Comment by niftylettuce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by niftylettuce | Hacker News Reader

Formerly worked with DuckDuckGo

My advice:

Install ungoogled-chromium: https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

Install these extensions: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/ilGur1132/Smart-HTTPS

There is also a Chromium extension that lets you install from Chrome Web Store: https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store

Set duckduckgo.com as your default search engine with a blank home page. But you could also use @pkrumins home pages of https://techurls.com or https://finurls.com as nice home pages.

Use Mullvad VPN: https://mullvad.net/ (They are EVEN available on F-Droid now, which is AMAZING)

Security harden your Android device: https://niftylettuce.com/posts/google-free-android-setup/

Security harden your Mac: https://gist.github.com/niftylettuce/39597a7b3bc0660ffe1e09d...

P.S. If you need email forwarding for your domain name, you can use something I made. https://forwardemail.net - it is 100% open source.

Follow me @niftylettuce on GitHub and Twitter for more

Seems a bit off-topic for the concrete issue.

Advertising your Twitter for the advice of "switch to somewhat well-known browser X, install these very common extensions and use a VPN" is also a bit ... odd.

Privacy-focused web browsers; alternative to DDG browser due to this issue among others.

I think it’s significant that a former DDG employee is advocating switching away from the DDG browser.

An ex DuckDuckGo employee recommending people use an alternative browser over the DuckDuckGo browser, in a post about the DuckDuckGo browser spying on its users, is about as on topic as you can get; after the current employee giving an explanation.

They said "worked with" duckduckgo. I'm not clear on what that means. I think they'd have said "worked for" if it was direct employment.

> Security harden your Android device: https://niftylettuce.com/posts/google-free-android-setup/

I haven't checked all links but some things need to be updated, for example Skimmer Scanner is gone from the Play Store and Yalp Store is abandoned and doesn't work anymore, you should be using Aurora Store. I'd also recommend Aegis or FreeOTP+ over FreeOTP for 2FA. NewPipe is better installed from this[1] repository until this[2] issue is solved.

[1] https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo/

[2] https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/issues/1981

Yeah, I do use Aurora Store. No longer use Skimmer Scanner. I have to update that post. Working on a new blog/site and a book (eventually). Thanks for heads up.

Why ungoogled-chromium over Firefox?

Faster + less bloat

Ad blockers' functionality has been limited on chromium due to changes in the extension API, though

I don't think that has taken place yet?

Disc: Googler

Mostly agree, one nice thing about FF is containers.

That's something I really miss on chrome-based browsers

Disagree on most points, actually:

>Faster, less bloat

Stock Firefox doesn't actually have that much bloat, and it's not noticeably slower than Chrome on reasonably modern hardware (i.e.: most page loads are near-instant, same as in Chrome on a good connection).

>Extension support for Chromium is way better too

Until Google decides that your extension is unworthy of being in their store. This notably happened with Pushbullet quite recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23168874

... Until Google inexplicably restored it a few days later, but not before lots of accusations were thrown around.

---

IMO it's also worth noting that ungoogled-chromium is (obviously) an unofficial fork of Chromium. Google may at any time change Chromium so substantially as to either require Google integration at some fundamental level for even the most basic functionality, causing too much work for such a low-profile effort to continue, or just make Chromium closed-source. With Firefox, that risk doesn't exist because of the business motivations of the company that develops it.

As I said in other another comment, I'm a power user. And by power user I mean probably 10x the normal standard of what a 10x power user means. Tooling is everything to me; which is why I prefer this over anything else. I'm very biased.

What does that even mean? Ten times? Tooling is everything?

When it comes to a browser, I'm curious as well. I often end up with 100+ tabs in firefox before I close them all. I don't think think I'd consider that being a power user, but would a 10x power user simply mean someone with over 1,000 tabs open?

I haven't used Chrome regularly in the last year or so, but it would get noticeably slow by the time I had 3-4 windows with 10-20 tabs each. Firefox hasn't really had that issue yet.

Years ago though, Chrome was noticeably faster than Firefox. That changed (IMO at least) at some point in the last few years.

