TechTakes

The era of useful Silicon Valley Non-Profits seems to be fizzling out. I wonder how long Signal is going to hold out...

if you’re here to recommend ladybird, tell us why you’re doing advocacy for that trash fire in spite of the well-sourced, ah, downsides pointed out in article and video linked from the OP.

same for brave. I don’t give a fuck if privacyguides told you it was the goodest browser.

if you’re here to advocate for ladybird or brave and haven’t read the article in the OP, fuck off. don’t come here pretending to discuss something you haven’t read.

Move. I'm trying waterfox atm

you_were_the_chosen_one.gif

I jumped ship to Librewolf a year and a half ago (after seeing Mozilla steal people's data and sell it to advertisers), and I'm pretty fucking thankful for that. For anyone looking to leave Mozilla to rot, I highly recommend it.

I used Firefox for largely political reasons (summarized as "Google needs a competitor"), but it was becoming harder and harder to justify. Eventually, I just switched to a Chromium-based browser. I will say that, as an almost-good-enough solution until I wake up from this nightmare to a functioning Servo (🙏🙏🙏) , DNS level ad blocking (using Mullvad's DNS servers) + uBlock Origin Lite (filtering mode set to "complete") has been sufficient for me. It even blocks Spotify ads. I think it blocks YouTube ads as well, although I barely watch YouTube on my browser.

Ungoogled Chromium supports MV2 extensions and seems like a good choice if Firefox becomes unusable or you get fed up. I use Trivalent, a security hardened Chromium-based browser, but it may be tough to install if you aren't on Secureblue. Also it only supports MV3 extensions.

this shit is so fucking frustrating, just leave our browsers alone. we want security updates, not an unethically sourced bullshit-and-vulnerability-generator stapled onto the biggest attack surface on our fucking machine

Presumably, if Firefox version N breaks ad-blocking, someone can make a hard fork of version N-1. Security patches, upgrades to OS support and things like new CSS/HTML features can be cherry-picked or reimplemented to it, though Firefox updates in general will not be admitted, as it’s a hard fork (in the way that LibreOffice or MariaDB is). At worst, Firefox will actively make it hard to do this, closing their source or changing their licence to one which prohibits it, requiring any updates to be reimplemented clean-room style, which will slow things down, though if the alternative is actively enshittified, it’s the least-bad option.

maybe my favorite pivot to ai article yet, definitely top three at least. wonderful work

I'll just keep not using it.

Turn it off?