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Comment by sam_goody | Hacker News Reader

Chromium is definitely worse.

While these deserve an explanation, you should not wait to move.

Chrome is spyware that does web browsing. It's parent company also shows ads, all the time.

Chrome's auto update not only allows them to silently update or change your browser, it allows them to silently install other software on your computer.

Firefox is a browser. It can auto-update in a way that may be questionable, but it also has a lot of cranky devs looking over their shoulder to call them out years later because Mr. Robot may have been able to show them an ad. FF deserves to be called out on their mistakes, and need offer an explanation. But perspective!

Why would you not move now?

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I want the ethics of Firefox and the speed / user experience (eg. select & move multiple tabs) of Chrome, so I moved to Brave. It's a Chromium fork that's a bit more Firefoxy -- made by Brendan Eich, former Mozilla CEO and inventor of JS, (eg has the "Switch to Open Tab" feature I love from FF), although there's some cryptocurrency stuff thrown in that I'm not a fan of, but so far it feels like a net positive over both FF and Chrome.

It's very privacy oriented, to such a degree that it actually breaks a lot of websites (but you can disable the shields easy).

If you haven't read this one yet, here's one data point on Brave doing something unethical (blocking ads and collecting payments on behalf of websites without consent/agreement). [1] Tangentially, I'm writing this comment using Brave.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999

Sadly, I'd also like more competition in the browser technology space; with Edge switching to Chromium, and Safari's years of neglect, it's not looking too good.

Chromium is not Chrome. It does not have auto-update. Surprisingly this gives more control by default than with Firefox.

But Chromium still has most, if not all, the Google integration.

There are forks that try to strip Google from it, but it is a mistake to assume that Chromium is somehow better than Chrome.

Firefox by default sends all your searches to Google, and uses Google search suggestions (so sends all typed in text to Google).

What other integrations, specifically please, does Chromium have with Google?

Aside: do Google serve the Firefox Newtab adverts, perhaps that "feature" was added for the extra money Firefox are getting from Google?

The Newtab adverts are not served by Google IIRC and they are only matched with you data locally in your browser, you get a lot of them from Mozilla and locally on your machine they get targeted so you aren't tracked online (If my memory of the article on it is correct)

Is this still true of the default search engine is set to something other than Google? What are the relevant config keys?

Many things.

1. It uses Google DNS internally, bypassing system DNS.

2. First-run analytics to Google, new tab page analytics to Google.

3. Various built-in google services that phone home: Google Host Detector, Google URL Tracker, Google Cloud Messaging, Google Hotwording, Google Safe Browsing, WiveDine DRM, Google AutoFill, etc.

4. Update checks for all these components (the browser does not have update, but the rest does).

5. Countless accesses to Google, such as geo-location to find nearest Google server, ping probes for connectivity, etc. For a list of domains that are accessed by Chromium, see this regex used by the ungoogled-chromium project: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/blob/30969fddf...

More info at https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/tree/30969fddf....

I see no problem with neither Chrome nor Firefox defaulting to Google search and suggestions, as that is easily configurable for normal users. All of the above, however, is not.

Cool, thanks. Do you happen to know if Brave has these issues too?

It doesn't - like ungoogled-chromium, Brave have replaced references to any Google endpoints with placeholders that don't resolve to anything.

> and uses Google search suggestions (so sends all typed in text to Google)

This is not true. Firefox explicitly asks you the first time you start typing a search in the location bar whether to allow search suggestions. It is opt-in.

Firefox also allows you to keep the location/search bar separate so that you can have search suggestions without sending every URL you type to Google.

I find it very disturbing that the very dangerous issue with Chrome and its family is not discussed here, which is the erosion of web standards.

tl;dr : Choosing anything based on Chromium is giving the death sentence to the Web "democracy"

Moving to a Chromium based browser is letting more and more market share to a browser engine whose roadmap is fully determined by Google. The issue trackers of Chromium or Android projects clearly shows how much Google values its users'feedback about their most wanted features : Not At All. These days it seems they are starting to feel the same about open standards... At first with WHATWG getting in the yard of W3C they tried to get more influence on the redaction of standards, now they don't even bother since they can force anything they want in a "de facto standard" as they are doing with AMP.

The next step is to obliterate any standardized feature they don't like. It can seems to be a frivolous issue but they are doing this right now to SVG-in-OpenType, a standard that is currently implemented in all major browsers except Chromium family (yes even Edge see https://www.colorfonts.wtf/#section4 but the switch to Chromium will probably end it). Here is what Google responds to the numerous people aking them to implement it : https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078... Apparently a feature even the -probably small- team of Edge developers managed to implement is too complicated for Google chrome engineers ?!? This will get more and more frequent as long they have more than 80% of browser marketshares.

So if you switch to ANY Chromium based browser, even if it's for privacy reasons, PLEASE keep in mind that you are working for the destruction of the web "democracy".

It is disheartening how we seem to learn so little from history, even recent one. It seems like yesterday that the web managed to come out from under the stranglehold of IE and now the wheel turns yet again. This time it may be even harder to break the monopoly since billions of ordinary web surfers have little to no idea of these issues and default to Chrome because it is pre-installed and has almost become synonymous for a browser.

Google still pay for Firefox; about $2 per user. So, Chrome and Firefox are funded by the same people. In fact Google upped the money they're paying despite FF's falling users share, what are they getting for their money - I doubt they're giving it out of charity.

It's like price differentiation, I feel. FF is for people who want to avoid Google, but Google are paying to get privacy-infringement lite. Who knows what else besides being default search provider, and getting every search you type in through search suggestions, they're getting for their money?

>cranky devs looking over their shoulder to call them out years later because Mr. Robot may have been able to show them an ad //

Way to underplay things. Do Chrome change their UI (ie chrome) to ad advertising? Do they force add-ons on people that are unremovable in order to advertise a product? And then update, re-placing the advert into users chrome who've removed it? Do they blank out users home-screen settings in order to add advertising? (I think they did do that one?)

Chrome may be spyware, but default so is FF. And Mozilla have shown they're more than happy to mess around with their users browsers for advertising/promotions.

Aside: how is Chromium worse? Waterfox is looking like a good option.

I've been reading lot of comments like the parent lately. Thanks for voicing my thoughts.

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