- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- firefox@lemmy.ml
- technology@beehaw.org
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Just use Firefox.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + arkenfox user.js gives you privacy, security and anti-tracking. The only way to fly IMO.
And a Pi Hole for good measure.
A dns blocker cannot do anything more than ublock. It is nice for other apps though.
A DNS blocker is great for other devices on your network!
It works very well on browser and outside the browser. So if your software/hardware is phoning home, it will pick it up.
Or Adguard Home, that I think is superior than Pi-Hole. It runs as a single instance and you can easily upgrade it from the web UI.
OpenWRT router with DNS over HTTPS for the whole network. Come for the easy adblock, stay for the updated router distribution and the best anti-buffer bloat features in any Router software.
Don’t forget DoH or DoT if you can
White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It’s like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.
Librewolf
No android version = no buy
Mull for android
What does Arkenfox do? I’ll definitely add it if it’s beneficial.
It changes many default Firefox preferences in
about:configto be as private as possible. The main selling point is resist fingerprinting (RFP). I highly suggest reading the wiki. It can break some websites, but you can configure it to fit your needs.Sounds interesting. I’ll definetely check it out. Thanks!
Is this applicable for Firefox mobile?
According to the GitHub page the user.js is for desktop only but ublock should still work.
Why not add Snowflake while we’re at it?
I bounced between the two for years, i guess i am going back to Firefox full time.
The only reason I haven’t switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn’t have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it’s not a priority. 🤷
Yes, it really sucks. I am in the same boat. Samsung Internet on my tablet; really wish I had FF on it.
So use edge
Its chrome-based… but at least its not brave, and the adblocker(which is off by default…) is decent enough
If you think the things brave has done are bad, go read through the list of things microsoft has done. You really don’t want them to ever have a browser again, and certainly don’t want to personally use it.
I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn’t handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up
I really enjoy the chromium grouping of tabs. So much so that’s it’s almost a deciding factor for which browser I choose. I hope Firefox adds that feature soon, so the switch back feels easier
Try the Simple Tab Groups addon for Firefox. I’ve been using it for years and prefer it to any other tab grouping now.
Will do, thanks! But in the meantime I switched to Vivaldi and I quite like it!
I really enjoy the chromium grouping of tabs. So much so that’s it’s almost a deciding factor for which browser I choose. I hope Firefox adds that feature soon, so the switch back feels easier
Same. I had no idea about brave and I started using it full time on all my devices like a month ago. Guess I’m going back to Firefox. Which was fine.
I’ve switched on Desktop a year ago. Also with Android. But Firefox on Android has an odd bug that I cannot get rid of. Pages are really slow to load on initial render. I’ve noticed it gets stuck on the SSL cert verification step, sometimes around 5 to 10 seconds before it starts painting the page.
I’ve tried disabling all add-ons, logging out of Firefox sync, disabling the built in HTTPS everywhere, and literally any custom settings I’ve added. But I can’t get past this issue and seemingly no one else has it.
Chrome doesn’t present this issue.
I’ve never encountered this, which makes me realise I’ve been running Firefox beta for ages (with zero issues). Perhaps try that just in case it helps?
Yup got the same thing. Annoying as hell. The loading bar always goes to like quarter of the way and stays there for a couple of seconds and the continues. After that it’s fine, but it is always the first page you load after closing Firefox.
Same issue here! I thought I was alone. It annoys me to no end and weirder still, issue doesn’t present itself with Firefox for Windows running behind the same IP.
Firefox Focus also doesn’t seem to present the issue. Just the primary Firefox browser for Android. And honestly, often enough that it’s nearly unusable.
If you ever figure it out, please let me know.
I don’t have that issue on Mull, so maybe try that?
You’re not alone, I’ve been using Firefox on Android for two years now, and I’ve had this problem from the beginning. The first time I launch Firefox and load a page it stops a quarter of the progression bar for ten seconds, and then loads fine. Once pas that everything works perfectly. It’s very annoying and I don’t know why this happens.
I use chrome on my mobile device… Is that bad?
Might as well take shits with the door unlocked; same level of exposing yourself.
And ads. Ads everywhere.
Ooh tell me more
About Chrome, or the shitting?
