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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

#141
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's doing Google's game by being based on Blink.

Blink is the de facto web standard like it or not just like linux is for web hosting and both are open source and contributed to by many companies. Firefox is now in 5th place for browser market share and Mozilla is a dumpster fire of a company, imo it is only a matter of time before Firefox switches or completely folds.

> imo it is only a matter of time before Firefox switches or completely folds.

Indeed, it's your opinion. Development and benchmark tells another story:

https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6...

OTOH, Firefox's "perceived slowness" is mostly due to your local DNS response times. On fast DNS, Firefox is at least equal to chrome in terms of speed.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#143

Mozilla get a lot of funding directly from Google for making Google the default search site [0]. Seems to me that this may be a problem going forward if Mozilla continue to allow ad blockers in Firefox. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

It's already a problem. You can see that they're already scared to piss off their sugar daddy

You have an official "Facebook Container", but of course no official "Google Container" ... even though Google is the one that does actual tracking across the whole internet and has JS/fonts/etc. on nearly ever webpage

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#144
post #64

I tried moving to Firefox a year ago but found that the lack of Tab Groups really killed me. There are several extensions that try to emulate this behaviour, but I didn't find that they worked particularly well. And then there are the security concerns. I guess when Chrome break uBlock Origin next year I'll give Edge a go, or one of the various chromium builds

What is the security concern of Firefox over chromium?

Not the browsers themselves, but the extensions that provide tab group functionality - they often have the `Access your data for all web sites` permission.

Maybe I trust the developer right now, but one day they may sell their plugin to someone else. Obviously its the same story for uBlock Origin, but I prefer to restrict the number of extensions with these permissions, and its a shame to need an extension for what is provided by all the other major brwosers.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blink is the de facto web standard like it or not just like linux is for web hosting and both are open source and contributed to by many companies. Firefox is now in 5th place for browser market share and Mozilla is a dumpster fire of a company, imo it is only a matter of time before Firefox switches or completely folds.

> imo it is only a matter of time before Firefox switches or completely folds. Indeed, it's your opinion. Development and benchmark tells another story: https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=6... OTOH, Firefox's "perceived slowness" is mostly due to your local DNS response times. On fast DNS, Firefox is at least equal to chrome in terms of speed.

I didn’t mention a thing about ‘percieved slowness’ and it isn’t my opinion it is the entire market’s opinion, I’m a former FireFox user, don’t shoot the messenger: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#146

Unfortunately, Firefox isn't quite keeping up. One issue is that for me at least, Firefox crashes too often, and when it does, the entire browser goes away, not just the tab. That's annoying. Another issue is that something seems to be lacking performance-wise. I messed around a bit with Invoke AI, and the canvas is painfully slow even on modern, high end hardware. I thought it was just the code sucked. Nope, it's si…

that is plain false info. firefox is running each tab on a different process. also invoke AI works fine.

either your ff configuration is f'up (which kinda is the browser's fault) or you are doing something wrong.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this works for me env -i DISPLAY=$DISPLAY DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=$DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS firefox this doesn't, it gives me the "Firefox is already running, but is not responding." message env -i DISPLAY=$DISPLAY firefox

I'm not sure what you mean. What I try to achieve is start a new firefox window (for the normal user) from a root terminal. So part of the command has to be "sudo -u normaluser" or "su -l normaluser" or something.

You have to pass those environment variables to Firefox through sudo.

sudo has a --preserve-env=list option but you must know the value for DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS. That's usually

  unix:path=/run/user/1000/bus
where 1000 is the id of the user Firefox is running for. Your root console could have no DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS or have a different value for it.

To be 100% sure of the value, as you are root you could look into the environment of one of the running Firefox processes. Or wrap Firefox in a script that echoes that variable to a file before starting the browser.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#148
I have been a happy Firefox user for 15 years... maybe more.

I have seen people use and complain Internet Explorer in my younger days, from version 6 to 7, etc. Even though I mention Firefox to them, they stay with IE. What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009.

It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it.

I see this a lot in my career as well (software engineer) - when some cool, flashy new toy comes backed by companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun/Oracle. etc.

Anyway.. I only recently found out there was a thing called hardened firefox. There is me thinking "Oh! This might be worth a look" - and it is basically firefox with private settings enabled, etc, in the config section.

(which is what I have been doing for years. lol)

I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. However, even if you use something else, I would not be surprised in modern Windows listens in on your microphone "for advertising" purposes.

I might not be able to eliminate privacy issues, but if I can reduce the best I can, I will.

Back to browsers - I hear good things about Brave. Not used it, though. Happy with FF.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like a true Internet Explorer believer in 2010. Nothing is forever, no matter how solid its lead appears to be.

Certainly not but believing that FireFox is going to resurrect itself from a dropping market share of 3% is delusional and the sooner we all face reality the better we can make it. I loved FireFox over the years but he’s dead Jim.

How do you know this? It hasn't happened just yet. Let's wait and see.

I still use Firefox, it's still regularly updated and it still works very well. It pretty much does the job, regardless its number of users. It'll be dead when it won't receive updates anymore.

I don't understand what good can be done by considering it dead right now.

Re: Choose the browser that best suits your privacy needs

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have (nor want) multiple users. I just want to open a new window for my one user.

So what's wrong with Super+N? I'm struggling to see the need for a completely new browser instance when you only want another window.

He doesn't want a completely new browser instance, he wants Firefox to open another window but depending on its mood Firefox refuses to do this.

Chrome can do this just fine btw.

Running Firefox from the command line isn't an obscure thing either, clicking a link on other apps like Signal or Telegram also use this method to spawn new tabs/windows. And depending on how you executed the first instance, you run into problems with clicking links on other apps as well.

I pretty much need to open Firefox first before clicking links on other apps, because otherwise I can't run Firefox normally later without killing the process.

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