No to Chrome
notochrome.org
notochrome.org
I have to admit, it has gotten a lot faster recently, Firefox sync is working very well, and the Firefox Android app is a pleasure to use (being able to install uBlock origin is a huge plus).
Anything else I missed on Chrome was easily solved by an addon, or a small tweak on userChrome.css (customizing the browser interface by overriding its CSS is amazing btw).
Edit: This post prompted me to Google for it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Debugger/How_...
Move along, nothing to see.. :-\
Looking good, will give it another go.
Firefox is generally still a little buggier and less performance in my experience, but not so much that I want to switch back. Hopefully they can stay relevant.
But Chromes debugger and performance analysis still is a lot more capable.
And in at least one regard it's entirely true: on iOS, everything uses WebKit.
If anything, it was a fork of Konqueror.
Edit: It was widely speculated that Apple would use gecko for Safari and a shock when they announced they would use the relatively little known KHTML engine. The decision was based on KHTML having much cleaner code. I haven't looked at the Mozilla code in many years, but it was pretty gnarly back then. Lots of old cruft from the Netscape days. In comparison, KHTML was beautiful.
This. I find any browser that doesn't do that to be unusable. The alternative, in long documents or source code, is to blindly hit NEXT and visit all locations where a search term is found rather than scrolling quickly to see the different context regions.
I tried a plug-in or two but they were not nearly as functional as the native Chrome experience.
Sorry, but as far as the modern browsers are concerned, we coders are a negligible market to cater for. The number of non-coder browser-users is orders magnitude higher than the number of coders.
This and the fact that I heard all the “switched to Firefox and nothing’s degraded” comments from coders, and upvoted by coders.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/highlightall/...
I think you misread that
I don't login anywhere (including the browser itself) I don't need to for work, I don't use any extensions, and I don't mix work with personal stuff.
For anything not work however, Firefox all the way. Keep the data off google's servers as much as I can.
Btw, I can code in TextEdit too, but I don’t because I have programmer’s text editors. Same goes for a web browser and its convenience features.
For me I cannot understand how people can choose to use a browser that doesn't support tree style tabs. I'll gladly sacrifice searcy result markers in the scrollbar as long as I have Firefox extensions.
A feature I cannot do without is the web developer console; much of the modern web pages are bad without it.
The older XPCOM-based extensions also are more powerful than the WebExtensions and can do many more things (I don't like the design of XPCOM, but nevertheless WebExtensions isn't very good either). Such as, I can alter the behaviour of the location bar; I don't like the default behaviour and I want it to treat my entry as a relative URL (rather than trying to add the scheme automatically or treat it as a search query), so I programmed it to do that.
Been using it for years and years, I never could adopt Chrome. First when it came out I tried it, but no adblocker, then when there was one, it was too crippled, my guess is that this was intentional since they're going back to crippling adblockers. Now we have network level adblockers which I think is the best approach.
I only use Chrome cause some kiosk-like application I'm developing will ship through Chrome (not Electron) / WebKit. Also my boss prefers to see it, so I demo with Chrome mainly, but I do all my real browsing on Firefox. I'm a geek / developer so I have Firefox and Chrome on every system I have. Except on Android, unless it's preinstalled for me, I wont get it.
- customizing userChrome.css .. It was a bit time consuming to figure out first (I wanted to remove the top bar and use vertical tabs). Happy to be able to do it, but it's not exactly user-friendly.
- Rejection of Windows local certificates store that requires fiddling with a setting to enable. If my certificate store is compromised Firefox is not going to save me. I don't recommend it over Chrome at work since we have one of these for a local server and I'd rather not generate support tickets.
Both of these are not part of Firefox Sync and require manual handling on each PC.
1: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/f972ec60de7...
While you probably can assume Firefox will mostly work, there's decades of history saying you probably shouldn't, given the state of enterprise web apps. To be safe, I wouldn't assume Firefox would work any better than lynx for an internal app if neither are listed as supported (and the same goes for every browser).
