DuckDuckGo Extension to Block FLoC, Google’s New Tracking Method in Chrome
spreadprivacy.com
spreadprivacy.com
However, almost every web site or web app I make in my professional capacity gets tested with, and is expected to work with, ~95% of browsers. That means testing against Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Samsung Internet, and Internet Explorer. Edit: I forgot to add Safari, which I also test with.
Anything less is not my brand of professionalism, because I am convinced my clients expect me to leave my personal thoughts and convictions at the door. If you want to only create sites that work in Firefox and maybe not elsewhere, then you can do that - but doing it ethically means telling the client upfront that you won't accept work that requires the site work for the widest audience reasonably possible.
That said, there are two caveats. The first is ethics. I do not leave my ethics at the door and if I am being asked to do something unethical I will refund the money and walk. If it is illegal it will be reported, as otherwise I am an accessory. Clients agree to this upfront. The second is client requests. If the client wants it to work in Firefox and they tell me not to bother with the other websites, despite my advice against it, then that's what I do.
When I reread some of my comments, I realize that I often drop words. A fair number of times the meaning is the opposite of what I intended to say. Those cases usually contradict the rest of my post so people should be able to figure out the intended meaning, but it would be nice if it didn't happen in the first place.
Whwn I first encountered SwiftKey I just didn't understand how it could be as good as it is at predicting what I want to type. Even switching between Swedish and English (just by typing words from either language).
Whenever I use someone else's phone (to show them how to use something) I feel handicapped, I guess I'm clumsy on the keyboard.
More software available on their platform should be a good thing, no?
Professionals will still buy machines for convenience (building/testing is a lot faster when every click doesn't take seconds) and pay the Developer Program fee, and us open-source developers can make our software available to Apple users, or make sure it works on Safari. Why make it illegal?
You meant with the other browsers, right?
Browser Cookies are inherently more ethical when used properly.
More of my public thoughts here:
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
I don't like this FLoC proposal either but to me I see it as a small leap in saying goodbye to mass cross-site spying that has been uncontrollably rampant with no present working solutions.
FLoC will not mean that advertisers will stop tracking you in every other way they can. All it does is provide additional information.
I don't know how many people came across that or clicked the link, as I don't track that, but I enjoy doing my tiny part in letting people know.
“Chrome users might experience issues” but what issues ? It reads like a dishonest TOS like the one used by service providers using catch-all statements to cover their backs.
It sounds like the old “optimized for Internet explorer and 837 by 394 resolution” for websites that were not optimized in any way but it was just the people behind it not able or unwilling to do better.
Therefore my site is explicitly optimised for Firefox. Chrome users might experience issues. Or they won’t. I have no idea.
I don't know what you do/sell on said websites, but if you still have a job it means that those who hired you haven't received (enough) complaints yet.
This might be due to Firefox users being more aware of standards than just "whatever runs on Chrome today", or because Google tends to ship non-standard behaviour with their browser and make it a "standard" with their massive marketshare. Or it might be related to Firefox developers implementing the standards more carefully in order to protect their shrinking marketshare.
In my experience people get way more complaints when the developer uses Chrome and the user uses Firefox than the other way around.
I was expecting that they perform their UAT on the prevalent browsers at the time. I don't expect/demand that people will UAT a website for "Pale Moon", but it is dangerous to not test Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera (and a few more) and in multiple devices/displays.
I have no expectation that a personal blog will display perfectly, but for some applications/websites every menu option, line, frame, must be perfecly visible as per the design, otherwise you get your Chrome users that cannot hit "send" to complete that funds transfer, and that won't keep you employed for long.
Regardless, I’m self-employed and my website makes enough money that I can spend plenty of time arguing with people on the Internet. Your admonishments certainly aren’t going to be my undoing.
Paradoxically, it's consistent with part of the strategy google used to promote Chrome in the first place: make the dev tools good, to encourage developers to use chrome, so they'll optimise for it, so it'll become popular.
