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Comment by samspenc | Hacker News Reader

Related tweet from Paul Graham: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1699021936573940154

"If you go to chrome://settings/adPrivacy you can turn off the spyware that got inserted into the latest version of Chrome."

And I found PaulG's tweet from this earlier Hacker News discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392517

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At some point you would have to set a weekly (daily?) reminder to turn off all new sell-out "features" that get added. Also, at some point those "features" stop being an option you can opt-out.

The real solution is switching to Firefox.

The Windows model.

When human beings act like this they get labelled as predators. This industry has a terrifying understanding of what consent means.

If computing was a night club, "Silicon Valley" would be the creepy guy who goes up to women with "Do you want to dance? [Yes] [Ask again later]". Or more often: "We are now dating. I'll pick you up at 7PM tomorrow for dinner. To opt out, send me a letter in the post."

If you're interested in utilizing your history information for something in your intentional interests, consider saving an archive of pages you browse to make a search engine you can query back through later.

You can save the full content for indexing with full text search, and you can even export archives as tarballs by zipping up the directory. Many people find this a useful way to "mine" their own browser history to create a curated search engine aligned with your interests. Or simply to save the pages they browse for review offline--either to save bandwidth, or just because they're actually "offline"--at a remote site, or on an airplane.

Everything is saved in a fully interactive way. Personally tho, I find search the most useful feature. Also, we're open source so if you want to get involved, please do so!

https://github.com/dosyago/DiskerNet

https://pinboard.in is my go-to for this sort of thing.

Didn’t something happen to that guy, or the site went down? Or was that something else. The one i linked is self hosted, but a Saas version definitely is interesting.

Does your one have archiving and search??

The site has been solid for me for years and it does have content archiving and search.

Not sure of which site issue you're talking about.

Or you could... use any other chromium based browser that doesn't do this.

Might I suggest Vivaldi? It's nice, lots of built in features that you probably are running extensions for currently.

Please, do not use Vivaldi or any other closed source, secret codebase browser.

Can you imagine signing into your bank with a closed source browser.

This argument lacks for the average consumer. Heavily. Do you compile every update of Firefox yourself (and this assumes that you have read every line of code that changed during updates)? Especially when on Windows or macOS, you just download the version that is distributed by mozilla.org on their website. There is no guarantee that they're using the actual sources to build. They could just as well add in a little patch that does some nasty things.

But they won't, because they have a reputation to loose. So does Vivaldi.

I download the version from my distribution's package manager, which is compiled by independent volunteers.

Is that safer than downloading from Mozilla or Vivaldi? For $10,000 which one would be more likely to add a compromise?

And of course, you check every commit for malicious code and newly introduced backdoors, right? Right?

> Please, do not use Vivaldi or any other closed source, secret codebase browser.

This is misleading, Vivaldi source code may not be released under an OSI License [1] but it is publicly accessible for audit at [2].

Whilst you wont be able to create OSS derivatives from it, it's definitely not "secret" and fear mongering need not apply to a publicly auditable code-base.

[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/privacy/is-vivaldi-open-sou...

[2] https://vivaldi.com/source/

Or, stick to Firefox.

In the long run I want a browser that has a solid community or base behind it, with a mostly-good record (no point chasing perfection here) of privacy and security. The Mozilla Foundation has done a good but not stellar job (remember 1.1.1.1?). I also don't want to change browsers because someday Vivaldi - hypothetically - gets acquired by Evil Corp, or has some vulnerability that remains unpatched. I just want to get my work done.

Firefox, the browser that recently started literally showing ad spam on the new tab page on mobile? I'm sure they're a lot better.

They are a lot better. You’re talking about Google, a company that literally owns its existence and trillions of dollars of revenue to targeted advertising across the entire world, vs Mozilla, a company that’s chosen to add a few non-targetted ads that are easily disabled.[1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mozilla also owns its existence to Google's firehouse of money, a portion of which is streamed to Mozilla (some $500M in FY 2021) to ensure they keep Google as the default search engine.

There's plenty to criticize of Mozilla, but yes, they're a lot better, or a lot less bad if you want.

Are you really suggesting there isn't a huge difference between an ad and sharing your browsing history with advertisers?

I see this happen all the time, specially in politics or politics-adjacent topics. Just because no option is perfect, they become equal in people's mind. Two things can be both imperfect, and one be way worse than the other.

Google Chrome is on a whole different league when it comes to abusing your privacy. Mozilla Firefox ain't perfect, but it's way better.

What’s wrong with 1.1.1.1?

Why use chromium based browsers at all? Google largely has control of the project and they seem determined to keep adding anti-privacy/anti-user features.

I feel moving away from Google Chrome still sends a message but yes long term I think we will need to move away from Chromium given Google is running it into the ground. My hope is that Chromium will get forked and supported by other companies and individuals with ethics around a free and open web that doesn't involve Google Adware.

if anyone likes and needs to use something based on Chromium, use Falkon. if not, stick to Firefox

Just use brave. I only use chrome to watch videos when I need Nvidia Video Super Resolution for low res videos because brave has a performance bug supporting this feature

Brave is quite unethical itself, I wouldn't recommend it.

I use Brave.

All the same Chrome extensions and other functionality work.

But I'd wager someone on here could find a problem with them too :(

Yeah, I like Vivaldi too. It's been a string of largely pleasant surprises since I started using it a few months back, along the lines of "I had no idea I needed this until now". The only downside has been the occasional crash, perhaps because I've gone overboard with workspaces relative to the specs of my old PC.

Same boat (workspaces are great), only in addition to crashes it slows down with many tabs even when they're all hibernated (so the number of tabs/workspaces should not matter), and it's in general not the fastest , but the latest version claims some big improvements in opening new tabs/windows

> You can block sites that you don't want. Chrome also auto-deletes sites that are older than 30 days from the list.

> You can block topics that you don’t want to be shared with sites. Chrome also auto-deletes your topics that are older than four weeks.

Wow, they really went all out here in regards to actively user hostile patterns!

Thanks, I was looking for exactly this!

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