Like if I type "re" it completes to reddit.com even though I've deleted that entry. Chrome will respect the deletion and complete to reddit.com/r/all.
On the other hand, I like the meta-characters that can be used to modify the search results: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... (though I wish they were easier to remember).
Of course, there's an element of me having gotten too much used to Google Maps in some of this.
You mean street view? Apple Maps is slowly rolling out their version.
I was trying to show someone one of my favorite state highways through the Hoosier National Forest, but the road (remember, a state highway!) literally vanishes into the greenery until you zoom quite far in. Maddening.
I think that's not really what people have issues with. The scariest thing about YouTube to me is that there's so much great content that's only on YouTube and there's not really an alternative. So if YouTube goes away for some reason, or Google decides to wipe all videos with < xxxx views, or Google decides to get rid of it for liability issues or other things there's nothing to archive this amount of content.
It's tedious to even have to draw these distinctions at all, but I'm not saying it is the answer. A replacement is most preferable. In the meantime, here's something that accesses youtube without being associated with a youtube account or ads, which is one step better than being directly plugged in as we await a preferable alternative.
On OpenStreetMaps.org, zooming over my area (NYC) and searching for "pizza" brings up the first 3 results in Tuscany Italy.
It's a different world and just because we got by with sailing the oceans and using star navigation doesn't mean we can't use modern technology to improve our lives.
Where you used to find a stand with local maps in most fueling stations, you don't.
I'm looking at AAA's Map Gallery page trying to figure out if they offer paper maps any more. What's on offer are PDFs for online viewing or printing.
I'm someone who's got several atlases, globes, and piles of paper maps, as well as highway atlases and other paper-based navigational aids. I know how to use them. I prefer them.
They're simply not availabe as they were a decade ago (and for decades before that). And may well not exist in another ten years, except through extraordinary effort.
The "it's just an option" argument works until it doesn't. At which point it's not only not helpful, but not true.
So I just tried Mapquest and it had the same problem :(
Google's mapping dominance outside the US is really only challenged by Bing maps... which I can't get on iOS. Nearest is HERE maps but it's not quite the same product.
There is a plan to update the WebDriver standard to encompass the automation features that are currently only available via devtools protocols. There's agreement it should be possible to open up a bidirectional channel to the browser from within devtools and use it for things like listening to events, streaming logs, etc. However as so often happens reality dictates that implementing something compatible with CDP is needed today in order to interop with the range of existing tooling that's either CDP-only (e.g. Puppeteer) or WebDriver-with-CDP-extensions (e.g. SauceLabs, various WebDriver clients).
In the long term we hope that we end up with a "WebDriver 2.0" that will satisfy all the common use cases in a standard way. That bidirectional protocol will probably end up looking a lot like CDP just to ease the migration for existing implementations, but the details depend on work that hasn't yet been done.
That's due to content creators, not YouTube.
YT pressures content creators into doing all sorts of stupid shit. They are made to think they don't really have a choice unless they want to risk their monetisation.
One memorable particularity was YT prompting the content creators to make thumbnail images with grimacing faces, which IMO is cancerous. yt/user/theCodyReeder talked about it, but I cannot find the video any more, this was about two years ago.
If I want to see a video I have to read all titles and it gives me a chance to think if I want to stop watching.
An added bonus is that it takes me at least a couple seconds to find a video to watch when I open the front page and I don't end up subconsciously clicking the first interesting thumbnail.
PS: Also let me add that I'm using youtube signed off with no cookies in a browser that doesn't remember history so the front page is usually the same videos that I don't want to watch for a couple days or a week at a time.
Of late, I mostly use https://invidio.us
DDG bang: !invidious
Not as short as !yt, but it's there and works.
I also noticed how different colors are between Chrome and Firefox. That becomes more obvious in the dark mode.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/4DdMh7X
It's basically racketeering.
