this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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These are not the only two available browsers, you know?
Do you mean Safari?
Name one other browser that is not based on Chromium. If it is based on Chromium, it has to deal with what Google throws at them.
I say this as an enthusiastic Brave user. Brave is great at what it does currently, but the more terrible stuff Google builds into Chromium, the more patches they'll have to maintain. This can make it harder to maintain their fork.
Worse than that, most Chromium-derivative users aren't Brave users. Many web apps already don't work as well with Firefox' JavaScript Engine (Gecko) as they do with Chromium. This gives Google immense power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Browsers_based_on_Chromium
Brave is extremely shady. Really, I used it and even created a script to install it on rpm-ostree distros, but damn that is shady.
https://www.kevinmuldoon.com/do-not-use-brave-browser/
That's a solid criticism. Firefox + uBlock Origin or Librewolf are good desktop alternatives. But what's the alternative on Android? Last time I checked, there wasn't any on privacyguides.
Btw I do always turn off all their rewards and wallet stuff and follow most of the https://privacyguides.org recommendations.
Thanks for your help in making privacy-focused software available on Linux btw!
Fennec, F-Droids fork with proprietary bits removed. & uBlock of course.
Mull is even better, it's hardened Fennec. It's basically like LibreWolf but for Android.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin on Android. You can still install add-ons for the app the same way you do on desktop.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/
Cromite has adblock. Vanadium too but it may break on on-GrapheneOS as it has security patches that break on regular android.
Mull is very fine for me, I use Vanadium and Mull, Vanadium for crappy sites (because mobile hardened firefox doesnt support as much sites as desktop for some reason). Vanadium is very likely more secure, unlike on Desktop where that is not easily said.
Cromite is the best recommendation I can give. It is currently under consideration to be added to privacyguides.org (you can find it on their issues page on the GitHub), and it is expected to be added (as was Bromite, which is where Cromite forked from after development on Bromite was stopped). The main developer of Cromite (uazo) has actually asked the evaluation to be paused until the licensing for aac and h264 are figured out, as licenses are very expensive, and a recommendation on the PrivacyGuides website would likely draw many more users to the project, potentially causing legal trouble. You can track progress on this issue here. It's worth noting that the dev of Cromite was an active dev of Bromite before Bromite's lead dev abandoned the project.
Of course there's other browsers! There's Opera...uhh that now based on Chromium. Oh, how about Edge...that's Chromium based too now. I know, there's the KHTML engine!...no, that's been officially discontinued.
GNOME Web technically, based on WebKit. Idk if anyone uses that though.
GNOME Web, qutebrowser, Konquerer and Falkon. While they are pretty obscure, I personally use Falkon regularly on low end systems/RPi
Both qutebrowser and Falkon run on the QtWebEngine, essentially Chromium.
qutebrowser uses chromium
Both OP and the author of the linked post explicitly say "Chrome", not "Chromium", and seem to imply those are the only two choices available to users.
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-different-from-chrome/
Fair point, but the engine is important.
I understand their blog post, and if I were to build a browser today, I'd probably do the same.
But that doesn't mean this situation isn't problematic. It's similar to car-centric infrastructure: in this situation, for any individual, choice X makes sense, but that will make the situation even worse for the whole population. A cumulation of many tiny Prisoner's Dilemmas.
I wrote Chromiun in the description too. Chrome is simply what people use.
Plain Chromium, even with all GUI settings, all degoogle policy configs and flags enabled, contacts Google like hell.
I tried googeeteller and its scary.
Have not tried Vivaldi for a long time, but its fingerprinting resistance was nonexistent, it is filled with useless features and has no container support, so nah.