chromium forks fade after an initial big splash), what your plans are, if you'll you accept contributions, how the binary distributions are built so we can verify the checksums, if you can tag the Chromium releases from Google so they can be verified, etc.

I've had the idea of a chromium fork with privacy enhancements in the back of my mind for a while now (turns out a lot of people have) specifically to replace Tor Browser and/or have a lighter browser (without canvas, webgl, webrtc etc.) with better defaults (ie. no hardware access, location, notifications, cookies, history, etc.) for opening links, private browsing etc[1].

This may be a good base to work on - assuming you want to go beyond just "de-googlify"

[1] I think there is a real need for an alternate browser that is lightweight[2] and has stricter privacy and security controls - with proper user segregation (ie. you really don't want to open random links from social media in the same browser session as where you're logging into your primary accounts).

[2] ie. do to Chrome/Firefox what Firefox originally did to Netscape - and Chrome would be the better foundation to work on

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

#209
post #191
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Maybe not direct instance. But if I were at Mozilla, I would have resigned because of him. I mean, Eich was giving money to people campaigning for removing civil rights from people based on their sexual orientation. That's not a small thing - if it was race instead of sexuality…

So you think that if the programer has the wrong political views, his loops and arrays stink?

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a security perspective wouldn't you be better served by having an up to date OS?

If I could reliably run a newer OS on an 8-year-old iMac, I would. But since I can't—and because the only thing I use the machine for is web browsing—the relevant question is which browser will be the safest.

Thanks for not throwing working hardware away. I imagine you would not be happy with Linux on your iMac?
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