Privacy-advocating developers optimising for the browser(s) they believe are most privacy-respecting seems entirely appropriate. It's not anti-chrome, any more than those using chrome as their primary tool are anti-firefox (or whatever).
--
EDIT: noted that taking this decision requires the authority to do so.
No normal buisness can ignore how the vast majority of its users experience their site. Every user with issues is likely a lost user.
But ... from a technical point of view, it is indeed very likely that what runs on FF will also run on chrome, but not necessarily the other way around.
Yes, one would expect that to be true. However, as a very heavy FF user I haven't noticed any breakage in pages at all. Might be there's small things in a side-by-side compare, but nothing annoying so far.
Without going to such absurd lengths, a lot of the APIs Google came up with to complicate the web and slow down browser competition are usually bad for privacy. A browser that blocks those will probably have better performance if the website has fingerprinting scripts that use a lot of those APIs.
Degrading the user experience for one browser does not mean it's optimized for another. Nothing has changed for privacy-respecting browser, there is no optimization, there is no code specifically targeting privacy-respecting browsers. But there is code targeting non privacy-respecting browsers and this code is in the website, not the browser. So the responsibility falls on the website author to respect its user's privacy, not the browser.
Am I being pedantic ? I have issues with the verb 'optimize' in this context.
Mostly, I would expect the site to work quickly and deliver valuable information with minimal nonsense, while integrating well with power user tools based on web standards.
I wish all websites were like this!
(I suspect if you added that to whatever default plugin people recommend for Wordpress you could have a noticeable effect.)
I am going to put my money into FF no matter how annoying some of the things in it are.
It seems Mozilla uses it a lot
If a newspaper or online magazine had traditional ads that were embedded in the page as static images (no distracting video please) then I'd leave my ad blocker off.
True, those are not targeted ads, they are sponsored content, but I wouldn’t even bother setting up my adblocker, had they made them less annoying.
To me though, sure, show me ads, fine, whatever, but don't build them around a profile of me to try to manipulate me directly based on my potential interests and behaviour. Any time I can disable any "personalisation" of ads, I do.
I think there's a bit of a language barrier. What advertisers mean when they say "personalized" or "relevant" is not the same as what their audience means when they use the same words. I find advertisers often mean "what you looked at but didn't buy," but I think most consumers mean "what is likely to interest me."
My opinion is, if DDG is showing me some ads based on my search keywords (which is sort personalised) so they can make some money out of their not-so-bad service? Fine by me.
Sure, DDG might be robbing Peter to pay Paul, but so is Mozilla. They sell out every FF user who does not change default settings. This must be a significant number of users, because the online ad services company pays millions to Mozilla for that "service". That means heaps of queries coming from FF are "feeding the ecosystem".
Honest question: do they? What evidence supports the assertion that they do try? I haven't seen any story suggesting Mozilla is trying to get away from that model of funding Firefox.
> "(how to get people to pay for a browser?)"
The Thunderbird email client (formerly maintained by Mozilla) switched to being independent from Mozilla and asking for donations; so far they are successful. Donations are now sustaining a team of 15, thanks to yearly 2.3 M$ donations [1], and they keep hiring.
"A team of 15 isn't remotely enough to sustain Firefox", you may say, and you'd be right. But then, if Thunderbird is able to find enough donation money for 15, what would Firefox (who is way more popular than Thunderbird) be able to score if it found the courage to make its case to its users, and ask for money? Could it afford a staff of 150? More?
[1] https://groups.google.com/g/tb-planning/c/-jbmYvYdX1g , https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/m9td33/thunderb...
For starters, they could let people donate towards browser development.
Yes thank you, please make a market out of privacy!
edit: I should probably say, please prove that privacy respecting markets are viable, I'm not suggesting the commoditisation of everything, lol.
