Well that's the thing - I'm not willing to build them. I wouldn't know where to start, even. And no ambition to learn, whilst Firefox and uBlock keep going. Seriously why should I? Maybe someone more able than I can share their knowledge with a pointer to a guide that says why this is better than what I have, and how to get it running on my Windows box.
My current position is to step wide and rather carefully around anything by/from Google.
Just use brave. I don't get why people are still trying to split off a new no-Google pro privacy chromium when there is a Very good option already. If people pushed to help brave even better we would be in a very good world
Brave shills cryptoshit at me, and Mozilla shills VPNs at me. Chrome is from an ad company. All three set off my sleaze alarm. What a sad state of affairs.
If Brave and Firefox are in the same league as Chrome for you your sleaze alarm is a very very bad guide to the modern world and seriously needs upgrading.
There are different levels of sleaze; I use firefox not chrome so don't try to put words into my mouth. While firefox may be a better choice than the other two, that's not saying much and Mozilla is very sleazy. If you don't see that, maybe you're acclimatized to it.
> While firefox may be a better choice than the other two, that's not saying much and Mozilla is very sleazy.
Rather than take such statements at face value, here's an example of one such instance that probably hurts its credibility: https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
Also, they're not exactly a world apart from Google in some respects either, for example: https://killedbymozilla.com/ vs https://killedbygoogle.com/ (though i guess the amount of projects also illustrates the difference in their sizes)
Personally, i think that we're past the peak of Firefox and are currently in the midst of it fading away, which i expect will come to its conclusion in the following decade. Apart from that, we basically have just a bunch of browsers that are all similar to Chromium.
Essentially, Chrome will have probably lived long enough to kill IE by becoming the next IE.
You're still supporting the cryptocurrency ecosystem by using it though. It's not completely unreasonable to want to avoid doing that if you're opposed to cryptocurrencies in a wider context.
You can do that but they will eventually add a new ad.
One day they added a small widget to buy crypto in the new tab page. That was the breaking point for me. Like it happened with Firefox ads, I started to understand that Brave was working against me too.
Brave even in the discussion is atleast a big improvement in affairs. I couldn't name a single chromium privacy fork from 5 years ago or whenever they started.
It's also like a few clicks to turn off brave settings. It's less setup for brave than I go through on any new video game settings lol
Yes, high-quality free products tend to try to find ways to fund themselves that involve appeals to their users. It's beyond ludicrous to find this a "sad state of affairs".
>If only there was some sort of "free high quality product" operating system that existed and proved this asinine defense of capitalism wrong
The only reason Linux is popular on servers is because it has huge corporate sponsorship. Big players figured it it's more beneficial for their bottom line to commoditize the backend infrastructure and invest in OSS. Same is happening with developer tools.
It's not happening with anything consumer facing because everyone wants to take their angle at capitalising on the market. I can't think of quality user facing OSS that isn't aimed at developers or isn't trying to capitalise on the users somehow. Scratch that - blender is the only one I can think of - these guys are an amazing exception.
I won't argue these projects aren't quality because they certainly do the job, but they obviously lack polish of commercial software. Eg. despite looking into kepass I still chose to pay for 1password, just for the convenience.
This is the worst option, Microsoft has consistently show they have the lowest ethical standards when it comes to products like Edge. They packed in a 3rd party payment tool in the browser ! It's like browser with crapware built in.
The only reason they aren't worse than Google is that they've been so shit at capturing the market share they don't get to make the same kind of moves, but Bing/Edge are not good alternatives for Google/Chrome.
I'm not one of those people that screams "M$ evil boooo", I actually use .NET day-to-day on a current project. But they have a really shit track record on Edge, it's the first browser I would avoid.
Your M$ evil boooo mentality is somewhat out of date.
Microsoft is making great strides in open source and Linux. A decade ago, you wouldn't have believed MS would publish SQL Server for Linux, release something as great as VS Code, create Windows Subsystem for Linux (and Android soon), acquire npm and github and make them better rather than destroying them, etc.
There was a post here recently about it [1]. After shipping this with browser I would have 0 trust in this product.
I gave up on Edge because it didn't support uBlock origin on Android, I view bundled add blockers as just another way for the browser to block competition while still serving you their own "respectful" ads.
Edge is a quality product, but sadly a privacy disaster. Their new tab page is chatty as hell, they do run their own sync backend, but that backend is not fully end to end encrypted, only some data types are. Their session IDs are hardware-based, while many other browsers' are more transient (some don't persist across browser restarts, some do).
Ungoogled Chromium isn't new. It predates Brave by years. And Brave is funded by advertising, just like Google. (In theory, at least, if the company becomes self-sustaining.) I'm not sure why we needed to add cryptocurrency to that formula.
I only use Brave for Google properties like gMaps and Google Translate (which never work quite right in FF for me), but you don't have to turn on any of the crypto stuff if you don't want to, I keep it all disabled.
The problem is that Brave, Edge, Chromium, Vivaldi and everything else are not "split from Chrome". They are in sync in Chrome and just add their gimmics to every new Chrome change. There is zero point in using any of them if the target is to dethrone Google from their monopoly.
