When Chrome blocks ad-blockers as Google intends to do soon, I will entirely drop Chrome. And likely all of their services, as well: in for a penny, in for a pound.
People bring this up but I just can't fathom how that can be an argument.
Just use both. Use firefox for everything but keep chrome for development and potentially any google services you use. You really want to segment that anyway.
I switched to Firefox once Quantum came out and never looked back, I do tend to use Chrome occasionally when developing web apps, but FF has been my main browser for a while now and I'm perfectly happy with it and the development features it provides. What I'm saying is you can still use Chrome for testing/development and FF for browsing (with respect to your privacy)
I mentioned this earlier, but you could try "Brave" (https://brave.com/) a web browser based on chrome. same features just less of the google-stickiness.
Using chrome exclusively as a devtool is also an option, no? Anything else I’ll do on Firefox including containerized Google, Twitter and Facebook (deleted my account but using to block Facebook from any activity online that might be using them).
Which part of 'responsive design testing' in particular do you mean? I use devtools pretty religiously to check elements, but put responsivetester.net together a few years back for rapidly testing across multiple breakpoints. Then I'll use lambdatest.com (because it's wonderfully cheap) to actually device test prior to launch...
Well, as responsivetester.net uses iframes it will not work if the site is properly protected from click-jacking using the X-Frame-Options or CSP headers, and it will also not emulate touch scrolling/events. The devtools basically bring you a little bit closer to the real thing, although you still need to test with real devices in the end either way. As for how to use it see here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Responsive_De...
Edit: Not the web browser. I believe the current surveillance practices are dangerous to a free world. Hence the analogy with the train that goes to a bad place.
And newsbinator was talking about some feature, which is important but nowhere near the main issue. Hence the comfy chairs.
Yup. I've already moved to Firefox, using containers, ublock origin and auto-cookie-clear.
Also moved away from Google to DDG. I HATE the stupid name, it's slow, and sometimes I still have to use the !g thing, but overall it's decent.
Why do you care what it's named? Set it as the default search engine, and just type your query in the address bar and you'll get the results. In fact whatever you typed in duckduckgo's search field can be typed directly in the browser address bar (including switches like !g or !im)
Or if you use it frequently, just type 'd' and it'll be the first result.
As for the name, I call it DDG, which is also what I call David de Gea :-)
I already uninstalled Chrome everywhere except my smartphone. It pains me because Chrome's UX suits me better than anything else. But I can't fathom their decision.
It doesn't. The amount of rules you can stick in a Chrome extension is sufficient to block the majority of spam. Current block lists are mostly redundant and unoptimized.
And if you don't want to switch, there are things like privacy badger[1] and ghostery[2]? Although, strangely Privacy Badger does not seem to mention their chrome extension[3].
These aren't really a replacement when the browser itself is compromised and the corporation behind it is leveraging it to try to take control of the web standards.
>Our latest privacy experiment found Chrome ushered more than 11,000 tracker cookies into our browser — in a single week.
Firefox doesn't support cookies or what?
>Firefox isn’t perfect – it still defaults searches to Google and permits some other tracking. But it doesn’t share browsing data with Mozilla, which isn’t in the data-collection business.
It sounds like the author doesn't quite know how cookies work. It's great that Firefox does cookie blocking by default, but it's not like not doing that is chrome-only -- and it's not chrome that's setting all these cookies, it's the internet advertising business.
It'd be more honest to write an article about Firefox breaking bad internet standards in the interest of the user, and another one about internet tracking being out of control.
Chrome has issues, and it'd be good if it blocked more cookies by default, but the headline here is way overblown.
The headline might even be apt with a different article! But it seems we all want to be believe the headline so much that we didn't read past it.
Edit: the article this was duped into has a much better headline.
Dear Firefox implement tab to search already. Yes you can do ‘similar’ things with ! but it’s really not the same. So many Chrome users staying for this feature. Solve it already.
