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Why use epic and edge when you can haves Firefox? My experience with Mozilla has always been great. It might be marginally slower than chrome, but I don't notice and they have great features and it's open source

I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.

On Linux Firefox gets updated the same way as any other package, which almost always gives you more manual control than this.

I suppose I'm saying this is a complaint about macOS and/or Windows, rather than about Firefox as such ;)

You can disable app updates and avoid the update notification by using enterprice policies (sounds complicated but is just a policies.json file).

Even more so when you know that Edge uses Chromium under the hood, which would defeat the purpose of this exercise.

I don't think Microsoft left any Google tracking, and Chromium is an open source project

The problem I have is not the tracking, but Google’s dominance of the browser market. They can (and do) push through efforts that mostly benefit Google, and their ability to keep everyone inside the Google ecosystem.

In other words, tracking is not the only evil thing they’re doing.

I suggest using brave instead others because it doesn’t advertise and blocks a lot of trackers and ads !

because the impending layoffs that mozilla is incurring in light of covid means it's very bad for development and bug tracking. i've been using firefox for several years and that part is kinda worrying.

There is also another alternative for search... Use search agregator (https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/) and do the search on all those sites (and more) at once. I am self hosting it and it works great.

One more search engine to try is qwant.com.

For phone just use microg lineage (https://lineage.microg.org/) and use aurora store instead of play store (https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/) for apps.

LineageOS tends to disable a lot of security baked into android, so itmight not be a good recommendation. According to Daniel Micay: "It significantly weakens the SELinux policies, rolls back mitigations for device porting / compatibility, disables verified boot, lacks proper update security including rollback protection, adds substantial attack surface like FFmpeg alongside libstagefright, etc. They merge in huge amounts of questionable, alpha quality code from the Code Aurora Forum repositories too. Many devices (including Nexus and Pixel phones) also don't get their full firmware updates shipped by LineageOS. It's unrealistically expected that users will flash the firmware and vendor partitions on their own each month and of course that's another incompatibility with verified boot and a locked bootloader." [0]

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/917yab/can_an...

Security is always weighting between danger and benefits. It means something different for everyone of us, i consider my phone with microg, netguard and xprivacylua and without google or any 3d party application beeing able to connect to the internet unless faking the data as secure (or, if you want - private), while I am not only flashing but also building my roms until I get full linux support for my second phone when I will depart from android world.

For now, lineage is as good as it gets, sure, I would love to have patched OS, withoug google etc., but for now there is really not much of alternatives available for various models of phones, and quite frankly - probably more than half of android phones are vulnerable, unpatched etc. let me just mention latest DSP vulnerabilities. At least attack surface isnt that big :D

Its on the eyes of beholder.

--- update ---

Looks like I am moving away from android today.

https://support.planetcom.co.uk/index.php/Cosmo_Linux_Mobile...

Half of those "security" features are at best useless and at worst more DRM features anyways. And yes, the firmware update mechanisms in android are abysmal in general, but that this is slightly better in google phones doesn't mean that it is good anywhere. For the most part, lineageOS is on par with any random android vendor there. No better and no worse. For software updates, it is generally far better.

Agreed on self-hosted search. I wrote a post in Feb. 2020 describing localhost installation of searX, which I've using since then as my interface to web searches. At times I revert to Google, e.g. for image searches, but I do that logged out of my Google accounts.

Non-Docker Local Installation of searX on Linux: https://persagen.com/2020/02/02/searx.html

Sure degoogle, but that point about Google earnings from ads having dropped doesn’t seem relevant to Google abusing its power, or being incompetent at its core business. I would be surprised if it wasn’t because of COVID-19 shock and that the larger economy wasn’t also moving similarly.

Browser - use Firefox.

Browser - I use Firefox and Vivaldi

Search - I use Startpage, DDG, Mojeek

Startpage has changed ownership recently. I would look into the new owners...

financed mostly by Google

Mozilla, at least, has shown they're not married to Google - they had Yahoo als the default search engine for a couple of years because Yahoo was the highest bidder.

At least they have a good manifesto. If they reach independence, it would be of course best. Donations could help in theory...

Did you find one that isn’t paid mostly by google?

Edge used to be an alternative on Windows at least, but now it's also based on Chromium. :-( I'd always prefer Firefox, but if you want to avoid Google money, you're basically up to Microsoft or Apple. The latter tying you to a hardware monopoly.

> Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube.