The real "split from Chrome" browser is for example Safari - Safari and Chrome go back to the same Webkit but went different ways, with different decisions and different codebase. Brave is just a clone of Chrome with bells and whistles. Not very brave, just saying :)
Brave is done a lot of sleazy shit in the past, I clouding redirecting all Amazon links to their own Amazon referrals etc. They're hardly the knight in shining armour HN makes them out to be.
Why the hell does a web browser implement SafetyNet?!? The one and only justifiable use for SafetyNet that I've seen is Snapchat - everything else has been a net negative...
If a user has Brave Rewards and ads enabled and gets an ad grant at the end of the month, SafetyNet is one measure used to help filter out fraudsters. The absence of it shouldn't cause a crash though
So you say your current position is to be rather carefully around anything by/from Google, but you trust Internet randos to build the binary of the browser you use?
Firefox is a well-known project that I've followed for one and a half decade, with roots much older than that and an established an well-known governance structure. I'd certainly trust them as much if not more than Google.
Unlike this project, which is very much from "internet randos"
The term "telemetry" can mean anything from automatic crash reports to click tracking to transmitting your browsing history along with your social security number. Google is far closer to the end of that spectrum, Mozilla is somewhere in the lower first half.
As for ads - where? I haven't seen any and I've been using Firefox on multiple platforms for many years.
Even if it did, we're again back at the point of "X is a spectrum". "evil" is a spectrum which, according to you, includes anonymous crash reports and then goes on to include serial killers and war criminals. Even then, anonymised usage data used to guide development is far less evil than collecting highly personal and identifying data and using it for targeted psychological manipulation to get you to buy things.
I get it, Mozilla isn't the poster child FLOSS org that we'd like it to be, but it's still orders of magnitude better than the competition.
Very few applications take pains to make sure no personal information is submitted in crash dumps. Generally it is just a bald memory dump that you're supposed to ship out - definitely not a good idea if you care about your privacy.
So they will do stuff like show you ads. They won't do stuff like steal your credit card details, passwords, or identity which an internet rando might do.
Is a pre-installed clipboard addon somehow as bag as siphoning all your private data and browsing habits? I don't think we're comparing equivalent evils here. It's also easy to not use Pocket.
Yes, there's a lot to be desired with Mozilla, and I don't think they do a particularly good job. With "I trust them as much if not more than Google" I wasn't setting a particularly high bar.
Wisdom of crowds though — there's enough eyes on the stuff built by "internet randos" over at Mozilla to have a larger level of trust in it Vs an unknown fork of Chromium
If you really want to blow your mind you can go all the way back to stage0[0].
A more practical depth would be to bootstrap with GNU Mes, which is a source based bootstrapping path, that begins with a tiny scheme interpreter (~5000 LOC of simple C) and a C compiler written in scheme that are mutually self-hosting.
These tools can compile a slightly patched version of TinyCC that is self-hosting. Using this C compiler you can bootstrap a bunch of gnutools (glibc, binutils, gcc) and using these tools you can bootstrap a full Guix Linux distro.
The bootstrapping process that GCC uses is as follows:
stage 1: build from source using your existing compiler
stage 2: build again from source using the compiler you just built
stage 3: (just for checking): build a stage 3 compiler from the stage 2 compiler. Verify that it is byte-for-byte identical.
extra stages for the paranoid: repeat the process with a different starting compiler, as unrelated as possible. Again, verify that the output is bit-for-bit identical. You then know either that you're good, that the compiler reflects the source, or both starting compilers have the same devious hidden hack, perhaps courtesy of Ken Thompson himself.
GNU Mes achieves that paranoid step: once you verify with GNU Mes that you get the same bits, you don't really have to do this ever again, because you can certify that the compiler you get is reproducible from source and has no tricks.
> So you say your current position is to be rather carefully around anything by/from Google, but you trust Internet randos to build the binary of the browser you use?
How did you come to this conclusion when they stated that they'd rather use Firefox? Or are you saying Mozilla are the internet randos?
Why not? I trust internet randos to build the binaries of (linux) OSes I use. It’s not like I know the folks who compiled the Ubuntu or Manjaro LiveCD from Adam.
Wouldn't you trust randos with nothing in common but trying to build an open browser vs a corporation who mission is to gather information from you via your browser?
The trust is in different areas. The risk that Google would ship something that steals your passwords, addresses, or credit card information and does anything harmful with it besides ad targeting is basically zero. You know what you're getting with Google for the most part. The risk in the case of downloading random binaries is they may actually steal your information and cause real harm beyond ad targeting.
If you want chromium without Google there are several options such as Edge, Opera, Brave and probably a dozen more I've never heard of.
I trust that Google will abuse my personal information for monetary gain via advertising. I also trust that their compiled versions of Chrome will not be a ticking time bomb of ransomware.
On the other hand, I simply don't trust internet randos, much less to install their binaries.
And it seems like a third option of Firefox w/ uBlock is less bad than either of the above.
If you don’t use ungoogled-chromium, you’re presumably not downloading and running community-provided non-reproducible binary blobs of ungoogled-chromium, so you don’t need to learn to compile them from source instead. That’s what the comment was about.
My current position is to step wide and rather carefully around anything by/from Google.