Comment by HelloImDumb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HelloImDumb | Hacker News Reader

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I see your point, but they don't leapfrog Chrome in privacy when the browser is pwned and leaks its entire process state to an attacker.

Any browser is a massive, rich attack surface with bugs, but Chrome has been cutting edge in its sandboxing, privilege separation, and overall security.

True, Chrome is and has always been a Google marketing vehicle, where the user is the product. But has Mozilla always been at the forefront of privacy, even? Something as basic as private browsing, let's see:

April 29, 2005 Safari 2.0 Private Browsing

December 11, 2008 Google Chrome 1.0 Incognito

March 19, 2009 Internet Explorer 8 InPrivate Browsing

June 30, 2009 Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Private Browsing

Apple, Google, and Microsoft all beat Mozilla to the punch.

Well, private browsing really functions as mechanism to discourage people from routinely deleting their cookies. (Which, according to a mid-2000s report, was an extremely common user activity.) Firefox always had an option to delete history/cookies on exit.

Firefox had plugins for private browsing since 2008. Only Apple beat them.

One of Chrome's many small victories was including sensible plugins by default, whereas Firefox's best functionality had to be downloaded separately.

What kind of moving goalpost is that? Chrome 1.0 came with Incognito built-in. Safari had it for three years. Because there may have been a plugin for Firefox a few months before Chrome's release, and followed IE in shipping it, it's the superior privacy option?

1) I didn't say Firefox was better for privacy. I was only pointing out that comparing the browsers based on built-in privacy mode isn't apples-to-apples.

2) On a related note, Firefox left out lots of features because there were well-supported, popular plugins that covered the same thing. Whenever a browser gets built-in ad blocking, should we say that all the other browsers are worse privacy options because they chose to leave those as third-party plugins?

On 2, I would say yes. The default experience matters.

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