Privacy Comparison of Web Browsers | Hacker News Reader

Privacy Comparison of Web Browsers

spyware.neocities.org

35 pointstutfbhuf13 comments

Aside from being a long way out of date (the test version of Firefox, my browser of choice and therefore the one I'm interested in), some of the tone of this article seems to be rather unreasonable.

Referring to automatic updates, it mentions that this can mean it "still installs something without your consent, with possible new privacy nightmares in there." - which of course is possible, but how many times has that happened versus an automatic update removing a definite security problem in the existing version it's replacing?

I moved from Chrome to FF a few years ago, when trying to de-google (semi successfully) my life. I'm sure I could have made a more secure choice overall, but at what cost?

Also, how relevant are articles like this if they're not kept up to date? Most people will just see the summary, and say "it's not worth changing to Firefox because it's only slightly ahead of Chrome, and I'll lose feature X, Y and Z". This seems damaging to the overall idea of privacy, to me.

I am the developer of Waterfox - this website comes up often, and misleading would be an understatement.

* It treats the Browser Sync service as spyware

* It treats automatic updates as something spyware does

* The initial launch connections it has issue with are the captive portal detection, TLS certificate updates, addon blocklist updates, safebrowsing updates and the release notes.

For comparison it rates Pale Moon as "Top Tier". PM does similar to the above (including auto-updates), and it also connects to start.me as it is the default home page, which loads Google Ads and Analytics. According to its privacy policy:

"Among the types of Personal Data that start.me collects, by itself or through third parties, there are: Cookies; Usage Data; first name; last name; email address."

What definition is it using for spyware and why does it only apply to browsers it doesn't like is beyond me, but the author clearly has a bone to pick.

"This article was last edited on 2/20/2019"

A lot has happened in this space in the last 2 years.

Yup. So much on that website is hilariously out of date.

Even its so-called recommendations are out of date, for example (but not limited to) GNU IceCat, Wikipedia says last release: "60.7.0 (2 June 2019; 19 months ago)".

I don't care how "spyware free" you think it is, I'm not using a browser that's 19 months old in this day and age.

There is more risk to my privacy and security from using an out of date browser than using Firefox or Brave.

What a joke.

Right, but the real question to ask is whether we really have to put up with this update treadmill in the browser landscape when the web is now approaching 30 years of being in existence. After all, HTML was supposed to be a vendor-neutral document format with links and to work like, say, MP3 where a player/decoder can be used with any new material, rather than a be-all/end-all technology where browser updates seem more frequent than content updates.

It's really curious on how the web browser that guarantees the highest privacy are the ones associated with piracy and crimes (i.e. Tor).

At the same time the mainstream ones are the web browsers we shouldn't rely on at all!

The same it's happening nowadays with various kind of solutions like p2p, associated in the 00s with copyrighted mp3 downloads through eMule-project. Nowadays instead innovative realities in tech are leveraging on p2p to guarantee 100% privacy combined with zero knowledge encryption and end-to-end.

I think a huge work on sensitisation should me made in order to cross the chasm of sterotype. This was my thought, and thanks for sharing this!

“When privacy is criminalized, only criminals will have privacy.”

I met somebody using the avast browser the other day and helped them switch to something else... Avast, one of the biggest antivirus companies, was apparently caught harvesting and selling user browsing data recently

https://fortune.com/2020/02/12/free-antivirus-software-avast...

I give any antivirus vendor that uses browser add-ons a wide berth.

They are usually marketed to the user as protecting them from online threats but in reality are there to sell the user's browsing habits to who knows who.

Microsoft Edge didn't even make the list

Safari, too.

Was this page designed in frontpage?

It's intentional. Neocities is a Geocities replacement, and frontpage is the aesthetic that Geocities used to have.

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