If you're keen on using chromium with manifest v2 add-ons, Vivaldi and Microsoft edge are both options to keep in mind.
Edge hasn't been released yet.
Vivaldi UI is a buggy and slow mess (I invite you to try it yourself)
(They are both based on Chromium....)
Advertisers are already figuring out how to get around that. CNAME cloacking, proxying with same domain, etc.
This idea of removing usability in the name of safety has gone way, way too far. It was crap when Mozilla did it, it's crap when Apple does it.
1. Extensions in the app store are not easily searchable. They aren't indexed/sorted on the store properly, and many only show up on Google.
2. Many of the good extensions are no longer available, e.g., UBO and KeePass, Vimium (there is a Vim extension, but it's a poor replacement so far).
3. The store promotes junkware and throwaway extensions.
Quote:
In July 2018, uBlock.org was acquired by AdBlock,[19] and began allowing "Acceptable Ads",[20] a program run by Adblock Plus that allows some ads which are deemed "acceptable", and the publisher pays Adblock Plus.[21]
EndQuote
uBlock was the original tool but was handed over to another maintainer some time ago. The original developer of uBlock, being unhappy with the direction of the tool, forked the repo and made uBlock Origin which he maintains and is often considered the better product by people here
Latest on Keychain sopport is in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=106400#c130 as WONTFIX due to macOS changes.
[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=667431
"We're not doing as the spec tells us to, BUT that probably gives us performance gains, most users don't care about it anyway, I prefer it that way, webdevs should fix it, we should fix the JPEG standard instead (!?)..."
Why so much resistance?
Our designer was pissed off when we discovered this bug, which explained why Chrome was the only program that displayed RGB values differently from all the others (not just browsers). She'd been careful about standardizing and tweaking colors we already used to work better for people with colorblindness, much of which was thrown out the window on Chrome. Not to mention issues matching the PNGs and SVGs she created for the site.
Quick edit:
> Why so much resistance?
Comment 34:
> Chromium developers have previously stated this won't be supported for reasons mentioned in this old post.
> https://www.webkit.org/blog/73/color-spaces/
From that link (posted in 2006):
> The big hurdle that we ran into, though, was with the drawing we did not control, namely the Flash plug-in. The problem is that designers specify colors in Flash and colors in CSS in the Web page, and they expect those colors to match. Because Flash’s drawing isn’t correcting to sRGB, if we did it in Safari, there would be color mismatches all over the place. These mismatches look far worse than if we just don’t correct at all.
Isn't Flash gone from Chrom(ium) now?
Wow. Just wow. I have rarely seen so much ignorance. And this exactly why Chrome is cancer for the whole internet. I mean, seriously, why should the web developers fix something that is standardized just to make it work in Chrome? And fixing the JPEG standard...?
You don't like google? Well don't use it. And yes, adblocking makes sense to avoid googleads.
But the browser is something different. And to avoid the googleintegration of chrome but like the browser like me (mostly for dev tools) just use chromium.
Also, some remarks on the site makes it less trustworthy
"Midori includes private browsing which is said to be “totally anonymous” and fast."
No it is not. Neither totally anonymous nor very fast. Quite sluggish for me.
I know Google isn't a completely benign force in the universe but I haven't been properly convinced I should boycott them.
No you don't. In fact, for many rhetorically primed things, such as opposition to Google, and especially in the realm of activism, explaining over and over why you're doing a thing is often not done because it's not necessary.
Every environmental protest doesn't need to include explanations of the Exxon Valdez and BP's Deepwater Horizon. Once things reach a certain level of cultural "it is known" explaining over and over is not required. If you're attending a protest, you know about these things. If you don't, others at the protest will tell you. If you do and aren't convinced, they aren't interested in reaching you.
I don't really understand how startpage is able to operate such a service, I assume it's maybe because if google started trying to stop them it would be rather hypocritical?