Agree. It would become a little easier if all major broadcasters would at least mirror their youtube content on other networks like Peertube. That would not solve the recommendation problem to discover new videos, but at least the hosting itself would be taken care off this way.

YouTube recommendations are really annoying. I don’t want to see 50 million variations of the same video. Impossible to discover new concepts etc

In the 3-dot menu for each recommended video there's an option called Not interested. Select that to train YouTube's algorithm on what you're not interested on. The menu is not available on every interface, usually it's found on the desktop one. It has worked really well for me so far.

I'm not a fan either.

Creators rely on them to drive traffic though and that's part of what makes YouTube sticky for producers.

The creators remain incentivized to use YouTube as a platform because they can leverage the recommendation algorithms to drive traffic to their content.

While this remains true YouTube is here to stay.

People will go to where the content is. The content will go to the platform that makes it easiest for them to build an audience.

> Search -> Use Bing, then DuckDuck Go, and if still not good results, then Google

Why not use DDG first? I switched to it in the beginning of 2020, have almost never had to fallback to Google.

Yes, may as well go straight to DDG, which is pretty much Bing anyway, as shown here: searchenginemap.com

thank you for the se map reference, was looking for something like this

> Trying to find an alternative to Android.

Why not use LineageOS with microG? Aurora Store and f-droid for installing apps. It works pretty well for me.

It worked well for me even without MicroG. The only proprietaty app that I need and use is Whatsapp, and it doesn't require Google Play Services.

> Trying to find an alternative to Android.

For privacy and security oriented folks, there’s Puri.sm Librem 5 phone that looks interesting. I wouldn’t mind buying one if the reviews are good.

I am particularly excited about the removable battery! Anyone has any hands on experience with the phone? Links/resources would be highly appreciated!

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

I can agree with Bing but DDG is plain horrible for searches. It's basically just Google page 2+ results on Page 1.

Outlook decided it would be a nice idea to change my "Thank you" signature to an emoji in a business casual email.

For mobile, I use an Android for all the apps I can't avoid not having, but otherwise I resort to Blackberry like the old coot I am. My Q10 is still reliable af.

I made the switch to DDG as my first search engine of choice a couple of years ago and when I am dissatisfied with my DDG searches, I usually compare them to !g and !b searches and find they are only infrequently much better.

I think it takes time to learn how best to query DDG. I originally started to use DDG when Google buried Google Scholar queries and I found using the !gsc query more convenient than working with bookmarks or navigating Google. Getting familiar with bang queries I think makes you have a much less siloed view of search.

I just wish DDG would make the bang options available as a button, so I wouldn't have to type them on mobile. Adding "!g" to an existing query requires 7 taps, versus just 1 for a button (!)

I guess I'm stuck with Google search.

The current Firefox Beta for mobile allows you to store BBG bang queries as buttons, using the "Search engines" option.

Just define a search engine with the search string "duckduckgo.com/!g%20%s".

> I can agree with Bing but DDG is plain horrible for searches. It's basically just Google page 2+ results on Page 1.

Maybe a couple years ago. I can't remember getting better results with Google over DDG more than once or twice in the past two years.

> Trying to find an alternative to Android.

You have the Pinephone nowadays. You will lose a lot moving from Android to a Linux based phone, especially if you rely on native applications.

https://boilingsteam.com/pinephone-community-edition-ce-revi...

If you are worried about American intelligence don't use anything based in the US.

You can say the same thing for anything based outside of the US. You think China-based services don't have the CCP spy on their users, like TikTok?

You can't really compare the US, an active empire with documented testimonies of spying on individuals and, e.g. Ireland, Switzerland or most other european countries.

At some point, if China is the comparison point you always cite when someone talks about the US, it starts to seem like they are actually comparable.

The US has done a better job at convincing me they won't hurt me. I have no idea why I believe them, though.

Better than whom ? Do you seriously think that Switzerland is after you ?

Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa

I’d argue the opposite. I’m China they can just kidnap you. In America, at least there are rules.

But that's not what your parent post is about. It's about that in America, you need to worry more about U.S. surveillance than about Chinese surveillance. And when in China, you need to worry more about Chinese surveillance than American surveillance.

What you state has nothing to do with that. If I understand you right, you are saying that you should be more worried in China than in the U.S. overall. That might be true, I can't judge. I can imagine there are rules in China too, maybe they are just not so pleasent? And I suspect some folks in Portland have some mixed feelings about the "just kidnap" part too.

Extraordinary rendition wasn't all that different from just kidnapping people.

You think China's reach does not extend outside of its frontiers?