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Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

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Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#591

Post by jklinger410 »

MikeRichardson wrote: post #488
xvector wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are fine. I've discovered so many fantastic products through them (did my research before buying, of course.) And they are also the only business model we have been able to think of that enables the free flow of information on the scale we see today. Unless governments step up to foot the bill for Maps, YouTube, Reddit, etc, ads are all we've got. I've never seen an ad that "stole" my time and attention. They are…

Oh, ok. So next time I get one of those full page ads that darkens the entire page - I should just concentrate really hard at reading the barely visible content. Maybe it will go away if I scroll really really fast.

This is the fault of the web developer and designers, not advertisers. Let's be clear on who to blame.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#592

Post by H4ZB7 »

why is this absolutely oblivious, joke of an article voted so high? web browsers are bloated and insecure, and there is practically no difference between them. tor browser tries (keyword) to reduce fingerprintability to make tor actually work as intended, beyond that there is no difference between firefox. icecat, palemoon, and all those forks are just firefox with 0.01% of the bloat removed. any "privacy" or "security" plugin just increases your attack surface and makes your fingerprint more unique (and 99% of websites collect this fingerprint and use it).

browsers are bloated and unfixable. consuming "privacy" and "security" products does not fix this.

> Mullvad Browser: Best Built-in VPN Support

this text is literally written by a bot

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#593

Post by godshatter »

maccard wrote: post #528
pitdicker wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of talk about Firefox having poor performance, but I have never experienced any of it. For daily use Firefox has always been one of the more responsive applications on my PC. If you experienced poor performance the common explanation at the time was that you either had a profile folder that had accumulated all sorts of stuff that somehow caused a slowdown, or had some unfortunate extensions installed.

I've used Firefox consistently since about 2006, and it is true. We use gmail and meet in work - both are snappier and break less in chrome than in Firefox. I probably spend 30% of my browser time on those two sites in work.

The fact that Google's gmail and Google Meet break more in Firefox than in Google's Chrome leads me to wonder what they are doing to make Firefox work as badly as it does.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#596

Post by igrunert »

dubcanada wrote: post #458
Dah00n wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these Chromium based browsers is that this is helping strangle the only real alternative to Chrome. You might not sell your soul to Google, but you still help Google keep their stranglehold on web standards, etc. Of course, a single person is always irrelevant in the big picture, but combined Vivaldi, Brave, etc. are helping strangle Firefox and helping prop up Google's heavy hand on web standards.

It's Firefoxs fault that Chromium took over, Firefox just had to copy what Google did with Chrome (which is make a version that is easily integrated in other applications). It had years to do so, and did not. I am not blaming Firefox for the rise in Chrome, but I am blaming them for the rise in Chromium. They have a solid alternative and didn't care enough to capitalize on it. Who knows in another timeline with chang…

I think a big reason developers don't choose WebKit is due to the Windows port requiring significant work, and most new browsers want to support Windows.

On this thread there was a rough estimate of $1M - $2M USD to do that work. It's probably not far off the mark.

https://orionfeedback.org/d/2321-orion-for-windows-android-l...

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#597

Post by jacquesm »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #578
michaelt wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the major reasons the UK left the EU is because it would turn the UK into the financial center that it once was not having to deal with all these pesky EU regulations on financial markets. Eh, yes and no. A lot of the financial backing given to pro-Brexit politicians was from rich City types hoping to be deregulated, it's true. But London, the financial centre, had some of the lowest support for Brexit (outs…

> Areas like the West Midlands and Yorkshire had the highest levels of support Areas with higher unemployment and lower economic development and opportunities often tend to vote on the extremes of the spectrum out of desperation. It's easy to think the EU or foreigners too your jobs away and that leaving the EU will somehow make it better.

Ironically: those votes made their plight even worse. Spend enough marketing money and say the right magic words and you can easily get people to vote against their own interests. That's something I always hated about democracy: that people tend to be divided by talking points and emotional issues that don't matter all that much and then vote into power parties that will rob them blind. Case in point: in NL we have had a center-right coalition for a really long time. But that presumes that the fraction of people that voted for the main party (VVD) is wealthy enough that the VVD is accurately reflecting their interests. They don't! But immigration policy allowed the VVD to get a whole raft of people to vote for them. Such divide and conquer tactics are really nasty and subvert democracy at its core, it allows a few wealthy individuals (not quite 'the elite', but definitely the top 10% or so) to use democracy as the ultimate form of regulatory capture: it makes them become the regulators bosses, and they get to make the laws as well.

In almost any normal society the 'left' would be 80 to 90% of the vote and if it isn't that's usually because of some demagogue or trick, immigration, religion, frustrations about various (often perceived) injustices and so on.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#598

Post by tentacleuno »

zxt_tzx wrote: post #579
volsa wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or if you're on macOS, give Arc a try. Tried it and immediately deleted the app again. Seriously, asking users to create an account which isn't skippable is just plain dumb?

I understand why you feel this way, but this seems to be the trend for all the latest generation of "polished" software and I think they do this so they can retain users. (Another example that comes to mind is Warp, the terminal written in Rust.) To be fair, as an Arc user, by logging in, I can keep my tabs synced perfectly across my personal and work laptops, which is worth it for me.

> (Another example that comes to mind is Warp, the terminal written in Rust.)

Sorry, do you mean there's a terminal emulator out there which forces you to login? I'm hoping you mean it provides auxiliary (optional) functionality with a login.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#599

Post by jacquesm »

michaelt wrote: post #587
jacquesm wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While they might not know the precise details, they know that a "Constitution for Europe" was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005, it was changed into a "Reform Treaty" in 2007 which meant most countries' voters didn't get a vote on it, and after Irish voters rejected that, they had to have a second referendum on the same treaty the year after. But that's fine isn't it? After all, if we didn't get a 'Consti…

> But that's fine isn't it? To a Brexit supporter, the French, Dutch and Irish people were all opposed to the constitution/treaty, and other countries would have rejected it as well if their referendums hadn't been cancelled, and yet it was forced through anyway by a body that considers voters an inconvenience to be worked around. When Brexit supporters call the EU 'undemocratic' this is what they are referring to. O…

Well, if that's what they believe they are comically misinformed. As it was the main reason that constitution would have been a good thing is that it would - hopefully - create a more level playing field. But the UK already had an exceptional position within the EU, and now it has none, with all of the downsides of being outside of their nearest neighbors and largest trade bloc.

It's going to be a long road back to inclusivity and if and when that happens you can bet that it won't be the nice exceptional situation that was there before.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#600

Post by tentacleuno »

cesarb wrote: post #520
viraptor wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embedding the browser is a very small issue compared to what Google actually did: spend money, put chrome ads everywhere on the internet, spend more money, push chrome in its results and pages, spend more money, put chrome ads in physical space. The features don't matter that much - there were a couple of years where you were simply bombarded with ads about a better browser. It worked and they made normies care.

You forgot one: IIRC, Chrome came bundled with some popular Windows applications. > there were a couple of years where you were simply bombarded with ads about a better browser Let's not forget the whole context: Chrome's main opponent back then was not Firefox, but Internet Explorer. And it did help reduce Internet Explorer's usage share, so much that it was abandoned (again) by its developers.

> You forgot one: IIRC, Chrome came bundled with some popular Windows applications.

CCleaner is a good example of this.

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