Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Brave? Hard no. Vivaldi? Also no.
Also, where are qutebrowser and Zen?
qutebrowser and IceCat are real top of the game when it comes to privacy. But then, they break some of the sites functionality, especially IceCat who seems to be going under the "if your site doesn't work, it's your site's problem" motto.
Which is honestly fair? Like, i would enjoy a "unsafe site, access anyways?" button, but if privacy settings break a page that literally is the pages fault for not respecting privacy.
Edit: typo
Kinda, but I would like to tailor my experience a bit more than "all or nothing".
IceCat is directly a GNU project, so it's highly ideological - which is important and respectable in a way, but then it gets adoption to near-zero because most sites just don't work out of the box, and to make it work properly means completely removing all safeguards that make IceCat make sense. There's little in between.
I'd rather have something like LibreWolf, but without phone-home functionality, or at least a switch to turn it off. Out of all Firefox forks I know, only IceCat respects user privacy in this way - 0 connections on startup, and then only connection to actual site and whatever it requires.
Opt-in telemetry (ideally - leveled) and manual bug information sending are totally fine, though.
What's bad about Vivaldi?
It’s proprietary
The UI is as far as I know proprietary
Nothing in the browser should be proprietary. Any proprietary part is a possibility of malice, and browsers are mission critical.
I don’t disagree with that. It’s just that most browsers are built that way, unfortunately. Nothing is free, not even Firefox. If you want to sell it, it’s hard to maintain reasonable expectations that people won’t just build it from source instead of buying it. Something 100% free can’t maintain itself over long time.
Firefox is open source, and while it takes some shady practices to fund it (it sure isn't cheap to run your own damn engine alongside everything on top), I take it as a more tenable compromise. It's not about free as in beer freedom, it's about basic security.
You can also have degoogled Chromium which is open-source if you're into it.
Even EDGE is a ungoogled Chromium (but containing M$ tracking APIs instead). Vivaldi IS a degoogled Chromium, a small part of the UI (by far the most advanced one of any other browser) is proprietary, but not really obfuscated, they show even in the support forum how the user can modding it, if for him isn't enough what he can do in the most complete setting page ever, the only thing is, you can't use it for other browser projects. It's certainly not a privacy or security issue.
Chromium as is, is 100% FLOSS but because of this isn't more private or secure as a proprietary soft, FLOSS isn't automaticly synonym of privacy and security, a lot of people confuse it, it's not the propósit of OpenSource, privacy and security of an soft depends only of the intentions of the developer or company, not if their soft is OSS or not. The user can audit the soft, which in any case is needed if he don't want or be able to check millons of lines in the code which a complex soft like a browser engine has.
Of course I mean pure ungoogled Chromium, without bloat on top.
Not only browser code consists of millions of lines, it is also audited by thousands of people, and, importantly, changes can be highlighted, which doesn't allow for them to go unnoticed.
Successful mass attacks with OSS typically require much more skill and resources as you need for you malicious code to be written in a way that stays unnoticed (and eventually, rather soon, it will be discovered, with all consequences).
With closed source programs, integrating malicious code is easy, and this code can stay there unnoticed for ages, so they are 100% "trust me bro, I don't do anything bad".
So, yes, OSS is more secure.
Agree, it's the problem with closed source, but also easy with FOSS with bad maintenance, even more, because also the hacker can see the source code, without the need to desensamble it. In Vivaldi some of the UI part (5%) is proprietary, but not really closed source in it's sense of meaning, apart it has a continuous maintenance, with snapshot releases and frequent updates, a great community with the participation of the team and beta-testers. Very transparent all this, no space for fishy or shady things.
Vivaldi (a employee owned cooperative from Norway) was since years active against the shady practices of US companies and one of the promotors, along with the Consumer Organisation from Norway and some others, which caused the current EU GDPR law. Nowadays it's needed to promoting European products and services to gain sovereignty from the US hegemony of big corporations. but sadly in browsers there are only three from Europe: Vivaldi (Norway), Mullvad (Sweden) and Konqueror (KDE, Germany), the other one, UR (France) is dead since a lot of years.
Mullvad is maybe the most private browser after TOR, but apart of this not much more, Sync with Mozilla account which is a no-go for me. Konqueror, based on the KHTML engine (Grandfather of Blink and WebKit) is Linux desktop only, interesting features, but few extensions and somewhat limited. Well, end of the choices.
LibreWolf W. Missing my boy Zen Browser on there tho
Edit: also RIP Mull 😔✊
What happened to mull ? :o
The DivestOS project mostly discontinued. There is a Fork called IronFox
Putting Cromite at the bottom most tier makes me discard the entire thing.
Brb, double clicking 'Netscape Navigator' to go on 'Ask Jeeves' to look up what this "PewDiePie" is
The only problem with Ungoogled that makes it "not ideal for a normal human" is that fact that it is still cumbersome af to download it. Regular people don't know github and how to click on "show all assets" and pick the right build.
Isn't installing extensions in it also a pain, since the Google webstore doesn't let you install from it?
I guess to answer my own question, I looked it up - there's an extension to let you do that alongside some flag changes, so I guess not too bad... But it's another step on the list of things you'd want to do as a user
Yeah that extension should be shipped with the browser to make things easier.
I like my browser hard AF
Why is the open source Chromium ranked worse than Google Chrome?
It's a youtuber, who made this, and people feel hurt, because he doesn't put their browser at the top. That's just sad. He puts Firefox at the top - I use Firefox, and I still don't care what he thinks about it. I make informed choices, it's not religion for me...
He didn't even made this, is a screenshot of a bunch of browsers that appears for 2 seconds on a video.
Hey, Cromite is great. Take it under "solid".
What's with Mull being at the very bottom? It was the best Firefox app
