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Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

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Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#71

Post by area51org »

hnriot wrote: post #52
area51org wrote: post #23

As a Mac guy, I switched back to Firefox when Chrome became practically unusable (slow, crashy). Pleasant surprise: Firefox is snappier and much-evolved since I last used it. Haven't tried DuckDuckGo yet, but I know my day is coming.

This makes no sense. I, like many people here use a Mac and Chrome and can't remember the last time it crashed. I suspect this is something specific to your installation, possibly a rogue plugin you've installed. My experience is quite the opposite to yours. neither ff or chrome crash much, and chrome is significantly faster.

On my system -- and I've tried everything I could think of, including blowing away my profile -- it's slow, crashy, and hangs a lot. It's a newish Macbook Pro with plenty of disk and RAM.

FF, on the other hand, is faster (!) and doesn't crash often.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#72

Post by 1O0101ll100O »

You can still use the Googlesharing addon to proxy your searches through a concentrator.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/googlesharing...

As long as you trust the proxy to not be an adversary.

Sometimes[often times] the default proxy will go down. I've had luck using the following alternate:

googlesharing.riseup.net

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#73

Post by simgidacav »

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.

I switched to DDG some time ago, and I totally live happy with it. Besides, lately they improved the quality a lot, both on the results and on speed performances.

The bang syntax is just awesome, and I rarely need to !g my results.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#74

Post by k-mcgrady »

Spittie wrote: post #69
k-mcgrady wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I had the same problem. I switched to DDG and Firefox when the PRISM story broke but ended up using !g on so many queries I made Google my default again. I find Google much better when I'm searching for API docs, StackOverflow Q's etc.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#75

Post by jmillikin »

claudius wrote: post #61
jmillikin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I've never heard a claim that Chrome sends more data than Chromium. Do you have a link?

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#76

Post by bad_user »

teaneedz wrote: post #70
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.

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)

You don't need DDG for that. Both Firefox and Chrome support adding shortcut keywords for search boxes.

For example, in Firefox all you have to do is to right click on a search box and select "Add Keyword for this Search".

It's much better than DDG because:

1) if you care about privacy, then this is obviously the right way, as you don't have to redirect through a third-party's server

2) you can add shortcuts for whatever you want, without being limited to a fixed set. For instance I type "dex someWord" for getting the definition of words in my native language. I type "word hello" for doing a search on wordnik.com. I type "w definition" for Wikipedia. I type "mvn package" for doing a maven package search. I type "gem library" for doing a RubyGems search.

And yeah, it's easier to add a shortcut that's relevant to you, then it is to read that DDG document you linked to.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#77

Post by jmillikin »

kryten wrote: post #63
jmillikin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

The actual comparison would be between the Chrome binary size and the Chromium binary size, which is quite small if you exclude embedded graphical resources.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#78

Post by otisfunkmeyer »

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.

There's an omnibar FF plugin that I install immediately on every FF installation.

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#79

Post by kryten »

jmillikin wrote: post #77
kryten wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

The actual comparison would be between the Chrome binary size and the Chromium binary size, which is quite small if you exclude embedded graphical resources.

Actually that's a really bad comparison.

The binary size may be similar but that doesn't mean the content is. Consider the two cases below to back up my assertion:

   000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE000000000000000000
   000000WE_COME_IN_PEACE_SHOOT_TO_KILL0000

Re: Switching to DuckDuckGo and Firefox

#80

Post by babuskov »

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.

I miss the functionality from browser in Mozilla Suite.

Basically, when you type something in the address bar it would show your history and add "Search for ..." as the last option. So, even if you had large history, it was enough to press the UP arrow and switch from address to searching.

AFAIK, this is still the way it works on SeaMonkey.

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