Hacker News Reader

Comment by nik282000 | Hacker News Reader

nik282000

Not like Chrome, Chrome feels like it LOVES hanging out with me, looking over my shoulder, telling all it's friends about what I'm working on, what I buy, and how much money I make.

View on HN

Sure, but Firefox doesn’t have to be Chrome to be unacceptable, and Chrome isn’t the only alternative. I reject the idea that Firefox can transgress as much as they want as long as Chrome has gotten worse.

And fuck then for buying and killing fakespot.

Chrome is the only alternative unless you have access to Safari. Brave, Opera, Edge, etc are all Chromium and will all deprecate Manifest V2 eventually. The V2 mess is just one example of how Google can continue to stangle the web even if you're not using Chrome itself.

I use Waterfox or Librewolf

The "I use arch btw" of browsers.

Jk but tbh I think group them in with Firefox

Maybe librewolf, but Waterfox is a drop-in replacement. Same extension “store”, gets updates quickly, install on every OS I’ve tried (which is usually windows unfortunately) is equally as smooth as Firefox, compatible profiles, etc, etc, etc. You literally just go to a different website to get the installer. It’s harder to install FF developer edition.

They both use Gecko under the hood and can install any Firefox Add-on. If you want something truly different, try a Goanna-based browser like Pale Moon or Basilisk

Tired: Firefox

Wired: Floorp, Midori, Mullvad Browser, SeaMonkey, Waterfox, Zen, GNU Icecat

Inspired: Basilisk, Pale Moon

Speaking of “I use arch btw”

>Chrome is the only alternative

The future looks pretty clear to me. We will have to use two browsers. One government approved, google (or some other thing) vetted browser for all the official and banking stuff. One other for all the other causal stuff.

This would be bundled as a single package, with something like firefox containers automatically switching to the "approved" browser based on domain loaded in the tab.

Once a browser is "Government Approved" all the other are 'Unapproved' ipso facto. There's nothing clear about that future, imo.

By government approved, I meant only to access government websites/applications.

Chrome != Chromium engine

Most of the Chromium-based browsers remove Google's telemetry and integrations, so if someone has a problem with Chrome "looking over my shoulder", then they have many more alternatives.

And sure, Manifest V2 will disappear in all those forks, but many browsers have built-in adblocker instead, for example both Opera and Brave claim to. And other than adblockers, what else is lost in Manifest V2?

Mind you, I am still using Firefox, but saying "the only alternatives are Chrome and Firefox" is completely incorrect.

> Chrome != Chromium engine

This exactly what I disagree with and I think I supported my argument quite clearly. The more we say "Chrome is not Chromium" the more stuff like V2 will happen. At some point we need to admit that the dominance of Chromium does in fact give Google power over the web

Google controls Chromium to the extent they can impose changes like manifest v3 and while some forks like Brave will try to circumvent such changes, it will eventually become too costly or incompatible to maintain.

It is kind of the same daydream as the Windows 11 debloaters have that if they just keep doing that, everything will be okay. That is until Microsoft implements features they can no longer fully disable, like recall, or just exercise their control to revert any changes at will.

Epiphany on Linux is a pretty straightforward Webkit browser. Konqueror still exists. Ladybird is up and coming. Servo is still making progress.

> I reject the idea that Firefox can transgress as much as they want as long as Chrome has gotten worse.

Well, then the good news is nobody is saying that.

There’s room for people to disagree on what constitutes a serious “transgression”, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com