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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#201

Post by mehrdadn »

EwanToo wrote: post #190
mehrdadn wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: How do I sign extensions I wrote for myself so I can actually use them, without uploading a copy of the extension somewhere? That's my roadblocker right now. I don't know how to migrate make my own extensions work on my own system without uploading them to other people's servers. (Yes, I want Firefox stable. I don't want to run a buggy browser.)

You can run either Firefox ESR or the unbranded builds [1] if you want unsigned extensions, but I'm curious what your concerns are with the unlisted extensions option from Mozilla? 1 - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Extension_Signing#Unbranded...

> You can run either Firefox ESR

Then I have the exact same problem when support dies in the coming months though.

> or the unbranded builds [1]

Interesting, so does this mean that if I want stable builds, I'd have to manually update to the exact unbranded counterpart of that stable version?

> I'm curious what your concerns are with the unlisted extensions option from Mozilla?

I guess because I really don't see what business they have forcing me to upload my extensions to their servers? Same reason why people don't like uploading Chrome stuff to Google servers?

~~~~~~~~~~~

Edit:

I'm trying out the unbranded builds and running into a problem when I try to use my existing profile: disabling signature checking doesn't work. However, it works on a fresh profile. Not sure what the problem is...

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#202

Post by Klonoar »

calcifer wrote: post #139
aphextron wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Firefox in theory, it's just that in practice I've never been able to stick with it. One thing or another always leaves me running back to Chrome. It's possible that it's just my own bias and familiarity, but I'm not principled enough to endure an inferior experience in any way. Plus working in chrome dev tools all day long, you really miss it when you want to pop something open and look under the hood real qu…

> Plus working in chrome dev tools all day long, you really miss it when you want to pop something open and look under the hood real quick, and I don't think Firefox is quite up to par there Based on what? What did you try to do and couldn't? Or is your complaint - like the rest of your comment says - that you weren't immediately familiar with the UI, you didn't bother learning, and then decided it was the browser's…

Protip: when you want to sell someone on something, a response of "you're doing it wrong, you're the problem" generally doesn't work.

It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's, which is frustrating because FF (really, FireBug, unless you count the weird IE stuff) pretty much _made_ the concept of browser tools great.

I'd love to use FF again too, but for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain. 's why I just use Safari.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#203

Post by rst »

SiVal wrote: post #150
stefano wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're looking for escape hatches, you know the software is working against you. At that point, it's better to move to an alternative browser, it's not worth it to fight it with hacks. If too many people use the escape hatch, they'll remove it.

It seems as though the needed escape hatch is a browser that simply CAN'T send info about you back to home base. Firefox might qualify, but I don't know for sure, and I don't want that to be our only option. There's a lot of great engineering that goes into Chrome. So I'm wondering: Is enough code open sourced to make it possible for an organization such as Apache, GNU, or whatever, to create a sanitized fork of each…

You might want to look into the Brave browser (https://brave.com), which is a commercial browser based on the Chromium code, funded by a micropayments idea, which tries to generally be more privacy-sensitive than the Google version.

As for a fully open-source version: here's a fairly recent summary (2017) of what's in Chrome and not in Chromium (the open-sourced subset):

https://www.howtogeek.com/202825/what%E2%80%99s-the-differen...

There are other omissions that could get in the way of general usability; chromium also omits some proprietary licensed codecs, including the mp3 support.

However, Google synch support, etc, is left in -- and if you desire to keep that out, maintaining the patch set that does it without cooperation from upstream could be a hassle. Whenever they refactor of update the integration between synch and the rest of the browser, you need to make corresponding changes in the patch set that cuts all that out -- and at a fairly rapid pace, too, lest you find yourself unable to ship an urgent security update.

So, it's doable -- but at a price in usability, and doing it right requires some kind of continual effort. Which is what Brave is, in effect, trying to arrange with their payments-based funding scheme. And even a very capable person trying to do the project solo, on a volunteer basis, would be putting themselves at risk of burnout.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#204

Post by kerng »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #173

Firefox here I come. Google’s update, to automatically take an action on my computer that I specifically don’t want, is an egregious misuse of technology. This is what Microsoft might have done in the early 2000’s for which they were rightfully vilified. What happened to “do no evil”?

Once in a position of power the true colors show.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#205

Post by driverdan »

skndr wrote: post #120

For those who've switched over to Firefox recently and find Youtube inexplicably slow, it's "because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome." [0] The YouTube Classic extension will speed things up: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class... [0] https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

YouTube works fine for me in Firefox on OS X with 6 year old hardware.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#206

Post by emayljames »

zmw wrote: post #171
kbenson wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox's web tools are slightly different, but very comparable. Firefox container tabs are game changing.

Container tabs just makes up for lack of easy profile switching (at least on macOS, not sure about Windows or Linux), which was in Chrome for years. Even after it came, I gave it a try and found it pretty cumbersome. (Before I get you-can-do-this-and-that replies, I know Profile Manager exists, and that's an ugly hack: macOS users should not need to run multiple copies of the same app bundle.)

Profile switching takes more steps to use than container tabs: 0.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#207

Post by seppel »

skndr wrote: post #120

For those who've switched over to Firefox recently and find Youtube inexplicably slow, it's "because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome." [0] The YouTube Classic extension will speed things up: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class... [0] https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185

Is that the same reason why reddit is so slow in Firefox?

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#208

Post by pdkl95 »

SiVal wrote: post #150
stefano wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're looking for escape hatches, you know the software is working against you. At that point, it's better to move to an alternative browser, it's not worth it to fight it with hacks. If too many people use the escape hatch, they'll remove it.

It seems as though the needed escape hatch is a browser that simply CAN'T send info about you back to home base. Firefox might qualify, but I don't know for sure, and I don't want that to be our only option. There's a lot of great engineering that goes into Chrome. So I'm wondering: Is enough code open sourced to make it possible for an organization such as Apache, GNU, or whatever, to create a sanitized fork of each…

> a browser that simply CAN'T send info about you back to home base

Unfortunatly that requires a large sacrifice: no Turing complete languages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15708099

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#209

Post by ori_b »

SiVal wrote: post #150
stefano wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're looking for escape hatches, you know the software is working against you. At that point, it's better to move to an alternative browser, it's not worth it to fight it with hacks. If too many people use the escape hatch, they'll remove it.

It seems as though the needed escape hatch is a browser that simply CAN'T send info about you back to home base. Firefox might qualify, but I don't know for sure, and I don't want that to be our only option. There's a lot of great engineering that goes into Chrome. So I'm wondering: Is enough code open sourced to make it possible for an organization such as Apache, GNU, or whatever, to create a sanitized fork of each…

If it's connected to the internet, then it can send info to home base. The only way around this is code that's simple enough to audit and understand.

That ship sailed long ago for browsers -- if you care about auditability, you can't trust the web.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#210

Post by [deleted] »

shawnz wrote: post #110
Twirrim wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't for _now_. Which is no small part of his point. The next step is to automatically turn on sync etc, which is an easier step now people will start to be used to the idea they're automatically signed in to stuff in Chrome. The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. There appears to be absolutely no benefit in turning this on.

> The main thrust though, is that this doesn't actually solve anything for end users that the Google Chrome team says it does. Yes it does, it solves the exact problem described right in the article. Before this change, there would be a seperate log-in process for Chrome versus every other google service (which normally all share your current login status). Now, your login status is shared between every google servic…

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