I checked out brave a few times but every time stopped using it due to the bulky feeling of their interface and the forced remembered sites you visited that show as an icon when you open a new tab. I take as much offense at browsers showing me every single site I went to without an easy “turn off this feature “ toggle as I do with chrome forcing itself into my browsing experience. When will a browser come around that is light and does what it’s supposed to do - let you browse.
Why I’m done with Chrome
301–310 of 876 posts
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#302Firefox 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”?
> What happened to “do no evil”?
It was considered "stupid" so they dropped it:
https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/13/4326424/eric-schmidt-once...
I thought that even if "evil" can't be well-defined, its general meaning probably encouraged a culture that tried to focus on ethics. When your leader says that trying not to be evil is "stupid", it has a different effect on the culture.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I gave up on Firefox on OS X for performance reasons and switched to Safari a while ago and it’s a decent browser. It has support for extensions that I use (ublock origin and 1Password), uses less battery than any other browser, and is fast
The one major thing that keeps me from Safari is keyword searching. It's a major part of my browsing workflow and makes me so much more productive. Last I knew, you could assign hotkeys to bookmarks, but I don't think you could assign keywords and you couldn't use %s as a placeholder.
At first, I was confused, because I've been using this feature in Safari for years. But then I remembered that years ago I installed an extension called "Omnikey" that provides this: http://marioestrada.github.io/safari-omnikey/, https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=ec.mario.omn.... If this is the only thing holding you back from using Safari, install the extension and switch. It's been working so well for years that I forgot it wasn't built in.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ummm, leftism has a long history of invasive mass surveillance and questionable social engineering practices, so I don’t really see the contradiction here...
Well, most of the fighting against "invasive mass surveillance and questionable social engineering practices" has also been done by leftists, so there's that... Centrist average Joes usually don't care about such things, and right wingers applaud them to help the police and such. As for libertarians they are against them when it's by the government, but fine with them when a private company (even one the size of a sm…
True. There’s the hippie leftist archetype, and the commissar leftist archetype. It’s a spectrum, so they say!
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's culture breeds internal arrogance and blindness to outside concerns. Arguing with Google people about issues with their products is approximately as effective as arguing with a brick wall.
This may be true, but it's definitely not unique to Google. I know some well-meaning leftists who work for the leading Social Network and don't see any contradiction in that. I could imagine a high-flying company having entitled employees, I just don't see the qualitative difference between this or that company. Please enlighten me if I'm missing the point. And lest I sound arrogant myself: I once worked in Pharma an…
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
--- Upton Sinclair
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#306I log into my personal gmail and Facebook on Firefox and everything else on Chrome. I’ve been doing this for years now and I’m perfectly comfortable. For the most part I’ve forgotten about any differences between the two browsers.
If this is your strategy, you're going to also need to avoid google documents and signing into youtube.. and there's also the fact that at some point you need to ask yourself if Chrome is really great enough to warrant using multiple browsers when Firefox containers take care of everything privacy related for you.
Using Brave for a bit will give you some perspective on what sort of things (e.g. location) are being requested whenever you hit a Google-related page.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#307The solution is Safari
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#308My default is now Brave, great for privacy. I like the features in Vivaldi so sometimes use that too.
Firefox just grinds to a halt for me on my Mac.
I only use chrome on the very rare occasions I still need to do a little front end work.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly. I'll go further in saying a system or software should be considered insecure if it connects to Internet and wasn't designed/implemented with strong security. That's most stuff.
Re: Why I’m done with Chrome
#310I don't like to be "forced" to do anything, but I happen to like browsers that sync! This way I can save a file to my "reading list" or add a bookmark at work and I'll see it at home. Very handy.
I feel opposite of this. I want my bookmarks to be separated on desktop and laptop. Sometimes my wife will use my laptop and I’ve had occasions where I’d bookmark something as a surprise for her (a gift I wanted to purchase) or I’d research some activity- only to have her find out just because google decided it was okay to sync my stuff. If there is an option to disable that I’d like to know. Ah hell, the latest UI update to chrome makes me want to dump it entirely. Worst part, it didn’t even ask me if I wanted to update.