Keeping that in mind, doing a !s bang is probably better privacy-wise (bonus - you get the same results) vs a !g bang, even if it is no longer as good as it was.
Obligatory mention of https://fastmail.fm/ I've been using the paid version (it's quite inexpensive) for over a decade now and it remains fantastic.
Yay!
Do you download everything and search offline? Or maybe, unlike me, you don't rely on search so much?
> Google will do everything it can to ensure its ability to extract information about you [...] even without your consent and sometimes in direct opposition to existing national and international laws.
... and...
> Google is an information colonialist who want to seize all information both online and in real life – irrespective of who should have the right to access it"
Then I have to turn around and try to justify that I need obfuscated aggregated data about how our users use my product to determine what feature to work on.
Or I have to spend half a day going through user data sensitivity training about fictional consumer footwear. Again. Because I have to do it quarterly, even though the content doesn't change.
Or I write up a design doc where more than half of it is explaining how collecting what users could actually see on a page isn't PII, and it's being aggregated anyway, and we don't capture, target, or in any way interact with users under 13, and that the content team really does need this data because they use it to decide what to serve to the user next time so that the user feels like the experience is new and fresh and more interesting, and that if we see fewer then {x} unique users over a given period of time we'll literally delete the data to make sure that nobody can combine it to build any sort of PII profile, despite the fact that the entire table's data retention is {y} months anyway.
I get that it feels like Google sucks all this data in. And this data could be put together in various ways. And it's big and scary and opaque. And nobody outside knows what is really happening with this data, regardless of what the TOS says. But I can't imagine any level of transparency that would satisfy people. Either it's too detailed and we get accused of burying the data in legalese, or it's too thin and we get accused of being purposefully vague.
Rant over. I have a design doc to write.
They are probably 99%.
The site feels like it's authored with a tin-foil hat on.
While I agree with the rhetoric of this site, this site really is just empty rhetoric.
The "why" on this site is, in my opinion, a terrible, ineffective, dogmatic argument. I agree with the dogma, but I'm not the one that needs convincing.
So for me to switch from Chromium to Firefox would require an argument on technical or UX merits, and so far Firefox is currently worse across the board.
Also means if it works in Firefox it will most likely work in chrome. The opposite was not always true.
Can’t relate at all. In my limited frontend experience, I’ve run into a lot of rendering deferences between WebKit and Blink, and even more between Gecko and Blink. Sometimes the differences are subtle yet break pixel perfection; sometimes the whole layout is broken.
FF requires several clicks to re-run XHR. And doesn't return me to where I was before. And doesn't render my JSON.
Thanks for listening.
Do any of the firefox devs use chrome dev tools to see what's missing in FF/nice to have?
I was tracking some similar ones related to displaying JSON in the Network pane that were open for years.
In my specific case, Chrome also displays EventSource events just like it does with Websocket frames, but Firefox treats that as a normal XHR, waiting until the very end to display the content. That is a little closer to "blocking" but also very niche, I guess
I may switch to Firefox at some point, but currently there's a long standing bug that breaks audio with multi-channel audio interfaces (FF does not adhere to the mac system output channel settings and instead defaults to channels 1-2)
The only site I need chrome to use is google meet, naturally. Which, if you've turned on automatic closed captioning and seen it perform speech-to-text with user attribution in real time, is horrifying by itself.
Jokes aside it's not perfect and there are different shades of "great" depending on what that means to you personally. But I do trust Apple over Google since their business model is not so aligned with mass scale data collection.
You can imagine that a young Instagram or What's App could have been on the safe list of alternate social platforms, but Facebook bought them both. Firefox isn't impervious to a change of management and ownership 5-10 years down the line.
So what you are left with is using esoteric applications and social spaces that no one really cares about. That's analogous to living off the grid. It just isn't really suitable to the majority of people and as such it isn't a solution at all.
