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Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

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Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#61

Post by claudius »

jmillikin wrote: post #38
kryten wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you hope it is. All sorts can happen between source and binary.

There's enough security researchers (of any hat color) crawling over the Chrome binaries that I'm fairly confident there are no backdoors being introduced. To verify, you could disassemble the Chrome binary and compare it against a disassembled Chromium binary that you built. You could also use a packet sniffer and/or MITM proxy to verify that no unexpected data transmissions are occurring.

That probably depends on your definition of ‘backdoors’. Some of the data Chrome sends to Google could easily be considered a breach of privacy (and the corresponding functionality hence supposedly doesn’t exist in Chromium).

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#62

Post by Watabou »

cupcake-unicorn wrote: post #20

I actually never ended up switching to Chrome from Firefox in the first place, but those are still good tips. I guess I did the right thing :) Yes, it has a terrible memory leak issue, but all of my computers have enough ram as to not notice. I'm still not ready to make the switch to DuckDuckGo. I figure that if I'm going to stick with Gmail no matter what, if Google already has that information, collecting a few sea…

There aren't any memory leak issues in Firefox. I have been using Firefox since Firefox 10 and it has made huge strides in memory performance so much so that it beats every browser out there on memory benchmarks.

In fact, on the mac, with the same number (34) of tabs, the same content, no add-ons or extensions, Firefox takes 600MB - 800MB, Safari takes around 900MB-1GB and Chrome takes around 900-1.2GB. I use these browsers every day and I have the same results every day.

I have the same tabs open now in Firefox, all 34 of them and it's only taking 740MB. You just can't beat that. It's really awesome.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#63

Post by kryten »

jmillikin wrote: post #38
kryten wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you hope it is. All sorts can happen between source and binary.

There's enough security researchers (of any hat color) crawling over the Chrome binaries that I'm fairly confident there are no backdoors being introduced. To verify, you could disassemble the Chrome binary and compare it against a disassembled Chromium binary that you built. You could also use a packet sniffer and/or MITM proxy to verify that no unexpected data transmissions are occurring.

That assumption relies on two uncertainties:

1. The probability of discovering something in all that binary code, especially with the intricate and non-orthogonal nature of x86/x64 assembly and odd compiler optimisations. This isn't some 80's game.

A comparison:

    28500000 = Chrome binary size [1]
   750000000 = Human Genome size (converted to bytes - 1BP = 2bits so 4BP per byte) [2]
So we're only 26x more complicated than Chrome and we have absolutely no fucking idea what is going on with us most of the time.

2. The probability of a vulnerability being published to Google versus selling it on the private market.

[1] http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/bloat/

[2] http://www.biostars.org/p/5514/

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#64

Post by [deleted] »

joeblau wrote: post #60
Spittie wrote: post #59

I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy. I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...). Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Fi…

I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.

[deleted]

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#65

Post by gnosis »

hnriot wrote: post #54
gnosis wrote: post #48

I've been using DDG and Firefox for years now, and don't miss Google at all. The main thing I'm really annoyed with DDG about is that they don't (no longer?) treat double-quoted search terms as literal. I'll often get results that are close to but not exactly what I asked for. This is really frustrating, as my entire intention in double quoting search terms is to ask for exactly those search terms and nothing else. A…

DDG is Bing with some front end work, why not just use Bing and then you can use quotes searches without problem [1] [1] http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/ff524480.aspx

It's not just Bing.

"DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "about 50" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, its own Web crawler, the DuckDuckBot, and others."[1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duckduckgo#Features

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#66

Post by mcpherrinm »

Hilyin wrote: post #7

My biggest problems with Firefox after using Chrome for so long is stability. I find that web pages can lock up the entire browser rather than just a tab, and this isn't just a rare occurrence, when I tried to give it a chance a week ago, it happened several times. I am amazed they still haven't picked up the separate process per tab feature yet.

The project to do this (Electrolysis) turned out to be a lot more effort than I think people anticipated, and was paused for a while last year to allow some other changes to happen. It resumed this year, and you can follow development from https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis which includes links to meeting notes and the experimental branch if you want to try it out.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#67

Post by k-mcgrady »

joeblau wrote: post #60
Spittie wrote: post #59

I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy. I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...). Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Fi…

I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.

On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#68

Post by shardling »

binarymax wrote: post #8

I made the switch to DDG about 2 years ago and am pretty happy, though I do occasionally use the !g. Switched back to FF on my desktop a couple months ago when I got my keon and I love it. The only thing that's hard to get used to again is a search bar separate from an address bar. Chrome really had that figured out. A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

> A unified bar in FF would make it the perfect browser.

The thing is there are people like me who prefer a separate search bar. I don't want google search results showing up when I'm just trying to look through my history or bookmarks.

It also is a privacy issue -- if the URL bar tries to autocomplete search results, then it necessarily sends every URL you type to google/etc.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#69

Post by Spittie »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #67
joeblau wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.

On DDG you can add !g to the start or end of a query and it will do the search on Google.

That's one of the best, and yet one of the worst feature of DuckDuckGo.

When I tried using it a while ago, I ended up always searching for "!g ", since I knew I would always get equal or better results.

I'm glad it's this easy to search on Google from DuckDuckGo, but it also makes the switch harder. Or, at least, it did for me.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#70

Post by teaneedz »

joeblau wrote: post #60
Spittie wrote: post #59

I'm glad to see more and more people switching (back) to Firefox, as I admit I'm quite a Firefox fanboy. I've never made the full switch to Chrome. First, as a long time linux user, Firefox was never so bad on it (startup time, random freeze for i/o...). Second, when Chrome was (a lot) faster Firefox had way more addons. Now Chrome has kinda fixed that (I still miss some essential addons, like Tree Style Tab), but Fi…

I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.

The !Bang syntax is excellent for searching language/framework/library specific answers. Just append it to the end of a search if you need to.

[DuckDuckGo !Bang](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

If you still need a Google result, try appending !sp which will give you a Startpage result (Google result with privacy)

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