761–770 of 850 posts
It is developed by Google, the number one enemy of the open web.
Use Firefox. To be honest, I always felt a little dirty when using Chrome so I always ended up switching back to Firefox.
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Brave is really good and always surprising me with features while largely staying lean and out of my way. They recently added a chatbot that runs locally they call Leo based on llama2. It's pretty impressive that you can perform LLM tasks on the current page without the use of any 3rd party service. And of course you can pay them for the souped up version. https://brave.com/leo-release/ Feels like I am alone in think…
I have tried Brave multiple times. I find its desktop version as bad or worse than Firefox for things not working or bugginess. I have used Brave more on Android. I have bounced between Firefox, Brave, and custom builds of Chromium for years. I am currently on Firefox.
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I switched away from Firefox about 3 years ago (after more than 10 years of using it) because I got tired of them breaking stuff (and my habits) with unnecessary redesigns every 6 months or so.
What did they break? I've been a Firefox user since forever and I don't recall any breaking changes on desktop for the last 15 years or so (really since they deprecated xul). Now on mobile you might have an argument, but Firefox on android was bad before the recent redesign and is by quite a margin the best mobile browser since.
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How much do they really differ? Chromium browsers for the most part are just going to appear the same to site owners.
It'll all render the same using Chrome/Blink, but forks might take out tracking by Google (and potentially add other tracking), add adblock outside of plugins, or re-add support for Manifest V2 to name a few. Chromium forks can actually be pretty different.
Anyone else remember Mitchell Baker (Firefox CEO) calling for more than deplatforming? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
I hadn't read that, thanks for sharing. The recommendations were shockingly reasonable, despite your framing.
The problem is that it's hard to pull that off: One of the chief challenges of current day is that people have a hard time even agreeing what the facts are, and what some people hold to be factual aren't necessarily so.
The "factual voices" promoted by Facebook in the linked NYT article, for example, are just mainstream media which shares Mozilla's political slant and which have a built-up reservoir of respectability from earlier days when they were higher quality, but which aren't exactly paragons of factuality or careful reporting today, having spread outright misinformation and been quiet about important events. To put it another way, should we promote say, Fox News, because they're mainstream? That's probably not wise, if you ask just about anyone here.
The thing is, Fox may have been first, but every news outlet has drifted in a Foxified direction of catering to an audience and telling them what they want to hear instead of challenging their preconceptions, which ends up with many outlets made a killing hyperventilating about Trump, for example.
So the issue ends up being that Mozilla's just fine boosting that hyperventilation, which is part and parcel of the polarization and "we can't even agree what the facts are" problem. The issue of people lacking trust isn't solved by browbeating, but by earning their trust. It's presently really, really hard, but still in principle possible.
In the end, I don't want my browser maker to have that attitude. Brave and Vivaldi don't: They just make browsers and other services and give me more and more options. Brave even lets me judge sources and adjust my search engine should I want to. Supporting these teams that focus on giving me control and making better and better tools for me is an easy choice.
Some of the other bullet points have genuine upside that would be wonderful, but they also have costs and downsides that aren't immediately apparent.
If you keep feeding the Google monster you soon won't be able to browse the internet without a 3rd party attesting that your computer is worth browsing that site. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...
(While OSM and alternatives are probably quite good I'd like to keep using GMaps though)
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Firefox + uBlock origin is far better than any other browser without UBO.
Mullvad browser
The extreme bent towards privacy and not retaining any identifiable or fingerprint-able behaviors is exactly what its target audience wants, of course. But it leads to a markedly more inconvenient experience than Chrome or default Firefox or Safari.