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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

You'd be giving up a FOSS browser for a proprietary one and making the Blink monoculture worse at the same time.

Yes, but sometimes I wonder if Firefox is still fully open source. I still hate having to do the first thing first when I install the browser is disable Pocket, change the default search from Google to DuckDuckGo (the latter is a recent disappointment). I miss the traditional / classical browsing of the 90s. Heck, I will pay for a browser that brings back the 90s experience.

A program could have all the advertising and tracking in the world and still be fully open source, as long as nothing stops you from creating a fork of it without that stuff.

Yes, but browsing is what we do most of the time. Why can’t we actually pay for one that doesn’t have all the tracking. Each browser claims privacy features, some have more while others claim it is essential not to block certain sites. But they all free and we pay the price for whatever features they impose. Maybe to your point, if I don’t like it then fork the code of browser and then be another offshoot of one of the browsers. Or build one from the scratch and loose hours / days of one’s life with no goal other than making a browser that is customized to my thinking/philosophy about tech

I've been testing out Orion[0] on macOS. It's a WebKit browser built by Kagi[1] (who make a search engine you pay for). I'm hoping the business model works for them, I started paying for the search. The browser is still in beta.

[0] https://browser.kagi.com

[1] https://kagi.com

Why can’t we actually pay for one that doesn’t have all the tracking.

Of you could just use Brave.

Lots of online complaints about the founder's personal life/opinion but in terms of privacy, Brave is pretty good. Maybe not the best but pretty good for a solution that you don't need to fiddle with yourself.

Yes. I did use Brave for quite some time until I noticed Firebox becoming more stable. Also, I noticed a better experience with Firefox in Gnome than with Brave.

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