Should DDG become ultra-successful, how long until they start making concessions to privacy to increase revenue and growth? After all not so long ago Google themselves were "the good guys" and we were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out that "Do No Evil" only really works until it starts clashing with "Make More Money".
If I recall DDG doesn’t even use cookies. So they’re showing ads based solely on the search terms, which personally I’m ok with as long as it doesn’t clutter the page too much. Showing me ads when I’m in a discovery mindset is ok and is less intrusive; it’s way worse when you’re in a consumption mindset and the ads are just obnoxious (I’m looking at you, YouTube ads).
I gave up trying to be too optimistic about DDG and use Google with no javascript and no cookies saved on the domain in my browser.
My problem with search is a user one. Not an ethical one. When I search for something I want the best results. I don't care if some cute furry animal had to be sacrificed in the production of this utility.
Btw, DDG has a settings button hidden somewhere that allows you to tweak a few settings and save cookies if you wanted.
Should this happen then DDG will know better than anyone that this just puts a target on their back to be replaced by the next privacy respecting search engine, and the cycle continues afresh.
I mean it's not as nefarious as it could be since they are actually privacy focused, but this blend of advice and advertisement is rubbing me the wrong way
I'm content to live In a search world when I type "how to do xxxxx" an add for a software company that provides xxxxx as a service is the top two or three results. I'm not content with getting cold calls from salesmen 1 to 2 hours after I type in a search for gartner magic quadrant xxxxx. (this happens all the time)
if the ads served are keyword based on the current search, and clearly marked as add, I'm ok with it.
I even click on the ddg ads if the seem relevant on purpose, because I know it generates them revenue. I go out of my way to click on anything I know is a Google ad.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/1553
DDF is of course a search engine and doesn't need to be installed.
DDG now also has an extension which blocks FloC (a feature which the uBlockOrigin extension seems to not have full support for - correct me I could be wrong, but that looks like an open issue?)
So you can install the DDG extension now, or install the uBlockOrigin extension - but possibly have to wait for full integration.
Also, look into what chrome recently did to the APIs adblocker extensions use, even in the current market google is already making adblockers less potent in chrome.
> Google’s pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with FLoC (and other elements of the “privacy sandbox”) will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad-tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...
Another false premise is that the "old tracking" will stop because of the "new tracking".
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/14/21064698/google-third-par...
Or just how aggressively google wants you to login to youtube these days.
This includes things like clearing the cookies leaving Google cookies alone, to sending a header with a browser ID to Google domains. I really doubt Google will get rid of all theirs methods to tie in their scripts on third-party websites to one user ID, as that will greatly reduce the effectiveness of Google Analytics or ReCAPTCHA.
Maybe Chrome doing it will get them assed to fix it.
If the effort to increase user control and privacy continues, sites that can't support themselves without targeted ad revenue will either adapt or fold.
FLoC in many ways makes it easier to fingerprint users, and I don't think that advertisers are going to look at the brand new opportunity FLoC-enhanced fingerprinting presents and just leave it sitting there untouched. There's nothing built into the FLoC spec that prevents advertisers from adding in additional fingerprinting on top of FLoC, and we've been down this road already with stuff like DNT. If any technology at all can be abused for fingerprinting, they'll abuse it. The market they're in doesn't allow them to have restraint, somebody will cross the line and then everyone else will follow under the excuse of being competitive.
So I'm just not willing to give advertisers the benefit of the doubt anymore, or to assume that if we meet them halfway they'll be satisfied. They've already burned that bridge, I'm not inclined to keep offering them new bridges to burn.
Let's not forget that Microsoft deliberately murdered DNT by making it the default value. Had they not made that move, there's a good chance, we'd have seen DNT honored and eventually codified.
> They've already burned that bridge, I'm not inclined to keep offering them new bridges to burn.
I agree, if you give them no option whatsoever, there will never be legislation reining them in. With FLoC, you could outlaw other forms of tracking and add significant fines. Without it, politicians will not move a finger over concerns to damage the industry.
