Also if you're making an issue of providing software with no telemetry then your website should probably not include cloud insights tech that: "collects web vitals from the actual devices your visitors are using".
For example, we have been experimenting with a opera/vivaldi-like method of accessing Firefox's sidebar. Whilst you could technically achieve this via patching `omni.ja`, you would need to repatch it every update. At that point, it might as well be a custom browser.
Sorry about Vercel's insight stuff, not sure how that got enabled, but it should be disabled now (or whenever Cloudflare invalidates your cache).
If you want further reading into some of the specific parts of our code that we are putting most of our effort into, here are some links: - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/blob/alpha/src/brow... - https://github.com/pulse-browser/browser/tree/alpha/src/brow...
I appreciate your honesty, but hearing this was enough for me to file your project into the "not touching with a ten-foot pole" bucket alongside the likes of Wave Browser.
It is a balancing act, and I won't be collecting or selling your data, but I won't be competing with Librewolf or Tor for the "privacy" market either. However, at the bare minimum, we will be more "private" than Firefox by extent of including uBo and disabling Mozilla's non-critical telemetry by default.
Those people are very vocal on HN or on the Foss community, but they do not speak for most users anymore than I do.
What you are attempting is very interesting and a lot of work.
Even if it's not tor browser level of private, I'll be glad to give it a try. We desperatly need more diversity in the browser space.
Any chance we could see something like this in Pulse Browser or is that something that just requires touching too much of the underlying code base to be viable? ^^
I think it also has many more config options, but I'm quite happy with the defaults.
How do you "accidentally" enable such user-hostile tracking? This gives quite a bad image of the site and the associated project. Will you "accidentally" enable telemetry as well on some future versions of Pulse?
Development teams build and test with debug mode builds, send out these builds to internal teams to beta test. These telemetry tools are used to collect data, errors etc.
When it was time to ship, they forget to turn it off for the stable builds. I've seen it happen a lot.
> We have been moving further away from privacy and towards developing/iterating on features faster
That is fine but what have you done on the Privacy aspect? I tried out your alpha and immediately on startup it tries to connect to location.services.mozilla.com . So I disabled geolocation, and it still insists on connecting to Mozilla. So I check settings to see if there is an option to disable checking for updates, but there is no such option. If you want me to create config or policy files, I don't see how your browser is making things any easier than Firefox. And hence my question - what privacy features have you actually incorporated or enabled in Pulse Browser?
(Note: I am not questioning your rationale of the default settings, which is necessary for the average user, but the lack of ease for power users to customise any feature. Please look into how Pale Moon / White Star and Orion browsers ensure that disabling phoning home features in settings actually means that the browser will not make any automatic network connections on startups - they are the only 2 browsers that do this, and thus show that they genuinely respect their users.)
Otherwise, your whole project is just a browser extension bundled with the browser. Nevertheless, a good effort. You might find this resource useful for your project - https://sammacbeth.eu/blog/2020/12/27/firefox-fork.html
> We have been moving further away from privacy and towards
But sorry, I literally stopped reading at that point.
The only feature that people want and need from browsers, and the only reason to even glance twice at yet another Firefox fork is enhanced privacy and cast-iron control over what a browser is doing.
There is enormous scope here to add value - adding client web application firewalls, different, customisable jailing schemes, detailed easy to understand monitoring, file monitors, inviolable fine-grained per-io-device permissions, better Tor and IPFS integration.
How about starting with a browser that can remember your privacy settings, instead of silently "updating" and defaulting back to the worst possible settings as Firefox does? Having the latest (probably broken and more privacy invasive) presentation features would be very low on my list.
Well, not me.
That's what you're interested in at least, I don't care about these features and if it was up to me the #1 priority for Firefox developers would be making desktop mode persistent by-site on Android
It’s new browser engines which are increasingly declared unfeasible. Browsers themselves are a dime a dozen.
How many people really care or even know about these things? 1 percent of the populace?
Privacy is one aspect, sure, but it seems to me that the majority of the population simply doesn't care one way or the other. It's not a "killer app". Otherwise, everyone would be using something like Pale Moon by now.
How many people have you asked?