The problem isn't Chrome or Google per se, it's technology. We should be pressuring the big guns to conform to our needs, not opting out and abandoning the people who benefit from large social platforms and convenient, well supported applications.
The makers of Firefox (and apparently Safari) do have an incentive to keep your privacy.
The makers of Chrome have an incentive to keep you tracked.
So it's not the technology, it's business models. (Basically it's the rude awakening to TANSTAAFL.)
I take it as self-evident that the form that this takes will be the simplest, most generic one, and by definition will not have any associated "business goals." This era of business models wrapped up with browser design is ephemeral; certainly browsers (in some form) will outlast Google's business model.
It's easy to forget that all of this tech is still in its infancy, and the various players are fighting for market share and to make money. It is something out of a comedic dystopian novel to imagine that the browsers of the future will be tightly coupled with something so petty and vapid as advertisements.
The solution is to put pressure on legislators to prevent companies like Google and Facebook trading your data to fund their business. This could result in Google/Facebook charging for their services, and maybe that's a really good thing. People would have to think about how much social media means to them and not ignore the hidden cost of their privacy.
I would go for clearer definitions of what personal data are, several most important kinds of it. Maybe a regulation should require that ToS clearly state how these data are going to be collected, accessed, and stored. Much like with medical or financial records.
Then most users would just make more informed decisions, and that might also inform their online behavior and expectations.
People are mostly not dumb, they just need clear information.
How do you propose to do that without boycotting? I'm all for regulating overly large corporations, but until that happens I can also vote with my feet.
Push for privacy laws, push for laws around data ownership. Develop a theory of "what should people own" and "what kind of behaviors should be prohibited by companies" and "what kind of disclosures should be required."
Develop a message and start hammering your reps, and get like-minded techies and community members to do the same.
Spend a lot of time doing boring and tedious things like building a coalition, and make this an issue that can be fought for and that people will spend time advocating for.
California's privacy law didn't form in a vacuum, and neither did the EU's GDPR, and neither came into being because individuals were switching their personal browsing habits.
None of that's a technological solution so it's the sort of thing we techies overlook, but that's how you do it without merely voting with your feet and doing individual actions that, on their own, have zero impact.
When techies start organizing around issues like privacy, security disclosure, data ownership, and stuff like this, I think we'll stand to do some real good for the world.
Just check the threads here when GDPR was introduced, oh all the rage.
Don't blame the companies, politics,...
They are the best what society can offer.
If world is filled with corrupt, egoistic, narcissistic, greedy (etc.) people, the companies that are made by exactly the same people, are also corrupt, greedy (,...).
Same goes for politics. And everything else.
The society needs to change. But. There is barely anyone left to push the change. There is barely anyone who understands that there is a need for change.
< scratching head under thousands of layers of tinfoil hats various people, who didn't listen, put there in last 20 years >
Read Zeldman's "Browser diversity starts with us." http://www.zeldman.com/2018/12/07/browser-diversity-starts-w...
And honestly, the profile manager on Firefox is annoying, since you have to start from command line to access and it can't run multiple instances/profiles in parallel.
(...and discussed further in the parents of the above link, like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559122 or the full recent related discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21557309 ).
Given which, I might switch to Firefox for some uses after the next OpenBSD release where it will have pledlge/unveil support (preventing it from accessing the computer beyond config-specified limits).
Edit: One thing I wish I knew about firefox is a way, without extensions/add-ons, to limit which sites can use javascript/images/etc., and/or to open multiple config tabs at once to quickly turn those on by exception for occasional specific sites, as I do with chrome. Exception lists, even better. This was discussed a little bit at those above links.
The new privacy tools allow you to tune this from the url bar, but I think it only applies to cookies, javascript and trackers.
> and/or to open multiple config tabs at once
yeah that's the sticky part. It only allows one open config tab unfortunately.
