Google did it again.
Just install another more privacy friendly browser
I personally use librewolf. Firefox is making it look like they are private, but you need to tweak a lot of settings to get there
Orrrr… don’t use Google Chrome.
Agreed. I never understood why anyone goes out of their way to install Chrome.
Rant:
Why not use Edge, which comes with the OS? I’m not promoting Edge, but it’s already there. If you’re going to install another browser, why not use Firefox instead? Every time I ask someone why they’ve installed Chrome, they either don’t have an answer or say something like “it looks nice”.
That said, Firefox’ handling of tabs is still horrible. “Go Vivaldi” on this count. Sadly it’s a Chromium browser.
How does Firefox fail you at tabs? I’ve always been happy with it, I sandbox my FB and Google social stuff, Save groups for opening at once, share tabs across devices, I don’t want for anything.
Chrome and Edge have native vertical tabs. I was an Edge user before the Manifest V3 fiasco, and it’s the one feature I dearly miss. There are extensions to add this functionality to FF, but they require extensive setup, and every new FF update breaks them. Edge also had shortcuts to open a link in new tab and switch to it or stay on the current tab. It’s the little things that you don’t really notice until they’re gone.
I started using Chrome instead of IE11, which was crap for standards, and before Edge was a thing. When Edge came along, I got really ticked off by the constant nagging to use it, which made me hate it without even trying it. I will probably carry on with Chrome for now, whist I can still turn off all the ad tracking stuff.
Idk what people have about chromium tabs. Firefox does tabs just fine.
Also, edge does not come with most os, just w*ndows
Vivaldi does this out of the box: Tab grouping, tab stacking, tab stack renaming, vertical tabs, periodic tab reloading, etc.
Firefox has some catching up to do in this regard. I need extensions to do some of this. Tab stacking, for example, simply does not exist on Firefox, which means that my tab bar eventually makes me scroll horizontally.
Not badmouthing Firefox. Just saying that it isn’t the greatest in this area. Am still using it daily. I just don’t use it for tasks that require having many tabs at my disposal.
Edit: I didn’t say that Edge comes with most OSs. But Windows is the most widespread Desktop OS, so most people will have access to Edge “out of the box”.
I go out of my way to purge Edge from Windows every time it works it’s way back in no matter what registry edits I have to make, what Windows “features” it breaks or whatever script I have to write.
Edge is like having a roommate constantly hitting on you and occasionally withholding things from you when you reject them and you’re basically over here going “They’re already living with you, why not go with them instead of hooking up with someone from outside”
Chrome is ethically questionable admittedly at best, but Edge is straight up cancer.
Inertia. For years: IE sucked and Mozilla was painfully slow and missing features. I know it’s been quite a few years since that was a thing, but people don’t like to change, so I really think it’s still leftover behavior.
Or at least it is for me, but I’m mostly in the Apple ecosystem now, so it’s not as relevant
Amen. Only using Edge when there’s no other choice.
Usually there is, though.
Chrome, on the other hand, is never needed or required. At least I have never encountered such a scenario. Conceivably, a company admin could force it on employees, but in my experience, admins usually just stick with Edge if they run Windows and want to lock down company PCs from being tampered with.
Sadly it’s a Chromium browser.
Chromium is the open source project, it doesn’t contain any of the Google Chrome specific changes.
Google’s changes for Chrome are a problem. That’s the main topic of this discussion.
To take it further, Chromium being mainly developed and maintained by Google and a ton of browsers basing themselves on that is another problem: Chromium monoculture and why it is a concern.
Unfortunately, on Android, Chromium based browsers are SIGNIFICANTLY more secure than any other browser framework. I recommend Mulch and Cromite.
Again, this is ANDROID specific. Everywhere else, I use FF based browsers.
You can’t just say that FF on Android is less secure and not give any sources for that claim.
I mean, you can, but that makes your claim not have any value.
I wasn’t trying to argue about, or even educate people, on the specifics. I was just making an objective statement of fact. Anyone is free to do their own research to validate my assertion, disprove it, or just ignore it.
But, okay, I can provide a good entry point into the topic with a good write-up on Android browsers from the developer of a security focused ROM, DivestOS:
https://divestos.org/pages/browsers
*He’s also the developer of two good Android hardened browsers: Mulch (Chromium) and Mull (FF/Gecko).
Edit: I also recommend NOT using Google’s official Android Chrome browser, just forks that are based around Chromium e.g. Mulch and Cromite.
Firefox is great and works well on Android yes! I recommend Mull.
However, technically speaking, resources don’t fully recommend it due to there being no per-site process isolation yet that works well.
If that doesn’t matter to people then sure it’s great and better than using Chromium based browsers. 🙂
It’s just good to give everyone the information and reasoning why then let them decide.
Divest OS resource: https://divestos.org/pages/browsers#processIsolation
PrivacyGuides resource: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/?h=site#android
Laughs in Firefox
After dragging my feet for years I finally moved back to Firefox a few weeks ago. Sure, there’s a few features I miss from Chrome/Edge (vertical tabs, PWA support, tab groups, etc.) but I was able to ‘fix’ many issues with extensions and a custom userchrome.css, and trust is ultimately more important to me.
I’m thankful there are still free, open, privacy respecting options out there.
You can also edit the userChrome.css file to get rid of the top tabs.
I read this article from top to bottom and didn’t find a clear explanation of why you should disable this feature.
Because it doesn’t protect your privacy (Google still tracks everything), but it gives Google an even stronger monopoly to make taking other actions to protect your privacy less viable.
The end game is still their web DRM pretending to be “security” to make it impossible for you to choose how a page is displayed to you.
It’s an underhanded way of implementing a browser supported foolproof adblock detector. Even its stated goal of “give advertisers a unified, browser backed, ‘private’ way of tracking you for advertising” isn’t especially appealing or useful when you get something better than that from adblock anyway. Turning it off will be reflected in telemetry sites gather about feature availability and hopefully low adoption numbers discourage them from taking advantage of this “feature”.
Hmm, not having read up on the tech, what’s stopping someone from making a Firefox plugin that just spoofs fake data back? It’s all done client side if I’m understanding, so everything necessary to do so must be available. Only wrinkle I could see is if they have signing and ship the cert with Chrome and regularly rotate it. It’s still not impossible in that case, just more annoying.
My understanding is vague but the sandbox environment is cryptographically integrity checked in some fashion that makes the spoofing you’re suggesting difficult or impossible.
Let me guess … every new update reverts Chrome back to default settings
Chrome feels like it’s updated every week
It’s a browser. They have been getting weekly updates for like a decade now.
Updates generally don’t require settings resets. It can happen if there’s major changes but that’s the exception, not the norm. If Chrome updates revert settings to default with any degree of regularity (I actually don’t know if they do, I haven’t really touched Chrome in ten? years) that’s either gross incompetence or sheer malice.
Fair enough. I stopped using it ages ago, and was abhorred to find out chrome logs you in on the browser when you log in to Google at any point. Any browser that silently insists on knowing your identity as you browse the Web deserves zero trust.
Thank firefox for containers.