I use Firefox day to day, but if I was a “power user” and picking apart web traffic everyday I’d probably use Chromium. The dev tools in it are way better than the ones built in Firefox.

In what way are Chrome's dev tools better?

I got used to Firefox's dev tools and can't find my way around in Chrome's.

That's just pure muscle memory. I personally dislike the chrome tools.

So you're a 100x poweruser. Got it.

That has fresh meme potential. How many 100x power-users do you need to make a 10x developer? And how many normal users for a 100xPU? Are 10 100xPU equal to a 1kPU? So many questions...

You are probably seriously overestimating yourself and/or underestimating a large subset of your audience here.

People here are:

- early developers from majir browsers

- extension creators

- creators of major web properties

- people who spend their work days on the web

- etc

seriously. Don't underestimate HN.

Edit: and as someone who's been very into customizing and extending browsers since early Firefox: your ideas about Firefox vs Chrome tells me that you are either

- deeply biased

- use a subset of browser features that is too small to realize the problems with Chromium (in which case I suspect your 100x superuser is wild hyperbole)

You can come back when Tree Style Tabs including related sub-extensions works as well on Chrome as on Firefox.

This comment made me smile because it gives me the same absurd vibes as "Impossible Is Nothing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Is_Nothing_(video_r...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGMaVC1YVlQ

Also important to note that ungoogled-chromium builds can be provided by anyone that submits them, (e.g. not the maintainers)

Firefox can run chrome extensions.

Why ungoogled-chromium or Firefox over Brave?

Brave is the only browser that includes strong ad and tracker blocking by default, which is the best way to ensure your privacy on the internet.

In fact, every decision I've seen from them makes me think they care the most about user privacy, period.

I cannot recommend Brave due to the autosuggestions-for-profit feature.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23474842

You can install uBlock Origin in 10 seconds from the GitHub release page (see previous link shared). This is vastly better than anything I've seen for ad-blocking.

An auto-suggestion is not a redirect.

Also that just makes me trust them more – they are the only browser vendor that are trying to find business models that don't involve selling my data or selling out to someone who does.

The issue is that nothing is as pure as ungoogled-chromium is right now. I've also felt that Brave was slow, and not best for developers. As a power user I'm very biased, so Brave may work better for folks that are not as technically skilled and have no idea how to install from GitHub/brew/etc.

Edit: I feel it is slow because it has extra bloat added. Like I said, take my comments here with a grain of salt because I'm a very biased power user. I respect the efforts of these developers regardless of what project it is, the focus on privacy and building something different is truly awesome.

Brave is chromium under the hood. Not really sure why you think it would be slower than ungoogled-chromium.

Ditto for developer / power-user experience – it's still chromium. Just with an ad-blocker written in Rust built-in and some other features.

> I've also felt

Data or stop spreading FUD. There is nothing "slow" about Brave.

Wow, I did not know about that. Between this and the original post it seems no matter what every company ends up selling its soul to the devil.

Through better tech and with better developer usability, we can conquer these monopolistic false promises. Our work with the Lad framework is instrumental.

https://github.com/braver-browser/

A Brave fork meant to address this issue. Time will tell.

Braver (https://github.com/braver-browser/) is a Brave fork meant to address this and other issues.

Could you please elaborate as to why you suggest ilGur1132's Smart-HTTPS instead of EFF's HTTPS-Everywhere?

https://reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/5qnq6j/time_to_...

That's outdated information. Nowadays you can enable Encrypt All Sites Eligible and the extension will force HTTPS everywhere skipping the whitelist. It'll also prompt you to continue to the HTTP version if HTTPS fails to load.

Thanks for the heads up

Your "Security harden your mac" guide has a bunch of amazon affiliate links, it would be good to call that out when piggybacking on a post about privacy at least.

ForwardEmail is a great service, thanks for making it!

Thanks! I'm rolling out the following within probably the next 7 days:

- All new load balanced infrastructure - Browser extension + API wrapper - Support for pixel tracking blocker (opt-in checkbox or TXT setting) - Smart alerting - Globby/regex support

If you follow my Twitter or the GitHub releases you will get updates.

Do you plan to have an SMTP relay?

Yes, 100%. It is in the works.

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