I didn’t know what ‘tab to search’, for people like me this is the simple explaination I found:
> For example, whether it's YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia, or any other site with its own search function, all I have to do is start typing "yout," Chrome will automatically fill it out to youtube.com with an option to press Tab to automatically start searching youtube from the address bar.
They're probably talking about the other feature: choose/write the domain name in the search bar, press Tab, and if you have previously visited the site, and it implements the OpenSearch "standard", the search bar sends your input to the chosen site instead of the default search engine (Google or whatever).
I forced myself to forget about this, but I agree, this feature is so easy, elegant and useful, I'm surprised none of the browsers (last time I checked) had implemented it except Chrome.
completely serious question, what does it cost me? It's not like my data is some zero sum thing that vanishes once someone else has it, and it's not like I have the ability to directly sell it to anyone else. How in material terms am I worse off by anyone tracking me.
Isn't this all just entire ideological, I don't see what cost I incur if Google knows that I visited hackernews, listen to bowie on youtube and like podcasts
The cost is the risk of someone using your data against you in the future, against your will.
For example, even seemingly benign page visits, like apolitical YouTube videos and shopping data can probably be combined with location history to infer political affiliation with good accuracy with some basic machine learning. That kind of data only needs to be collected once, and it's out there forever.
Now imagine the wrong authoritarian party gains access to such data in 5 or 10 years, and now knows that you've spent your life going to church and watching gun videos, or that you visited a planned Parenthood clinic and listened to a strongly liberal artist.
Google and a few other gigantic corporations are clearly aiming for a much larger power grab in the future, with their own money, hardware, complete control of the software stack, the web, messaging, transport, etc. In this future, a corporation becomes indistinguishable from a government and this is the long term cost. It's hard to see if you're only paying attention to immediate cost on the scale of a year or few.
Privacy in an individual context is irrelevant and only leads to folks glibly claiming they don't care about their privacy. Its like saying I personally doesn't care about the environment. That context and framing is wrong and misleading.
Privacy has a value on a one to one basis. That's why no one is going to give you their phone, yet they will make dissonant statements online. And privacy has a far higher value on a societal basis for a democratic society.
Surveillance capitalism is anti-democratic, hugely abusive and solely for the profit of a few. These are bad actors. That's why societal rule of law needs to kick in but as we know money and greed creates its own logic so that may take time. And till then there will be no shortage of apologists with a vested interest in surveillance trying to 'normalize' it.
I was starting to think I was the only one against these claims.
There's no one pushing Google down its users' throats. Yet people ask Google to behave like they want. Well, surprise! Google is a private entity and they'll do whatever they want. If you don't like it, leave. I left a long time ago but I believe these claims are unfair to Google.
We are being bombarded with "Google's x product is a monopoly". No they are not. There are tons of alternatives to anyone of Google's services. The thing is, they do it better than their alternatives. Free market, my friend.
If x alternative to a Google's service gets better, people will gravitate towards it. But don't ask people to drop the better product in order to give (undeserved) attention to the not-so-great one. Earn it!
People also complain about Google making their services' sites suck on other browsers. Well, their site, their rules. Not so long ago all online services had dedicated clients instead of web apps. Those apps weren't called "monopolies", yet there was no alternative client. Because the root of the monopoly argument lies in the "service", if there are no alternatives to the "service", now we are talking, but there's no monopoly in the "client". If you don't like the "client", drop the service.
Unfortunately, your narrative fails due to the existence of standards and governments. Having a large enough market share and capital allows you to manipulate both to your advantage.
What's your gmail migration strategy? My primary email is hosted @gmail.com -- and I need a reliable way to transition this to my own domain on a trusted (and 3rd world priced) provider.
Forward to the new address, unsubscribe from all the crap and change my address in every website that I care about. For humans I still don't know, I guess I will start writing from the new account and if they don't take the hint, I will tell them explicitly.
Protonmail. From what I've understood, tutanota is better but I'm also a German resident and they are based in Germany, so better have a provider abroad than at home.
