My main browser is Librewolf but I keep a chromium browser just in case. Previously used brave but their flatpak is shit. Ungoogled chromium seems ok but it looks like they don’t change much from upstream chromium. Any good chromium browsers which harden their browsers like librewolf does for more privacy?
Yes and no, 5% of the script, corresponding to its unique UI is proprietary, but 100% auditable and even moddeable by the user (in the Forum they show you even how to do it, at own risk, logical). And its better so this way, making it OpenSource too, Chrome and Edge are the first in forking it, which will be the end of Vivaldi and any other Chromium. Anyway, with more than 100 browsers curretntly in the market, OpenSource or not isn’t the most important poiny, more important the ethics and transparency respect the user of the company. Respect privacy it is irrelevant, it depends only of the manufactor of the product, not if it OpenSource or not, all spying APIs of Google, Facebook, MS & cia are all OpenSource and included in a lot of the FOSS in the market (also in Firefox, eg the “save” browsing API is from Google, not really needed if you use an adblocker (uBO), which contains a similar function, this API send your browsing data to Google who host the list of phising sites but also logs your activity, If you can, desactivate it, in Vivaldi you can do it in the privacy settings)
Opensource is a very important point. If its only the UI that is a different thing though.
Save browsing in Firefox is anonymized and afaik even proxied. In FF you can also deactivate it but shouldnt. No personal data is sent and it is not identifiable. But you may really not need it.
FOSS nowadays isn’t the same anymore since BigBrothers entered this world, first Google and Microsoft, the latter even acquiring GitHub, FOSS is no longer the same as it was a few years ago. Many companies no longer focus on communities, developing their products tangentially to the user more in their own interests. In the world of browsers, there are already more than 100 on the market, forks of Gecko, Blink and Webkit, some exotic ones aside, like Otter, which is also fighting for its life to avoid passing to the more than 70 browsers that were abandoned and discontinued in this Browser war that exists, where everyone fights to survive against the great Mainstreams Chrome, EDGE, or the Chinese Opera.
I have been using Vivaldi for more than 7 years and I have seen Google’s tricks to eliminate it, even leading to the point that the Vivaldi team removed the Vivaldi UA, disguising it as Chrome, against their own interests, so that the user not getting blocked by Google services and related pages with the argument “browser not compatible” which was absurd. Since then there has been a continuous war against Google’s attempts to control this browser, which has until now always resulted in Google coming to hit the teeth on a rock, (IdleAPI, FLoC, and other crap)
Meanwhile Mozilla made a contract with Google, for using Google as main search, apart from sending Data of the accounts to Alphabet, googletagmanager and googleanalytics to survive. That is the value of FOSS today, not the user or the community, nor the ethics or transparency of the company.
FOSS is important, yes, for devs who want to launch another fork more, but not so much for the normal user, for this it counts excellent support, an active community, a real interaction with the devs and the team, honesty and ethics of the company. But yes Vivaldis 5% of the script of its unique UI is proprietary, to avoid that Google, EDGE or Opera can fork it, same with Brave, it also isn’t fullOpenSource for similar reasons (see its TOS about copyrights) Other engines are easier to go OpenSource, because Chrome or EDGE can’t fork it for the own browsers. It’s not the same problem.
Not all what is proprietary soft is crap nor all FOSS is the panacea, it’s by way not so simple, with ugly surprises when you walk with fixed ideas