I totally disagree. Just going to link to a few previous comments I've made on this subject rather than rehash the entire discussion here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24294280
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24289186
It is not Microsoft's fault that DNT failed; a privacy option that can't be turned on by default is not a real privacy option. Microsoft made the decision to turn on DNT by default because it determined that most of its users didn't want to be tracked, and the ones that did want to be tracked could go turn the header off. That's a very reasonable determination for any privacy-respecting browser to make. Users should be able to have defaults that closely align with their preferred user-agent behavior.
The reason DNT failed was not because of underhanded sabotage. It's because it got adoption. Advertisers were unwilling to remain in a world where the majority of people didn't get targeted. That's why I say they burned the bridge, because DNT's wide adoption was never a real option for them in the first place -- it's entire existence was predicated on the assumption that most people would not use it.
> there will never be legislation reining them in
We could do this anyway. We don't need to present an option ahead of time to make advertisers happy. I guarantee if you go to anyone in Congress and ask them why they're not supporting a privacy bill, they are not going to respond, "we would if better technology and standards existed for targeting." Senators and Congresspersons aren't thinking about browser standards in that level of detail. And if you're worried about advertisers lobbying, I do not believe that FLoC is going to make advertisers lobby less to block any privacy bill.
I understand this as "Microsoft produced a privacy-respecting browser and had their user's best interest on their mind", and I find it hard to engage that, because we seem to be living in wildly different realities.
> We could do this anyway. We don't need to present an option ahead of time to make advertisers happy.
We won't, so let's enjoy the situation we have, because change in the right direction that doesn't get us 100% of the way is bad and we'd prefer to remain where we are right now.
Fair enough. If Firefox and Chrome enabled DNT by default, do you think the outcome would have been different? Ie, do you think that advertisers rebelled specifically because they thought Microsoft was hypocritical about tracking?
I don't. I don't think there's evidence that advertisers were mad at Microsoft, and the reasoning I have for that is that they stopped respecting DNT across the entire browser ecosystem, not just on IE. The other point of evidence I have is that advertisers are similarly angry about every other privacy-mechanism that gives users choice, even in browsers like Safari and on platforms like iOS.
I think my theory is a pretty consistently reasonable explanation for all of those scenarios. Why are advertisers mad about iOS privacy changes? Is it because Apple is hypocritical? Or is it because a lot of people use iOS, and advertisers don't want to see widespread adoption of any privacy tools? You can find a consistent correlation between how angry advertisers get about any privacy-enhancing proposal and the number of people it would impact.
> so let's enjoy the situation we have, because change in the right direction that doesn't get us 100% of the way is bad
I don't think that's what anyone at all is saying. I disagree that FLoC is a change in the right direction, and I disagree that it will make any legislation any more likely.
I could just as easily make the same point back to you. You're arguing that we should embrace a new tracking standard that makes privacy worse just because an arms race where browsers try to stop tracking entirely on their own isn't a perfect solution.
But an arms race where browsers close tracking vectors where they find them is better than a legal status quo where browsers add new tracking vectors of their own volition. And I don't see any evidence that adding FLoC is going to make US Senators feel better about privacy bills, or that it's going to change how advertisers lobby those Senators.
No, but I don't think Firefox would've done that, because they had no interest in killing the feature (which was predicted to happen soon as they announced, certainly their smart people were aware of the consequences of their actions -- and they have very good connections to ad-tech, they're part of it, hence their understanding of the response and interest for the events to play out exactly like they did).
For Mozilla, I would have had a much easier time to assume good faith, for Microsoft I find that very hard to believe, much like their Shenanigans with IE on Windows and not allowing removal, making browser install hard etc wasn't done because they thought IE was the best browser and users couldn't possibly want to switch.
Similarly, I don't believe Google suggests FLoC because they want to protect privacy by any means necessary. But that doesn't mean that it's not better for the average user than what we have today. And we won't get any movement without Google.
