I'm not sure where to go from here because it seems pointless to even use Chromium if I can't remove Google from it and still be able to login to Gmail.
Are you referring to the chromium space options, or the browser market as a whole? I’ve never left Firefox and still find it to be a pleasant browser, one with which I’ve never felt really left out barring a few annoying bugs from time to time that are typically short lived.
It is true the Firefox's dev tools are a lot better now than they used to be - I use them regularly when I test sites cross browser. But they lack critical features like source editing and stack rewinding, and the tiny visual/layout improvements they've made are not enough to get over that. In Chromium, if I pause a script, I can edit a line code earlier in the function, resume, and Chromium will rewind the stack to that point and replay it forward with my changes.
It is insanely useful, hands down the single tool that I use most often. Stuff like that blows Firefox's dev tools out of the water, because it turns out that I debug Javascript more often than I debug Grid layouts.
A while back I looked into whether or not anyone at Mozilla was working on something comparable, and there was somebody. But then everything went silent and I don't know the status anymore. I've been wondering for multiple years now why this kind of stuff isn't higher priority than new Grid tools or color selectors or whatever.
Firefox's dev tools are way behind Chrome's in basic functionality, even if the user experience is otherwise excellent. You can't even set breakpoints on DOM elements. I would disagree with anyone who claims that they're even remotely comparable tools at this point.
Based on what? What did you try to do and couldn't? Or is your complaint - like the rest of your comment says - that you weren't immediately familiar with the UI, you didn't bother learning, and then decided it was the browser's fault?
How long did it take originally for you to learn the Chrome tools and how long have you given Firefox?
It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's, which is frustrating because FF (really, FireBug, unless you count the weird IE stuff) pretty much _made_ the concept of browser tools great.
I'd love to use FF again too, but for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain. 's why I just use Safari.
I agree, but how is this relevant to my comment? I didn't say the GP did anything wrong - I asked them what they did. Not nearly the same thing.
> It's a pretty widely held thing that FF's dev tools don't feel as smooth or well thought out as Chrome's
There are a large number of groups with widely held beliefs where said beliefs don't stand up to scrutiny. "It doesn't feel like Chrome" is not a belief that doubles as valid criticism because it's not actionable. Its sole purpose is to complain about things while making sure nobody can ever act on them because it's so vague.
> for me the blocker is the UI and battery drain
While "the UI" fits in to the category above, battery drain is an actual, specific, measurable and actionable complaint. So please, more of the latter, less of the former.
These are not things that Firefox just does differently, they're features that Firefox just doesn't have.
Firefox's dev tools aren't bad in and of themselves. The UX is fine, and getting better. I don't know if other people have opinions about memory tools or profiling -- I don't all that much.
I guess Firefox's dev tools look prettier, and they do have some features that Chrome doesn't. But Firefox features tend to trend more towards, "here's a cool thing like the ability to debug shaders". Chrome's trend more towards, "here's a useful thing like the ability to debug Javascript."
Firefox container tabs are game changing.
(Before I get you-can-do-this-and-that replies, I know Profile Manager exists, and that's an ugly hack: macOS users should not need to run multiple copies of the same app bundle.)
The big thing that's different with container tabs is that after you set it up (which is done little by little as you decide to open something in a specific tab and then mark it to always open there), it's not something you actively manage, it passively does what you want. That's why it's so different.
Having every site be it's own container (which is also a mode Firefox supports, to my knowledge) would be slightly more passive, but also likely cause problems with some sites that use multiple domains, so I think container tabs is a good compromise (for now) that allows good compartmentalization while also allowing escape hatches for sires that require it.
If you ultimately do want to keep using chrome for the dev tools, you can switch your primary browser to ff and use Chromium (without signing in at all) just for that purpose. There's no reason you have to use your primary browser for your web development work.
I like gmail web mail a lot, and don't have any desire to switch. It seems absurd that my web browser would be incompatible with that.
I obviously get the idea of privacy. But using gmail somewhat contradicts it.
What you DIDN'T sign up for is Chrome, which can see every site you have every visited, sending all of that info to Google as well to perhaps start targetting some different ads at you. I'm sure that would work well if one of your housemates had visited a dodgy site, which then picks up some suspect ads when you are doing online shopping with your girlfriend.
Well, I've sort of just accepted that Google has all of my personal data at this point. I trust them with data that I want to explicitly give up for the sake of convenience. Anything I type into Gmail I can accept as becoming essentially public record.
However, that doesn't extend to passively collected browsing data. It creeps the shit out of me that my private browsing history could be associated to my real life identity and other PII by someone at Google.
I'm thinking about doing that.
The single reason I started with GMail was because at the time, it had the best spam filter in the industry.
But that was years ago. Has everyone else caught up? Is there another option with equally good spam filtering?
IMO, options like ProtonMail are much better. A service that isn't free but doesn't exploit users in order to make $$ ought to be a better option.
Otherwise I've had pretty good luck.
Edit: actually, there should be more browsers that I don't know about because I haven't really looked around anymore since choosing Firefox a decade ago. Is anything as well-supported (in terms of proper rendering and security, as well as being FOSS / privacy-conscious) that I should look at other than ungoogled chromium?
I'm posting this comment on Brave, having switched over last week for most of my personal browsing. Generally like it a lot; there are a couple warts (it won't open S3 URLs from the AWS web interface, for example), but it does most of what I need in a browser.
As a replacement for Chrome on your PC, Brave takes the second approach, and performs the evaluation locally (pulling down a fresh list every so often for up-to-date comparisons). You'll have to check with Vivaldi on which approach they take.
Brave has all of the phone-home-to-Google logic removed. If you ever spot anything at all that gives you concern, do feel free to let us know.
Sampson (Brave Developer Relations)
After having just posted here, it was...disconcerting. I'd like to give you guys the benefit of the doubt, but you may want to check a fresh update & relaunch from 0.23 to 0.24. I doubt I could reproduce (I've already clicked past it, and it was only on the first re-launch), but for a moment I was pretty confused about what browser was open (in fact, the only reason I'm certain it's Brave is because I just double-checked my Chrome and it's still on 0.68). Brave 0.24, V8 6.9.427.23, rev f657f15, macOS x64 (10.11.6 El Capitan), OS Release 15.6.0, Brave Sync v1.4.2, libchromiumcontent 69.0.3497.100.
* You can uncheck Firefox's "Play DRM-controlled content" option (which will delete the DRM blob from disk). https://support.mozilla.org/kb/enable-drm
* Or you can install one of Mozilla's "EME-free" builds of Firefox. The only difference between regular and "EME-free" builds is the default value of the "Play DRM-controlled content" option.
This is ungoogled chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Two things to note from that thread:
From what I've read, Mozilla had some agreement with Google to keep all the data from their tracking stuff silo'ed so it wasn't aggregated with other data and wasn't used for anything besides showing back to Mozilla people.
and
They're now (and have been for more than a year) respecting DNT, removing the GA code so that you don't make any requests to google if you have that enabled.
As for Firefox including Pocket, they own Pocket for starters, and it's less annoying than Edge or Chrome pushing their analytics filled services. There's a lot less cruft on Firefox than in other browsers. If I really wanted I could use one of the GNU forks of Firefox, though I'm not sure how much more privacy conscious they may be aside from a bunch of brand rework.
And I also got burned by the very badly managed WebExtensions thing. I can totally see where GP is coming from.
Sorry. I call BS.