I give you a precious bit of information than blew my mind: if you move to a new email, you don't have to nuke the previous one. You can still access it and lose nothing important. I had 10 years of history too and yesterday I had to lookup a receipt and I was like: "ah, it's all still there, the email apocalypse that I envisioned was all in my head".
We scrubbed and stubbed chromium front end code of all sorts of stateful requests to gstatic and other Google domains. We have Mark Pilgrim (11 years on Chrome at Google) working for us along with top people from Igalia. We've little-snitched as well as grepped. Some of the signaling bottoms out in common objects, which make stubbing easy. Anyway, we've nullified all the surveillance.
A note on this WaPo story: I spent an hour with the reporter on the phone on 6/13 and practically wrote whole sentences in the piece. I've been calling Chrome spyware since last year. For some reason the piece ended up excluding not only Brave but Safari, which has deep anti-tracking history. Anyway, the story is getting out, and consciousness does not go backward.
Brave is built upon Electron, which is built upon Chromium (not Chrome). Electron and Chromium are both open source, unlike Chrome, although development is still concentrated in Google and GitHub/Microsoft. So I imagine it's fine unless something egregious happens with those projects and there isn't a strong enough community to maintain a clean fork.
Oops! I actually thought about double-checking that before writing it, but I vaguely remember reading some list of reasons why they had initially gone with Electron instead of Chromium, so I assumed it was still true.
And by far and away the most energy efficient, which is pretty relevant for most Apple devices. It's currently my main browser and has been for a while.
Source: me. It's not a small difference, it's literally hours of battery life – or at least was last time I compared. Why would you be surprised? Note, though, that my browsing habits are very messy – I habitually have a number of windows open, some with many tabs. So if you're a neater sort you may not notice the difference as much. Also I haven't tried the most recent versions of Chrome, but I assume I would have heard something if they'd gotten that much better.
You're an interesting data point then.
It's surprising because chromium has an order of magnitude more developers dedicated to optimizations.
Webkit ~= 200K commits
Blink ~= 800K commits
I wrote my original comment imprecisely and without caveat because I was under the strong impression that it was well-known and uncontroversial. I'm definitely not the only person that has observed this. This is the first result for me for "safari chrome battery life": https://www.howtogeek.com/273606/the-best-web-browsers-for-s...
I don't see why number of commits would be anything but an extremely weak proxy for estimating power consumption, certainly not anything to cause surprise. A very strange thing to say by a self-described "rationalist". "Optimizations" is a very wide term you've used. Unless you are specifically targeting power consumption, it's quite possible to optimize for speed and markedly increase power consumption.
Probably because Safari is IE6 of today. That's pretty much as far from "the best" as it gets.
Even as an user, if I want adblock, it will launch separate application, with separate dock icon. That's so un-Apple, as if they didn't want you to use it.
The problem is mainly that the user interface is in my opinion horrible. Especially for new users (I've helped a few newbies), it's hard to see the tabs and to be aware that the browser created a new one.
From my limited experience using it (while teaching an intern how to do web dev), the Dev Tools are horrible and byzantine for some use cases - seems like while Chrome super charged their Dev Tools after the blink fork, Safari's got stuck in the past.
I find Firefox's Dev Tools far better, except the JS debugging tab, which is behind Chrome's on almost all counts.
Give the Firefox Containers a try - they are a far better experience than Chrome's profiles IMO. You can define multiple containers for different use cases or personas, and all the browsing and history and cookies from that persona stays within that container only. There is even a special Facebook container, which always opens Facebook in a separate container, so FB can't track you across different sites.
I am quite satisfied with Firefox's Multi-Account containers. As an added bonus, tabs associated with different containers can share the same Firefox window.
It's not exactly the same though... I have clients where we access a Google account, which has access to Google services... it's like synching a whole Google eco system. Everything is staked on the Chrome login - Gmail, Analytics, Tag manager, password synch...
It could be undone, but those frackers at Google make it so easy. And so much is built off of Gmail as the mail service.
Not that bashing Chrome or Googme bothers me, I made my own attempt at that recently, but no need to discuss the same article twice?