The shitting with the door open. That’s why you can’t get married, dad. ( Sorry for the shotty Stepbrothers reference)
In a way yes. You’re giving Google (via an increased browser market share) the power to decide the direction of the web. Their interests as a corporate organization are not aligned with yours, so they will make decisions to your detriment if they have to.
Just use Firefox. Mozilla isn’t good but it’s not evil
It’s not really bad per se, it’s the default on most Android devices these days. The problem is that almost all modern browsers are Chromium-based which give Google a lot of power to implement changes (see manifest v3 & web DRM). Personally, I’m trying to slowly reduce my usage of Google products. I’m using Firefox on desktop and a mix of DDG+Fennec on my phone.
Thank You! I’ll look into DDG n Fennec.
Unrelated, but why is it that so many kbin users seem to keep a dedicated reducing account? Relatively frequently, an account that reduces a post or comment has no recent posts or comments but heavy initial usage a ~month ago as jpgr above. It’s weird.
I think those existed on Reddit too. It’s just that you could never actually confirm they existed.
Which was why they existed, as alts to upvote a user’s own posts and downvote opposing ones.
Except now we’re on kbin, we can see them.
I downvoted because it was a lazy comment not providing further elaboration. If anything, the fact that such a comment is highly upvoted shows that this community is not mature yet.
That I’m not engaging in online discussion doesn’t automatically mean this is a bot or “dedicated reducing” account. Please restrain yourself from judging strangers on the internet.
In a space dominated by people endlessly sharing opinions and articles and memes, it’s just extremely peculiar to find accounts like yours so frequently downvoting while absent other activities even if it’s relatively mundane. Take, for instance, the upvotes on nothingwise’s comment where 1/5 are blank accounts. The novelty of the information sets off alarm bells, so I apologize if I was mistaken. I’m not trying to start a witch-hunt or JAQ off so I’ll leave it at that.
On mac? Love safari? But also want good adblock? Use Orion! It’s safari, but with support for chrome and Firefox extensions! Fuck yeah!
I always loved safari, and always got weird looks for it as a web developer (but after a month or two they love me for it because I always find non-chrome bugs because those peasants only use chrome), but that browser is so damn good guys… on mac, that is. Not sure if it even exists yet for linux/win.
Orion
Thanks for the tip! Do you know any similar solution like this for iOS? I’m struggling to find a fully featured browser with decent ad-blocking capacity.
Just moved from Brave to Firefox when that “AI training” story came out. I think it’s faster than brave now
I am using Brave on iOS mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
Firefox and mozilla aren’t your friend.
They like to play the “user and privacy friendly” company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.
Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated “I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That’s too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.”
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
They don’t need to be my friend to be better than the chromium browsers though, so I don’t know what this has to do with anything
Doesn’t Firefox do telemetry and other shady shit out of the box? Ofc you can turn it off but I don’t get the fanaticism over this browser.
The fact that they have (at least for now) foregone implementing Manifest v3 should be reason enough to use Firefox. Turn their telemetry off and use ublock origin, call it a day well spent.
If you’re inclined to, use Librewolf with ublock, NoScript, decentraleyes, and chameleon.
Copy the bypasspaywalls sites into ublock, add a redirect extension to avoid all the idiot megacorps, and use duckduckgo lite and learn to use shebangs for very fast web searching.
Yeah it’s not perfect out of the box but after turning off telemetry and adding some add-ons like ublock origin and such it’s one of the best short of going full on tor/mullvad. And still less fanaticism than brave lol
With brave I never see any pc or YouTube ads. With Firefox even with ublock origin I can’t get rid of those damn ads. That’s what keeps me on brave
Which websites exactly do you still see ads on with ublock and not with Brave? Because I’ve not seen any ads in years with ublock.
I don’t know why you’re getting ads… I run Firefox + uBlock just fine.
But I also run NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Maybe try those?
(Yes I know NoScript with uBlock is pretty redundant. Doesn’t really bother me to allow scripts on both to unbreak things. I like the double lock.)
The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they’re literally just trying to make their own adsense network.
The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.
And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it “Basic Attent Tokens”…
TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you’ll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.
The fact that their founder wants to ban gay marriage is enough reason for me to avoid it like the plague.
I dont know why anyone would leave chrome and land on something like brave.
If youre ditching chrome, which you should, go to an actual different browser and use Firefox.
