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If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Does it matter if you use a Chromium browser that isn't Chrome itself? I know Google has a large influence in Chromium development, but presumably they can't just stick tracking in other Chromium based browsers, can they? I just really like Vivaldi.
Pretty sure Chromium has Google tracking, you have to use ungoogled-chromium, and hope they did a good job ungoogling. I don't know how Chromium based browsers deal with Chromium's built in tracking...
Chromium browsers don't allow extensions (uBlock Origin being the best) to block ads as effectively due to their implementation of Manifest V3. The Firefox implementation doesn't share that limitation.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23559234/firefox-manifest-v3-content-ad-blocker
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2022/05/18/manifest-v3-in-firefox-recap-next-steps/
I remember reading about that... Do Chromium users live in a land without ad blockers? How?! Why?!
Except for Vivaldi, ever since the Mv3 news came out they've always said they're going to go around it. Here for instance one of the developers talks about there intentions going forward.
Vivaldi too is technically Opera 2.0 as it was created by Jon von Tetzchner who was the co-creator of Opera, and Opera (until the chinese consortium sale that is, after von Tetzchner had left the company) was always synonymous with privacy and innovation.
So even though Vivaldi is a fork of Chromium I believe from everything I've read about the guy, Jon von Tetzchner is 100% commited to his principals. Like one of my favourite von Tetzchner stories is from when Opera 8 came out and he said if it got to a million downloads over a weekend he'd swim the Atlantic, so when Opera 8 smashed the million downloads instead of trying to welch out on the bet he followed through, didn't make it very far but he still did it and I feel that says a lot about his character. Here's the best article I could find about it as it was back in '05 and Opera seems to have nuked it's old news articles.
This may be true, but I've seen basically zero ads in Vivaldi with uBlock Origin installed. However, perhaps there are issues I'm just not noticing, or problems caused by having uBlock active that don't occur in Firefox.
Well... there exists the Ungoogled Chromium, so it's questionable
Brave is built on Chromium, but has zero google telemetry and allows you to opt out of every single cookie, tracker, and javascript element at your whim or by standard. The only downside is that the "homescreen" is usually an ad for crypto, but 50% of the time it's a nice photo.
Brave has its own issues, and it seems like new controversies are popping up every day or two, but you can disable those ads in settings. Or at least you could back when I used it.