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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

#251

Post by craigsmansion »

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).

Chromium is Free Software as well.

Mozilla is not a club of like-minded hackers that try to keep the web livable anymore. They're a large company now with corporate salaries and expensive furniture and a prime real estate office that values advertisers over users. Firefox is their money maker.

Chromium is a Free Software version derived from a proprietary browser. The people who made that happen must have had an idealistic motivation, or otherwise it wouldn't exist.

Both browsers are libre license-wise, which is a good thing, but in my opinion Chromium is less likely to be used as a marketing stick against users, since the marketing stick version of Chromium already exist. As such using the Chromium browser is preferable for me, since the intentions behind it are likely to be more in line with a free Internet in spite of its proprietary origin.

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

#252

Post by andybak »

gnarbarian wrote: post #200
glogla wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

My problem is that the law isn't enforced evenly. Either you are allowed to discriminate based on race/creed/sexuality/politics or you aren't. As it stands, the BBC can discriminate like this: >A range of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television departments, programmes, and radio stations are currently offering highly desirable, paid internships, but white people are prohibited from applying. http://www.expr…

Positive discrimination has been endlessly debated but to wheel it out here without even bothering to acknowledge the nuances of the debate is a touch lazy and intellectually ham-fisted, surely?

And to use the Daily Express to support any your point is going to reflect fairly poorly on your stance for anyone that is aware of it's reputation.

Also - are we talking about the US or the UK here? Mixing the two situations together in a single discussion is going to make a murky issue even murkier.

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

#253

Post by piedradura »

I can't download the posts of forums like comp.lang.lisp, and I can't disable javascript in firefox with one click, so forget about any applaud from me. The browser I would like is nothing like this and I want a javascript free browsing experience in which content is important and display not so much, sorry css fans. Today web is about selling things and propagating noise and today browsers are a perfect tool to propagate more noise, linkbaits are the norm. The pityful technical enhacements of noise propagators is not what I am interested about. To be somewhat positive, anything Ungoogled sound to be a good thing, I am expecting the next interesting post to be about a very small company building the new web with a small browser whose code you can trust and check.

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

#254

Post by Spakman »

enobrev wrote: post #106
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.

I recently switched to Firefox on Android as well, specifically for uBlock Origin support, which has significantly improved browsing overall. Only issue I have is that default apps won't open for links. Otherwise I've been very happy with it.

As I have only just learned higher up on this page, FF has an Android button in the URL bar to switch from, for example, a Youtube page to the Youtube native application. I was missing this too!

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

#255

Post by Spakman »

vog wrote: post #220

My only issue is that GotoMeeting doesn't work with Chromium, only with Chrome. Otherwise I would already have removed Chrome a long time ago.

The GoToMeeting web client works in Chromium on Arch for me. Perhaps it's worth another go?

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

#256

Post by andybak »

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

> which listen to my microphone without my permission

This part is inaccurate. See: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=500922...

> You don't have to take my word for it. Starting and stopping the hotword module is controlled by some open source code in Chromium itself [3], so while you cannot see the code inside the module, you can trust that it is not actually going to run unless you opt in.

Also:

> I hope this explanation is satisfactory. I am closing this as WontFix because it is already an opt-in feature, and Debian has already removed the component in their distribution of Chromium [2].

I've read the comments on that bug thread and I really struggle to see anything sinister that doesn't require several visits to the tinfoil haberdashery. There are problems around governance, communication and lack of respect for the priorities of the OSS community - but to see this as a failed attempt to listen to the conversations of Chromium users without their consent strikes me as verging on conspiracy thinking.

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

#257

Post by csallen »

jamespo wrote: post #247
gnarbarian wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>being a neo-nazi, a racist, a nudist, a hippy, a Michael Jackson fan, etc are choices, I'm not so sure. Maybe they were brought up that way. You can't choose your parents or your religion in that respect. Muslims have a choice to be Muslim or not, should it be OK to discriminate against them too?

This is an attempt to reframe the argument and is relevant to Eich how? Was he brought up in an anti-gay cult? He's an adult, stop trying to claim he has no responsibility.

I sincerely think we just started getting philosophical and forgot we were talking about Eich.

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

#258

Post by halflings »

Frondo wrote: post #198
sangnoir wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know how many gay folks work for Mozilla...They might have had a real problem with his donating to Prop 8 Does that mean CEOs/management should be forced to resign for donating to the Trump campaign if some of their employees are Mexican immigrants or Muslim?

I'm not sure why you're talking about "be forced to resign". Eich resigned voluntarily, according to Eich and the Mozilla board (i.e. every involved party). No one forced him.

Which type of founder would voluntarily resign from the CEO position at his own company? (esp. a project like Mozilla) Eich resigned under huge pressure after the media broke the story and ran with it for days.

I started an internship at Mozilla right when Eich got fired, and the vast majority of people I talked had the same reaction: "Yeah, his donation isn't bad in itself, but the way he dealt with this polemic shows he's a bad as a CEO" (which does not convince me at all... since, you know, nobody is ready to deal with that type of pressure from the media, unless you're a politician with a PR team).

Bottom-line: As a CTO, he had a lot of engineers reporting to him, many of which were LGBTQ, and Mozilla is known for being one of the most pro-LGBTQ companies out there. He would have most likely been a great CEO to Mozilla, and a donation done personally cannot possibly be a valid reason for asking him to resign (the media, a tiny minority of people at Mozilla).

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

#260

Post by grrowl »

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.

Seeing the suggested plugins pushed onto you on a special first page of "Add-ons" include Ad-Block Plus definitely made me worry about the death of the old, free, Firefox.
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