> But an arms race where browsers close tracking vectors where they find them is better than a legal status quo where browsers add new tracking vectors of their own volition.
Two of the four major browsers are built by ad-tech companies, another one is almost entirely funded by an ad-tech company. That leaves Safari, and Apple has no intention to offer it to all users.
Google will not fight against itself (and it's the only relevant player on both sides), there will be no arms race. As for US Senators: who in ad-tech has more to spend than Google, Facebook, and Microsoft?
I always thought this was a naive take. People would say "Of course websites and ad services will respect DNT, it's in the spec!" as if that was a magic incantation that would prevent corps from tracking you.
Politicians will not destroy an industry, but they will regulate it. If regulation == destruction, they won't touch it.
But in my opinion, the idea that a flag begging companies not to track them would be respected was always a naive fantasy, regardless of whether it was turned on by default (because why wouldn't I want this turned on by default if it worked?).
Do we have evidence that advertisers are going to stop lobbying politicians if FLoC is introduced? Have they promised to do that anywhere?
EDIT: that would appear to be TURTLEDOVE [1]
[0] https://github.com/WICG/floc [1] https://github.com/WICG/turtledove
The FloC announcement is https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/2021-01-privacy-sa...
The whitepaper explains the approach: https://github.com/google/ads-privacy/blob/master/proposals/...
Will he now be able to query a list of properties of my personality? Interested in space, in biking, according to my Google Ad Settings also in Fujian, for whichever reason that is unknown to me?
Has anyone figured out some clever cryptography to enable personalised ads without the privacy concerns?
(I actually do use it occasionally to find specialist retailers so I don't have to use Amazon, as it's easy to buy from any other EU country here. German based retailers for audio equipment, or France based retailers if I want to buy cooking equipment etc)
Before writing the above I did double check this as I was not sure. So it is a sign that there is not much difference from other engines.
Localized results (in Ireland) are not that great though. But with time I just changed the ways around search queries. It is not really an issue anymore.
As for Chrome, I simply don’t see any reason why anyone would use it over Brave. Brave seems to come pre installed with lots of privacy protection.
But I find DuckDuckGo really bad for some searches where I’m not looking for a specific domain:
- searching for papers or technical blog posts is almost useless in DDG. Software stuff in particular seems heavily front-loaded towards SEO trash and plagiarized blogs/“tutorials” instead of useful information. Pure mathematics is a little better (probably because there isn’t a “pure mathematics boot camp” cottage industry)
- political news is heavily slanted to the right, often prioritizing flagrantly disreputable sources. While this might be a userbase issue (lots of lonely white men) I do wonder if DDG (or someone in their tech stack) is putting their thumb on the scale (maybe this comes up in Bing as well? I haven’t checked). I realize people on the right might say Google is slanted to the left and don’t want to get in to that. But DDG seems to push more outright propaganda than Google. Google also returns plenty of conservative results for politics news/blogs, but it seems very rare for DDG to return liberal commentary (even from major sources like The Guardian).
Obviously this is anecdotal and colored by my own interests and biases. But, especially with computer science stuff, I have given up on DDG returning reliable results. At this point I basically only use them as a Wikipedia gateway.
We don't need that kind of rhetoric on HN.
Part of the reason I suspect Bing/DDG return right-leaning content is because grassroots US internet culture itself slants slightly to the right (as it slanted to the left back 10 years ago). Whereas Google pushes authoritative sources heavily, which tend to skew corporate-left.
Corporate content is less likely to push flagrant untruths (unlike grassroots extremists on either side), and what propaganda there is, is usually much more subtle.
A balance is needed, to be sure.
You really don’t need to be a social justice warrior to understand my point. It is a shame if either of these completely uncontroversial statements offends you, but HN in fact truly does not need your centrist form of political correctness policing legitimate comments.