502 Bad Gateway The server returned an invalid or incomplete response.
Firefox Web Console reports an error: "The character encoding of the HTML document was not declared. The document will render with garbled text in some browser configurations if the document contains characters from outside the US-ASCII range. The character encoding of the page must be declared in the document or in the transfer protocol."
I'm not sure at this point what the issue could be, and why it works for Chrome/Safari. I don't have any extensions that could alter the requests or responses (i.e https everywhere, CORS, etc...)
1. With mouse hovering over the drop down menu showing the displayed tool tip
2. With clicked on drop down menu showing the "javascript contexts"
Only script elements in the HTML of the top-level page (i.e. in the HTML served directly from the URL you see in the location bar) get to be in the 'top' context.
Debugger's new threads panel also solves this partially when you pause in a thread.
Are your use cases extensions, workers or iframes?
My use case is more of, I saw something in the chrome tools that I didn't recognize from FF. I don't do much js debugging beyond console logging. But I'm starting a PWA project and will be making a service worker, so sounds like this functionality might be relevant.
ps - enjoyed this Changelog podcast w/ Jason Laster of the FF DevTools team, https://changelog.com/podcast/247.
It's amazing how Google has gone from a "do no evil", where everyone celebrated every new thing Google did to "it is the evil"
Hard to win that brand back once it's tainted. May be the whole alphabet move was so Google's brand wouldn't taint it's other brands. But by association, Waymo is Google-ish and they'll be seen as invading on privacy just like its sibling companies.
I would remove the light grey bars behind the logos.
Clicking on the images at the bottom should open the respective website instead of the image.
The "why" page should mention amp. Instead of ranking websites by user friendlyness, via boosting amp they rank them by affiliation with Google. I think that is the most evil thing Google did so far.
* "Google want to automate us" should be "Google wants to automate us"
* They should consider making the page about why not to use chrome in particular more discoverable from the main page
* "Google have been accused of ensuring other Google products don’t work on Chrome" should be "Google have been accused of ensuring other Google products only work on Chrome"
* They block Google search from indexing the page, but they also block all other crawlers. Why not let DuckDuckBot through?
What I want to know is why someone would pick Brave instead of the Epic Privacy Browser...
... though personally, I think it's far better to support Firefox as it's now the only viable alternative browser that isn't based on Chrome.
Chrome is now so dominant that people can just ignore open web standards and develop for Chrome instead. This is a Bad Thing.
So you never stay logged into anything? Private browsing has a purpose, but I can't imagine being stuck always private browsing. That sounds painful.
Personally, I think it’s nice to have the content instantly available and not having to go to a website for it but I can see how for content producers this means wrapping their websites and making money out of their content.
Also, DDG's "Instant Answers are open source and are maintained on GitHub, where anyone can build or work on them". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
It's not the same sort of massive web-scraping click-stealing operation as Google's OneBox.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browser...
WebKit based users (Safari, GNOME Web) are 1/10 users.
Gecko based users (Firefox) are 1/25 users.
Opera and Edge are neglible slivers of Blink's market share. IE and old Edge are dead.
https://policies.google.com/faq?hl=en-US
> We know security and privacy are important to you – and they are important to us, too. We make it a priority to provide strong security and give you confidence that your information is safe and accessible when you need it.
I guess they should just shut down the site now.
But here's the thing, I think you have a point, as far as it's a useful browser technology and open source, I can see about as little a problem as you.
It makes me so happy that people are finally realizing how evil Google is and pushing to end them.
They are so bad.
Do you understand how algorithm or statistics works?
They are giving people what they want. Freedom. People is watching that videos and made them more popular. They are free to share their thoughts.
Even google can't predict all the negativeness and prevent them with computer systems. Expecting being a god from google is unfair.
I think this is hate for google more than arguments against google.
I dislike chrome and using Firefox for a long time. But i don't think this is objective and completely true.
I suggest you read the work being published by Stanford U and Renee DiResta -- https://twitter.com/noUpside