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Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

If you're really set on a Chrome-like browser, there's ungoogled chromium. Otherwise, I guess Firefox is the only truly free choice at this point, and even that includes DRM to be able to cope with sites like Netflix.

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?

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Brave and Vivaldi are both based on Chromium and have packaged, non-Google distributions.

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.

Vivaldi still has Google features like search and safebrowsing which report everything you type into the URL bar and every site you visit to Google by default. Simply "not packaged by Google" doesn't guarantee non-Google.

You can interact with SafeSearch in one of two ways: by sending a URL hash to Google, or by downloading the list of URLs and performing your checks locally.

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)

I just spotted something after updating Brave this evening. Included in the update was the version bump to Chromium 69 - and when I re-launched Brave, there was a popup saying "Here are the new features in Chrome 69", and clicking on it took me to a Google-hosted page listing all the ways in which Chrome 69 phones home for a safer, faster, more convenient browsing experience.

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.

Firefox DRM is only downloaded after explicit user consent.

Firefox currently downloads the (Google Widevine) DRM blob automatically. Firefox will prompt you before using the DRM blob to play video, but you have two options if you don't want it on your computer:

* 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.

http://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/62.0.2/

I'm using Ubuntu's Chromium package and it isn't "un-googled" at all (69.0.3497.81-0ubuntu0.18.04.1). Any Ubuntu users have tips?

Firefox is completely ungoogled once you change the default search engine.

Well, with Firefox I have a separate issue which is that I never know when an update will include default-enabled integration with Pocket, a phone service, or some other startup that's scratched Mozilla's back in the past six months. So Firefox isn't a replacement. Also I was badly burned by Firefox removing support for XUL extensions, and refuse to depend on that browser again. I have serious misgivings with how Firefox is managed. You're not being helpful since you know I know about Firefox, and my question is about Chrome.

They ditched proprietary extensions in favor of an open spec than any other browser can use... I mean WebExtensions are here to stay and for the greater good. I can't understand blind hatred towards a move towards an open source alternative.

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.

Proprietary? By that standard, Firefox is proprietaty because they roll their own browser. Just because it's custom doesn't make it proprietary.

And I also got burned by the very badly managed WebExtensions thing. I can totally see where GP is coming from.

And blocked site list, right? I forgot the name but there is this anti-phishing and -malware list with 40% false-positives that Firefox uses and is maintained by Google.

Which you can disable.

Right, but the parent comment was claiming that Firefox is ungoogled after only one setting.

Except for the Google Analytics embedded into the extension system.

Really? Do you have a source for this?

I assume they're talking about the use of google analytics on the about:addons page discussed here: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785

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.

So is it disabled by default since Firefox now sends Do Not Track by default?

No. It's excluded by default, and only blocked if the user manually enables Do Not Track in the Preferences section.

https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785

I'm guessing that the parent is referring to this particular build/"fork": https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Chromium != ungoogled chromium, also not when it comes from FOSS repositories.

This is ungoogled chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Thank you for clarifying (and sibling who posted the same!).

I think they were referring to https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium (which I suspect is not what Ubuntu ships)

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