Personal anecdote:
When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions I’d grown accustomed to.
That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once I’d weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
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Also, if you going to completely ditch chrome/chromium, also stop using Electron apps (which have chromium/Chromium Embedded Framework on them!)
That’s gonna be quite difficult, unfortunately
What if the apps aren’t for online use?
I use it as my hardened Firefox doesn’t play well with some government and bank sites
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don’t buy the argument that it’s easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It’s not as complicated as people make it out to be. It’s not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they’ll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine’s direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
It really doesn’t matter what Firefox’es codebase is though. To a web developer it’s a black box. It may as well be COBOL. So long as enough people use it and it behaves differently to a web developer than Google’s Chromium or Chrome, the goal you mentioned is achieved. This is why I don’t buy this argument.
I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately “designed for Chrome” is a thing now, and got sick of Google’s bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.
When I need a Chromium browser I use Vivaldi. I quite like it!
Ungoogled Chromium is a great option for a back up. It’s lightweight and works well
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I am using Brave mainly because of its superb YouTube support - It has a built in ad block, can download videos offline and play minimized. Is there any way I can achieve this with any other browser? I would switch immediately.
I’ve tried Firefox several times but always end up back on chromium due to compatibility; a lot of sites don’t play well with anything but chrome anymore and this is very much something intentionally caused by Google, who have basically taken a page out of Microsoft’s playbook but with a much more mature product that is going to be substantially harder to replace then IE was
Firefox and gecko are just not as smooth. I don’t know how you don’t notice this, especially on Android.
I have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It’s business model is disgusting and extortionate, it’s like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.
Brave is a marching band of red flags. It claims privacy while injecting ads, affiliate codes and crypto into the browser. It’s kind of sad to see someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side and pretend this is all fine. It isn’t.
Best advice I could give for anyone who wants privacy is use Firefox or a branch of it. Firefox is out of the box the most privacy conscious mainstream browser and add-ons make it more so. If you want absolute privacy you could even use a derivative like Tor Browser.
someone like Brendan Eich who should know better turn to the dark side
LOL, he inflicted Javascript upon the world. He never knew better and was always on the dark side.
JavaScript is a victim of its own popularity. It was originally meant to be scripting glue to do little actions in the browser while the real work was done in Java (LiveConnect) apps. But Java got jettisoned, JavaScript became more important and became the thing we love and hate today.
JavaScript is a victim of its own popularity.
No, that’s not the issue. If Javascript were well-designed we wouldn’t hate it, but it wasn’t.
Most of the examples listed there are issues that don’t affect real applications. It’s just garbage code, so the output ends up being garbage too. Programmers don’t write code like that, unless they are doing it as a joke. A few of those examples can be real issues sometimes, but they are not that big of a deal to an experienced JavaScript programmer.
It’s an imperfect language like any other.
Louis Rossmann also recommended Brave in one of his videos. Quite sad.
I like a fair amount of his videos but he has a big ole bag of bad takes
Love everything he criticizes (corporate greed, drm, wasteful planned obsolescence, unrepairable disposable device design) are all incentivized and rewarded under Capitalism … but since he’s a small business owner he still supports the idea of Capitalism.
He gets so close.
Exactly my thoughts. He’s like right on the edge but to me it seems he has some cognitive dissonance re capitalism
Informative and unfortunate
heh… I got that
Brodie Robertson also uses Brave. Quite sad x2.
These people talking as if not all the crypto bloat would be opt in lol. It just take 30 seconds or even less to turn off everything of that.
Brave is more secure than Firefox out of the box.
At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see. Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave, and that’s what’s wrong in general with the “but the UX is so nice” mentality.
Lots of people today still mindlessly recommend Brave
It starts to feel astroturfed at a certain point. The last week or so has been crazy.
I would bet my left nut they astroturf
They’re cryptocurrency scammers; do you expect them not to hustle?
At one point they were scummy enough to automatically add their referral codes to any Amazon link you see.
To be clear, that means Brave is ① invading their users’ privacy, and ② stealing money from web publishers.
The point of referral codes is to reward web publishers for referring users to a product; leading to the user buying a product that they otherwise wouldn’t.
Your browser isn’t introducing you to a product. For it to insert referral codes for the browser vendor’s benefit is stealing money.