The ultimate reason I disagree is that the users of DDG don't seem to influence their algorithm. I don't believe DDG is treating users like Google (and shaping results based on interests of the userbase).
I switched for privacy and to de-google my life.
But for complex queries I often end up using the "g!" shortcut in the query to do the search on google instead.
Isn't this good? I would rather set my actual interests in the browser settings! I also am upfront glad to tell them to anybody interested so we might find common interests or discover something new. The only reason I would rather hide such data actually is fingerprinting.
We are already living in such bubbles by the way. At least people who consciously choose their bubbles probably tend to be more aware of that.
I want the CHOICE to share my interests in return to have more relevant content.
Yeah, it's less profitable. But it's been proven to work since like 7000BC and it gets rid of all the privacy problems.
All the invasive FBI style user tracking only existed for ~20 years. A mote in the history of advertising. Anybody who tells you online advertising won't work without it is a liar.
On the plus side, maybe now people will see Chrome for what it really is. A vehicle and a weapon for Google to protect its shady business model. Just like Android.
Audible Genius's Building Blocks course has a in-browser DAW that you need to use Chrome for. Flowkey (browser-based piano lessons) also only works in Chrome, as far as I've been able to figure out.
So to anyone with an inclination, Firefox could use help on that front. Or if someone already knows of a Firefox-based solution, I'd be happy to use it. I just haven't found one yet.
Just tried using it and was pleasantly surprised that it mostly worked fine with DWM (an X11 window manager), and it could play sound from my built-in sound card fine, even though I don't have pulseaudio.
However, once I switched to the external sound card, Firefox wasn't able to produce any sound (tried Youtube and some local videos); so I'll be staying with Chromium, unless some patched version of Chromium (with privacy improvements) makes its way to the Archlinux repos.
How recently have you tried this? Firefox added AudioWorklet in v76 [1] and it's very well done.
[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/05/firefox-76-audio-worklets-...
Tried Flowkey again now as well and although it required the Jazz-MIDI plugin (to permit the browser access to my MIDI controller), with that plugin I was able to use Flowkey in Firefox.
So it looks like my concerns were outdated.
How would those friends feel about Chinese people being able to gain their information independence from CCP? If they would be in favour, then at least metaphorically they answered their own question.
Imagine this setup: Gmail used on mobile mail program. Surf the web with a mobile browser other than Chrome. Use Google as search engine.
FLoC will still be able to make the connection. That’s what I believe at least.
For my whole life I have always been configuring my browsers to clear all history on close or disable it entirely. Is FLoC still going to work anyway? Is the history accumulated and analyzed on the server side?
I am considering adding web scrapping to this file sharing privacy application I have written that already works in the browser. I could screen scrape content from other sites using a proxy on the terminal per user request and once piped to the browser privacy is protect by single origin policy and by a separation of content from address. I could even make the experience look like an embedded modern browser.
The problem is not constrained to Google Chrome, and the problem is certainly not solved by "taking side" in a made-up rivalry of Google Search and Duck Duck Go (childish to say the least)!
What I am getting at is that there is a paradigm shift in privacy consideration and expectations in the last two decades (on top of another shift the previous 2 or 3 decades).
We are living in a different age. The combat I read about in HN comments seems that of a rearguard... no offense.
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
Obviously Firefox is an alternative, but i personally was turned off by recent censorship comments by Mozilla’s CEO which I won’t get into here.
Usage seems to be growing a lot.
Will suggest to look into another forks like
Vivaldi
Brave
SRWare Iron
I started using Brave for past couple of months and don't have much of complaints related to browsing experience.
No matter how many extensions you add to keep trackers at bay, you're still using a product developed by a company that will keep pouring money into developing new ways to circumvent ads and tracking blockers.
The reason why Google can bully the web and get away with it is its market share. It's time to change that.
But... what is a maintained, open-source ungoogled chrome for Windows?
https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...
