771–779 of 779 posts
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I highly suggest looking into Opera. It is also based on Chromium and therefore backwards compatible with extensions, bookmarks, etc. I switched around 6 months ago and haven't looked back since! They have built in VPN, adblocker, Turbo, screenshot, news, and more! Been really happy with it so far.
If it's based on Chromium, this will effect it.
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Chrome------------------64.15% Internet Explorer--------10.83% Firefox-------------------9.89% Edge---------------------4.30% Safari--------------------3.80% Opera--------------------1.58% Safari will survive since Apple is their patron. Obviously Internet Explorer is only a lumbering undead husk at this point, and it's pretty shameful that it's still outgunning Firefox by a small amount. Even more sad that it's got…
These numbers do not appear to include mobile browsers. Mobile browsers are just as important as desktop browsers these days, because a lot of people use them as much or more than they use desktop browsers. If you include mobile browsers, Safari's market share is closer to 17%, which makes it the #2 most popular: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?options...
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I highly suggest looking into Opera. It is also based on Chromium and therefore backwards compatible with extensions, bookmarks, etc. I switched around 6 months ago and haven't looked back since! They have built in VPN, adblocker, Turbo, screenshot, news, and more! Been really happy with it so far.
Opera is now owned by a Chinese consortium and quite possibly embeds spyware. Check out Brave, instead, which is founded by the inventor of Javascript and extremely privacy-focused.
I feel like "open source" has become a cheap way to earn trust. Very few people are able to understand code, even fewer actually comb through all the code and fewer still are able to find and decrypt obfuscated code, especially on large repositories. If someone really wants to hide something, publishing under open source isn't going to make a difference. Essentially, whatever you use, there's going to be some degree of trust you must instill to the company and its developers that they will protect and respect your data.
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Maybe if you won’t ever convert, they should simply stop wasting time serving you anything? YouTube isn’t a charity.
How could YouTube know you won't ever convert beforehand, and at scale? If they started blocking users for suspicion of not buying anything from ads they would have to block a sizeable portion of their traffic and that would have a negative impact on their company.
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I really like the point the uBlock maintainer's make: "Extensions act on behalf of users, they add capabilities to a user agent , and deprecating the blocking ability of the webRequest API will essentially decrease the level of user agency in Chromium, to the benefit of web sites which obviously would be happy to have the last word in what resources their pages can fetch/execute/render."
Extensions should act on behalf of users but, like websites, some don't. A questionable or poorly-maintained extension can do more damage than any single website, and browsers can support user agency by replacing APIs with better ones: an effective declarative API for content blocking would majorly speed up extensions like uBlock Origin and make it harder for other extensions to follow users around the web. That said…
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> I really just don't understand the obsession with Chrome, especially in hacker communities. Chrome used to be very lightweight, fast and basically unseated IE as the top browser. It got that love because at the time Firefox was bloated and IE had a stranglehold. Chrome was also safer with a process per tab. Chrome made web browsing/dev pleasant like Firefox/Firebug did and it really took off being based on Webkit l…
This is bad history. Firefox was top dog when chrome came out - it had unseated IE already for many users fed up with XP-era crapware. Firefox was not simply 'bloated', but designed for classic HTML rendering at a time when javascript (aka 'web 2.0 ajax') dev was taking off and memory was not as abundant as it is now - though slow, it was more that the core architecture was out of date than it was 'bloated'. Indeed f…
Maybe in mindshare for devs but Chrome officially unseated IE browser saturation in 2012. Firefox didn't pass IE until 2015 [1].
Firefox was amazing on its resurgence in mid-2000s but did get into memory/bloat stages that opened it up for minimal/performant Chrome that was also more secure at the time primarily due to the process per tab. This possibly did lead to more js bloat later, initially it was lightning fast and also had a debug console and was based on Webkit which was better than Firefox rendering.
Firefox definitely saw Web 2.0 come in from 2006 on and was revolutionary in web development/debugging with Firebug and eventually that was part of the browser and is now industry standard to have a console/debugger on the browser.
Most developers were using Firefox by 2005-2006 and then Chrome a couple/few years later and it has been top for almost a decade now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...
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Ah yes, I used Firefox' reader mode, but some news sites now don't even properly support that. I may have to remind myself not to go on those sites anymore as well.
> Firefox' reader mode, but some news sites now don't even properly support that All sites which are on Google Amp. Google, whenever it can, "helpfully" gives me the amp site and then I have to find and click the link to the actual site to get to the "readable" version.
In other words, if your "solution" to the problem as outlined in the OP involves google, you already lost.
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Is it perhaps time to return to using external tools such as Privoxy, Pi-Hole and the like? Privoxy appears to still be around, and (I think) was originally at the forefront of user-managed web controls. Once the browser reaches its natural Borg-self, transparent user-level tools will be all that provide a semblance of control. Well that, and Firefox.
AFAIK Privoxy isn't actively maintained.
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