this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Privacy
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Just lovely, when you think you found a browser that works decently and cares about privacy...
Just use Firefox, it's always been the best out of them for Privacy
@Astaroth Have you try this? https://www.howtogeek.com/557929/how-to-see-and-disable-the-telemetry-data-firefox-collects-about-you/
Or: https://librewolf.net/
Which telemetry, specifically? Anything you can't find in the standard settings menu can be found in
about:config. There are plenty of articles with huge lists of settings to adjust inabout:configwith explanations on what different values do.Every time I try to use Firefox I run into the same incredibly annoying issue.
Sometimes tabs will randomly not work. I'll open a new tab, go to, say, Google, and it will just hang, it never loads. Doesn't matter what site I try to load. It happens seemingly randomly. Sometimes it won't happen on the first page load, but the second.
It's the entire reason I witched to brave, because I couldn't figure the problem out and every time I posted to reddit about it I would be told that nothing was wrong and it must be my add-ons, despite the fact it also happened when I un-installed all of them.
It persisted to a new install, too. No idea what caused it and it's so annoying that I don't want to bother trying...
That's a shame. I use FF most of my day for work and I've never had any issues like that. I was thinking of add-ons too, but since you uninstalled them all AND it carried to a new installation.
I use Brave for my personal stuff, but Brave has had some dodgy stuff in recent times and I don't trust other browser's than FF right now.
Yeah the weirdest part for me was that it carried to a new install; I've NEVER seen another program where that happened. But it happened THREE different times, it 100% carried over, or at the least was so inherent to something in my setup that it started happening again within 2 days of re-installing.
Try disabling HTTP/3 (
network.http.http3.enable).I'm not on my PC to double check right now but maybe turn hardware acceleration off (or on, not sure what default is) I remember having issues years and years ago and I believe it was hardware acceleration. Worth a shot at least.
Can't say I've experienced the same issue as you though.
Alternatively could always try Librewolf
Brave’s been super shady its entire existence. They’ve been caught linkjacking and accepting “donations” for websites that don’t have accounts (so theft via fraud).
If you are talking about BAT, you should know that creators can sign up to get the BAT owed to them.
How many will though? They are still soliciting donations without the claimed recipients knowledge
"Solicitating donations" isn't really how BAT works. Users who use brave earn BAT. Users who opt in to sharing their BAT will share BAT with a wallet under custody of Brave. Users who visit youtuberx's channel in brave and spend x amount of time there will earn youtuberx y BAT. When a creator verifies who they are, they get custody of their BAT wallet with the BAT contained within.
You could say that "share with content creators" is soliciting donations, but it comes from the money you get from using the browser, choosing to see notification based ads and then earning BAT over time. It's more of "turn your ad views into money to automatically give to the content creators you interact with most."
They get real money for as views that they then act as if they will dispense it for the toy bucks users can "earn", knowing that most creators will never claim them=> time arbitrage in the best case, flat out false advertising/fraud in the worst case. Just because it's microcents doesn't change the facts
Install Firefox (also works on mobile!), add uBlock Origin (also available on mobile!), done.
*not on iOS **but soon will be due to EU laws (blink-based and gecko-based browsers will be available probably next year to comply with the law (yes worldwide, trying to region lock will result in 1) it won’t work anyway and 2) assdestroying fines from the EU for blatant violation)
And if you are feeling extra frisky, install noscript to pick and choose what sources of js you are willing to run and/or be terrified/furious of all the non-relevant scripts sites run.
I actually did that for a while (on my PC at least). Major pain in the ass unfortunately.
Of course it's good to block that crap, but usability takes too much of a nose dive. I do live in the EU though, so when it comes to data protection things have gotten a lot better in the last years.
I’ve been using it for a few years now and by now picking out the scripts for site navigation and finding the relavant cdn is pretty much automatic now. If I find a site that is just an absolute js clusterfuck, I just run it in porno mode and let the scrips loose and hope for the best until I find what I went there for. I even take the time to reject cookies manually as per my right, haha. Maybe it will show up on some stat somewhere, a flaccid message, but a message none the less.
What did you think of the recent deal the EU made with the giants? As an EU citizen I find it concerning, because it might be a slippery slope.
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Ghostery is like Brave, they record and sell your browsing habbits. I stopped using them back in 2013.
Seems like we need to have another talk with the less terminally-online people about what is and isn’t actually good int he world of web browsing safety…
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Or you could just enable that filter in ublock origin. Will be faster and more robust as well.
The browser is fine. Nobody seems to have read the article. It’s about their search engine. It doesn’t have anything to do with privacy, instead it’s about copyright infringement.
I’m not sure why this was even posted here. Maybe OP didn’t read the article either.
I was suspicious as soon as I saw it runs on Chromium. I can safely assure you, Google is not focusing on privacy features there.
Chromium and Chrome are not the same thing.
Per their wiki article, “Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, mainly developed and maintained by Google.” Source, i suppose
I know they’re different. I know it’s FOSS. I also know I do not believe Google is being altruistic and I do not have the expertise nor time to audit the code myself. I am not the subject matter expert here, but I know I’ve seen what Google can do and that certainly biases my opinion. I don’t believe any corporation that large is genuinely concerned about anything but capital acquisition.
They arent being altruistic. Having their browser engine implementation being dominant gives them an incredible amount of pull in the space of web standards and their adoption.
Some good has come out of this and the web has been advancing rapidly, but they have abused it plenty of times as well.
I feel like we are all of the same opinions on this but somehow missing each other lol. Very obviously, Google has had a massive influence on technology and the internet as a whole. As you stated, there have been plenty of abuses of that power in the past, most commonly noted with privacy concerns and data collection. Hence, how I arrived at my original position with regards to Brave as a browser.
yeah, it is such a pain 😥. but hardened firefox 😏
Nope it’s always been bullshit, like Blue Buffalo.
Vivaldi is awesome. Both for desktop and android.
Why do people just don't use something like Firefox or any forks of it. Its the only browser which is truly still Open Source
Mull 😏
How so? Chromium is fully open source and functional. There is the ungoogled chromium fork that removes all features tied to google from it. It's fully open source by all definitions.