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Why I’m done with Chrome

blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#311

Post by roenxi »

coldtea wrote: post #296
aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #279

Earlier 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…

Realistically the left/right spectrum is orthogonal to the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. Classic liberalism is, I think, more aligned with the right but also profoundly anti-authoritarian. Similarly, the left has a proud tradition of supporting individual liberty but also a strong tradition of suppressing it in favour of collective power.

Corporations of all stripes tend towards authoritarianism though, in my view. It is a natural structure when you have agents using someone else's capital.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#312

Post by fpgaminer »

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

Oddly enough I haven't had too many issues with YouTube's slowness (as a Firefox user). I mean, it's slow, but "tolerable". It's the new Gmail that's horrifically slow now. It takes a good 20 seconds to get to the point where I can interact with it, and then each interaction takes another 10 seconds.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#314

Post by bmurphy1976 »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #34
hellofunk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could use it but it has serious performance problems on macOS. I tried and it was just terrible. (thought not all Mac users have problems, quite a number do, and Mozilla has an open issue asking for debugging logs from Macs to find the reasons).

Strange. I almost exclusively use OSX (El Cap) and haven't had performance issues asides from needing to restart the browser once a month or so. Hopefully they get those problems resolved soon, the browser is super quick when it's working right.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

It's pretty bad. Firefox cuts my battery life in half doing nothing.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#315

Post by allenz »

craftyguy wrote: post #299
CydeWeys wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A mistaken include in a build file, most likely. I've removed all sorts of dumb stuff slowing down the build that was included by accident or unnecessarily on my project at work. Never attribute to malice ...

> A mistaken include in a build file, most likely. Yea, "whoops we accidentally downloaded a surveillance device on your system!"... If that sort of negligence can happen, what else is the browser currently doing, or capable of doing in the future, "accidentally"?

It was an intentional download so that Chromium users could use "Ok Google".

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#316

Post by ourcat »

0xmohit wrote: post #90

Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with wh…

I always have my sound input/mic levels set to zero in settings. They can't bypass that.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#317

Post by StudentStuff »

rst wrote: post #203
SiVal wrote: post #150

Earlier 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…

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%…

Does one really want to associate themselves with Brendan Eich though? Brave is what he has been building after being ejected from Mozilla.

While Brendan has built some interesting and useful things including Javascript, he is apparently poisonous enough to cause three of Mozilla's board members to resign, including a founding executive of Yahoo, the former CEO of AVG, and the former CEO of Mozilla Corp (from 2008 to 2010).

His wiki page is a good reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#318

Post by curiousDog »

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

This is like Microsoft and IE all over again.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#319

Post by kadfak »

cryptozeus wrote: post #257

Anyone using brave as alternative browser? I have been using it as 2nd browser for few weeks now and really digging it

I switched to Brave on iOS after the Chrome redesign that ruined the UX for me. Pretty happy with it so far. It has some pretty neat features as well -- a visible tab strip that you can swipe and select/close tabs, for example.

Re: Why I’m done with Chrome

#320

Post by smcnally »

atombender wrote: post #247
brian-armstrong wrote: post #10

Firefox is a truly fantastic browser now. I've been using it again for about 2 years and haven't regretted it at all. There have been a couple of weird feature hiccups but generally Mozilla seems to get things right.

I wish Firefox was as sleek, fast and no-nonsense as Safari on the Mac, which is my everyday browser. I vastly prefer the idea of an open browser that is not tightly coupled to a particular industry giant. And I wish Firefox actually had a viable Safari competitor on iOS, so that I can sync my state around. Unfortunately, while Firefox has made significant leaps the last couple of years, it's still not a viable alter…

> Container tabs are a similarly interesting idea with a weird implementation that requires you to micromanage your tabs, which I certainly don't want to, and provides a "techie" solution to something that should just be invisible and default (i.e. all web sites should be "contained").

All websites contained would be an interesting default. With ways to “re-open current tab in container [X]” and “merge current tab with container [Y],” it would involve less micromanaging. That’s still not invisible, the container process and UX warrants plenty of thought.

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