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The Browser Monopoly

blairreeves.me

131–140 of 197 posts

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried Twitter on iOS in Firefox where I have the strict privacy settings enabled including with Safari Firefox Focus content blocking turned on, and Twitter worked fine. In what way does it not work for you?

Firefox on iOS uses Safari's rendering engine. Maybe mcv is referring to Gecko-powered Firefox on Android?

I've been using Mobile Twitter on Firefox for Android and it works just fine.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#132

> Firefox is a fine browser by itself [...] I have the comfort of knowing that my personal information is protected (to the extent possible) – and also that my portal to the web is not custom-built to track me and serve me ads FF is fantastic, but the uncomfortable question is, will it always be, given Mozilla has to found further development and is financed by Google's money as well? Apple's Safari actually has bett…

Google pays Apple $12 billion a year to be the default search in Safari unfortunately, so Apple are making a lot of money from keeping Google happy.

The billions Google pays Apple is purely a tax that they extract from them. If it's meant to buy Apple off then it doesn't appear to be working given the privacy features that Apple continues to roll out.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#133

Am I the only one that doesn't like chrome? There has always been a "weird feel" to it that I don't like. I used to really like Konqueror, so I guess its mostly the interface that gets to me. ...As I type this I look the sandwich menu, and lack of search bar in firefox and I die a little inside.

The lack of room to grab the window at the top has always driven me nuts.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#134
post #23

I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard? In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to blo…

I use Firefox and very much look forward to the Chromium version of Edge as well. I only use Chrome to do work related things.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#135
post #23

I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard? In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to blo…

I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome). At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very conf…

IE wasn't winning any war against Firefox, it was Firefox which was gaining marketshare from IE, which had a crap reputation at that point.

For this reason and the fact that you think lawnmower ads are the worst that surveillance capitalism can do, I'm skeptical that you are technically minded at all. This is 100% how the average Joe thinks.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#136
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profiles provide separate bookmarks and add-ons per profile. I don't think containers do. Containers seem to be more about making it so you can appear as different people to different sites. Profiles are more about letting you separate roles. For different things I do during development, I want different sets of cookies, bookmarks, history, and add-ons. With profiles, I get that, effectively getting a separate browse…

Firefox also has profiles. (about:profiles)

Those were actually what I was thinking of when I said Chrome handles profiles better. Firefox has the functionality, but it doesn't have as nice an interface to it. Chrome, for example, on MacOS puts the available profiles on the right-click menu on its dock icon.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#137
This article has a lot of wrong or otherwise misleading information. One I haven't noticed in the comments so far is that the author refers to Chromium as being free and open-source. It isn't [0]. It downloads more Google account and activity tracking related blobs than ever when building the code as well.

While I agree with the gist of the article, this is worth pointing out since a lot of people do use Chromium because it is advertised this way, thinking that somehow they are not playing into the Chrome/Google monopoly. For those interested, there is an alternative build without all the google stuff baked in: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9724409

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#138
post #23

I don't get why people (I mean technically minded people who are aware of privacy issues and so on) don't just use firefox. They are pretty much at feature parity (Firefox may even get the edge due to the fantastic extensions ecosystem), except one spies on you and the other doesn't. Why do people find the switch so hard? In addition, Firefox + ublokc origin is pretty much the only option on mobile if you want to blo…

I'm a technically minded person. I've been using web browsers since NCSA Mosaic. I switch browsers probably once per decade (mosaic -> netscape navigator -> firefox -> chrome). At the time I started using Chrome IE was the dominant web browser and firefox was losing the war because content creators were continually accidentally making things work in IE only. (By "accidentally" I mean that the standards were very conf…

If only user tracking was limited to product ads. Behaviour control and propaganda are a thing, as evidenced many times over with Rohingya genocide, US elections, Brexit, and the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests to name but a few.

Re: The Browser Monopoly

#140
A seemingly minor issue got me really worried about the future of the Chrome monopoly.

For some reason, some developer/product manager at Chrome decided to ignore `"autocomplete"="off". This reeks havoc with the 100s of JS autocomplete addons out there when chrome autocomplete pops up over the custom built on.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12374442/chrome-ignores-...

Seems like there's no resolution yet, aside from a stream of ridiculous hacks that all tend to break at one point or another.

If Google wants to own the browser, they are going to need a more transparent process on these things. It affects everyone now and they have to start governing their changes more appropriately.

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