If you’re still using Chrome, do yourself a favour and install Firefox.
Meanwhile ublock origin works fine in Fennec/Firefox Android.
LibreWolf if you want security, privacy and freedom
Chrome? A browser that’s easily replaceable with any other browser? Huh… Didn’t see that one coming.
/S
I’m saying this as a 2 year convert Firefox user: mostly easily replaceable. Sure, I can browse pretty much every page that I can on chrome. However, a few sites don’t work the same way - sometimes because of the site’s conscious decision, sometimes because of Firefox.
Take Facebook, for example. On desktop, I can’t make voice calls anymore from the desktop site. For a while it was possible with non encrypted chats, but now pretty much all of them are encrypted, and FF is not compatible with that. I also can’t watch h265 videos in my chats anymore. I’m still sticking with FF, but I just can’t easily say that FF is just as good for everything (I’m still not going back to chrome).
Firefox-based https://zen-browser.app/ if you want to get fancy
Thanks for this!! I became spoiled with Arc’s UI, but it’s a Chrome based browser. This looks like it’s the same experience without the bs.
Yeah. Zen is a bit newer and I’d say not quite as slick an experience yet, but it has come a long way in the last couple months and is getting very good
This looks really interesting, but I have so many questions. A few important ones that come to mind immediately:
- What is the user agent that’s reported? I’m guessing Firefox, but if there are any indicators that would give it away it’s not Vanilla Firefox or a popular fork, this could make you more unique.
- Are the mods publicly identifiable? Another thing that might make you very unique and prone to fingerprinting.
A core part of being private online is blending in with traffic, so using a niche browser like Zen (depending on the configuration) would make you stand out.
The product looks good, and the privacy policy is pretty good too. Still, it’d be good to understand all the aspects of how Zen prevents you from standing out in the crowd.
I don’t know if you or someone else can speak to this. I would jump into their community, but it’s on Discord, so that’s absolutely not happening.
I switched to Firefox the morning they disabled uBlock Origin.
I never left Firefox. It’s a fantastic browser.
Unfortunately, there are only 3 companies developing browsers right now: Google, Apple and Mozilla.
Apple’s browsers are only available on Apple platforms. In fact, if you’re on iOS you have no choice, you have to use Safari. Even browsers labelled as “Chrome” or “Firefox” are actually Safari under the hood on iOS. But, on any non Apple platform, you can’t use Safari.
Google is an ad company, so they don’t want to allow ad blockers on their browser. So, it’s a matter of time before every kind of ad blocking is disabled for Chrome users.
Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google, so there’s a limit as to what they can do without the funding getting cut off. They seem to be trying to find a way forward without Google, but the result, if anything is as bad as Google if not worse:
“investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term;”
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
All these other browser people like are basically reskinned versions of Chrome or Firefox. They have a handful of people working on them. To actually develop a modern browser you need a big team. A modern browser basically has to be an OS capable of running everything from a 3d game engine, to a word processor, to a full featured debugger.
It looks like it’s only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads, because the only two companies that make multi-platform browsers depend on ads for their revenue, and both of them will have enormous expenses because they’re obsessed with stupid projects like AI.
Apple has a conflict of interest too: they need to keep safari gimped so that users have to install apps instead of using PWAs, so that Apple can keep getting 30% of the app sales.
As a result, Safari is terrible and very far behind in standards. It’s the new internet explorer.
The problem with Web Standards is that they’re so complete, broad and complex that it’s very hard as an independent team to get started writing a browser.
You’d have so little daily active users compared to the titans products (Chromium, Gecko, WebKit) that even if you made something super good, it would still be hard to guarantee website compatibility without faking the user-agents.
There’s also a lot of complexity involved in writing a sandbox for every instance of a website (tabs or iframe) and sharing information between multiple process. I don’t know how they do it in Chrome, but in Firefox they have a whole specification language for that which compiles to C++.
You also have to recreate the DevTools and other tooling for developers to adopt your browser and for you to debug any issues with your DOM renderer…
I love how much the web has to offer nowadays with technologies like WebRTC, WebSocket, Blobs, GamePad API, modern CSS3 but it has also the effect of locking us down into a tiny ecosystem.
I really their should be legislation on what companies can do with their browser because they’ve become such an important piece of the internet so they should serve public good.
I don’t know how to make it happen and I don’t even know if it’s a good idea when you consider the governance issues it would bring for open-source project.
I’m really passionate about this technology !
What is everyone’s thoughts on duckduckgo browser? I’m on grapheme os and have always used Firefox on my desktop
The Lemmy hivemind Firefox bias is a little bit insane lol
