Support Brave if you really want to stick it to them. Brave was founded by ousted Mozillians.
From what I've heard, despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, it often makes requests to “laptop-updates.brave.com” which is actually also used for affiliates.
Usage of Brave indirectly helps Chrome become a better product, by significantly increasing stability and security of the chromium-base, sucking up resources that couldve also been spent on a more privacy-friendly browser alternative.
Apple and Google do not share code post-fork, and Apple denies Google ~30% of the browser market, so using "mono-" is wrong. Google has a search monopoly, but not quite a browser and definitely not a browser engine monopoly.
The KHTML/WebKit lineage is more a monoculture in its older parts, but I say this is evolution in action (cf. successful alleles and haplogroups across many populations).
So we are not "contributing" much to any monoculture or monopoly, and the alternative is dying on the wrong hill, as I just posted. Any substantive response?
I use scare quotes around rewards and earn because those are my trigger words for projects I should walk away from.
As for update pings, all browsers automate this to avoid the plague that was IE, layered like sediment from IE6 on across the chart of browsers hitting websites, creating horrendous attack surface that was actively exploited, due to lack of auto-updates.
> resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his firm opposition to same-sex marriage[0]
No thanks.