Its almost like UX is one of the most important things for a user of any given program. 🥴
If you really dig into the whole ordeal it was a software error, not some malicious idea to steal links from creators.
How exactly does one accidentally insert affiliate data on links? At some point someone wrote that code, which is malicious in itself, even if the activation was accidental.
It’s also strange that it happened twice, first with amazon links, then they started injecting affiliate data for crypto platforms instead.
What’s so bad about that?
It’s without your consent.
Most of the stuff that happens on the backend of any software goes on “without your consent”.
You clicked on a webpage.
You were brought to that webpage.
You weren’t tracked, logged, or had your data exploited or anything. All that happened was Brave got an affiliate bonus.
Now if the companies in question were angry at Brave for doing that, I could understand. But why should we, the users, give a shit?
You weren’t tracked, logged, or had your data exploited or anything. All that happened was Brave got an affiliate bonus.
You seem to not know how affiliate links work. The products shopped are tracked & logged per user, and can be analyzed by the affiliate partner as to what their users were buying, i.e. data can be exploited.
I don’t know a lot, so maybe you know more than me. The tracking and logging is via cookies, right?
The same cookies that brave automatically blocks?
Again, maybe they do some tracking via some other method that I don’t know about; I’m not an expert. But it seems to me that Brave was essentially scamming those companies by using their referral codes but denying them any useful data. Great for brave, sucks for the companies, shouldn’t matter to us.
Not necessarily via cookies. The referral links can be unique to a specific user.
Why the fuck should your browser get a share from your amazon shopping? It’s doubly galling since they pretend to care about user privacy.
Yeah, fuck this guy.
First, I have been online for almost 30 years. I’ve led an open source project for 14 years. I speak regularly at conferences around the world, and socialize with members of the Mozilla, JavaScript, and other web developer communities. I challenge anyone to cite an incident where I displayed hatred, or ever treated someone less than respectfully because of group affinity or individual identity.
So I hid my hatred from everyone for 30 years successfully. Now that everyone finds out that I donated to a cause to strip them of rights everyone wants to say I’m hateful? Give me one example where I displayed hatred…how about the time you donated to strip people of their rights? That might be a big one for me.
The fact that its main 2 gimmicks are a shitty ad blocker and integrated cryptocurrency should be enough of a red flag, honestly. Just use Firefox, people!
the hateful browser
Holy shit man imagine if we judged every huge project by one asshole at the top. There wouldn’t be a single thing to enjoy in this world.
Edit:
I am going to add more perspective to this, because holy shit people are so into eating nothing burgers.
Reddit/Twitter was a database and API that everyone was centralized onto, there was no choice. Brave you can literally fork because its open source. Aside from that this was literally the CEO’s personal donation of $1000…in like 2014. Almost 10 yrs ago.
Elon, as CEO and on the X/Twitter brand:
- “brainwashed” https://www.news18.com/buzz/elon-musk-causes-uproar-with-anti-lgbtq-anti-vax-meme-insults-random-twitter-user-6714733.html
- https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musks-twitter-makes-millions-off-anti-lgbt-groomer-tweets-report
- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitter-pronoun-rule-invites-bullying-lgbtq-groups-say-rcna87336
- https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/21/elon-musk-triples-down-on-making-twitter-terrible-for-trans-people/
Meanwhile Brendan:
- Literally stepped down as CEO https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/brendan-eich-resigns-as-mozilla-corporation-ceo/
- https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/brendan-eich-steps-down-as-mozilla-ceo/
- made personal blog post about inclusivity shortly after https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/
- invented and worked on/for javascript, brave, firefox
Gnubyte
Firefox is king 👑
So the CEO is a raging alt-righter. Glad I never used his product then.
Vivaldi? Trusting a closed sourced application for privacy? What?
Not even defending brave here, just weird that the author say that.
This article is useless trash. There is no real technical argument here except “founder bad”.
I do have reasons for not using Brave, but it’s to do with the annoying defaults and the crypto integration. They default whitelist Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook garbage that I have to go and toggle off.
Given the level of effort and extensions like Facebook container on Firefox, I just prefer the better experience for me. This bullshit about getting on identity politics agendas I find abhorrent and repulsive. This author’s a stupid fuckhead.