But they now clearly shifted from a "Noble Actor" to a "Competitor" with this aggressive marketing. I don't appreciate these marketing campaigns that are directed at the competition. I never liked the "I'm a Mac"-campaigns, nor the all the "Bing"-fearmongering.
It signals to me that you're not a fighter for a noble cause, letting the product speak for itself, but actually in for yourself in the first place. I'm rather turned off by this.
The kind of marketing is not only "aggressive", it is overly aggressive IMHO. It is vilifying, demonizing.
You can do aggressive marketing all you want, but in my eyes when arguments become hyperbolic, they get less and less believable.
The way they write their piece, FLoC is the worst thing that has ever happened, worse than everything that came before (how on earth is this worse than strictly personalized cookies all over the place?!) and only DDG and their extension can save you.
Different messages have different appeals. Perhaps DDG's marketing "secret sauce" is word of mouth? And the message you don't like - as an admitted non-user - isn't meant to drive your behavior, but the WoM behaviour of current committed users?
I have tabs for administrative work accounts and personal work accounts, along with restricting anything from Facebook into it's own container[2].
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account... [1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/facebook-cont...
I have a keybinding on my system to launch "firefox -P" so that I can pick which profile to launch an instance of right away. I juggle between 5 different profiles at any time and it works exactly as I'd like it to. Additionally, it is much easier to do than setting up a complex multi-account container setup.
All it needs to compete with Firefox is browser extensions on mobile.
But Firefox is a good browser and "morally" a better choice for many reasons others have already summarized.
Personally I use Edge as a developer because it's a Chromium browser (so it reflects most of my users' experience and works with a lot of tooling developed for Chrome), I already use Windows 10 and VS Code and it comes preinstalled.
But I used Firefox between the initial release of Quantum and the release of the new Edge browser and while there are both benefits and drawbacks to its dev tooling, it's definitely a good browser and purely on a quality/UX level I see no reason not to use Firefox.
If Edge was still using its own layout engine, I would agree with this. But even on Windows 10, by using Edge you not only trust Microsoft, but also help Google's takeover and control of the internet.
Using Safari, Internet Explorer, Links, Firefox or Serenity Browser all help a bit by reducing the Google browser marketshare. Using Brave, Edge, Vivaldi or Opera still help, but to a much smaller degree.
Oh, serving them your browsing history on a silver plate isn't really the same as letting them infer it from the scraps they could get from other browsers.
PS: and speaking of Chrome mods - Edge is arguably the better one out of all of them. At least with MS we know their policies and main source of revenue, unlike with Brave or Vivaldi.
So 'Google Blink Vivaldi' at best.
Microsoft is terrible. Google is bad. Combining them in a browser was an evil achievement.
Adblocking works so much better on Firefox. It blocks even the mere shadow of ads, like "skip this ad" button on YouTube, no promoted tweets, no warnings about cookies, GDPR, ads and nonsense almost cease the exist.
And Tree Style Tabs provides both ascended aesthetic and unparalleled usability. Where Chrome monits you with some annoying popup about tab groups, Tree Style Tabs brings order effortlessly.
This is not a choice between a better browser that tracks you or whatever and some FLOSS alternative that sort-of works. There is a clear winner on merits and it ain't Chrome, not for this crowd, anyway.
First bullet point in the description.
It seems to me that no matter what Google does, there will be pitchforks ready. What is so horrible about FLoC if I as the user am protected and my personal identity is kept in check, and only contained within my browser.
I'll stop using Chrome when there is a better alternative.. Firefox is a downgrade in each aspect, Edge is Edge (lol) and you can put a gun to my head but I won't use Safari, I have no idea how someone can even use Safari, the UI is so unintuitive, and they tried making it so simple that it is a pain in the ass to do anything more advanced.
Now Google controls the browser and simply accesses the browsing history and hands a processed version of it on a silver platter to advertisement-sellers.