Privacy-First Browsers Look To Take the Shine Off Google's Chrome (nbcnews.com) 56
From a report: Google's Chrome now reigns as the biggest browser on the block, and the company is facing challenges similar to Microsoft's from competitors, as well as government scrutiny. But Google faces a new wrinkle -- a growing realization among consumers that their every digital move is tracked. "I think Cambridge Analytica acted as a catalyst to get people aware that their data could be used in ways they didn't expect," said Peter Dolanjski, the product lead for Mozilla's Firefox web browser, referring to the scandal in which a political consulting firm obtained data on millions of Facebook users and their friends.
And in something of a poetic role reversal, Microsoft is positioning itself to pick up the slack from people who may be fed up with Google's Chrome browser and its questionable privacy practices. Microsoft is expected to release an overhaul of its latest browser, called Edge, in the coming months. Microsoft is just one of a number of companies and organizations looking to take a piece out of Google -- some using the company's own open-source software. One name that might be familiar to most consumers -- Mozilla's Firefox browser -- is also a veteran of the "browser wars" of two decades ago. The nonprofit Mozilla, which has been biting at the heels of leading browsers for most of its existence, is introducing more aggressive privacy settings to try to stand out and take advantage of the privacy stumbles by Google and other tech giants.
And in something of a poetic role reversal, Microsoft is positioning itself to pick up the slack from people who may be fed up with Google's Chrome browser and its questionable privacy practices. Microsoft is expected to release an overhaul of its latest browser, called Edge, in the coming months. Microsoft is just one of a number of companies and organizations looking to take a piece out of Google -- some using the company's own open-source software. One name that might be familiar to most consumers -- Mozilla's Firefox browser -- is also a veteran of the "browser wars" of two decades ago. The nonprofit Mozilla, which has been biting at the heels of leading browsers for most of its existence, is introducing more aggressive privacy settings to try to stand out and take advantage of the privacy stumbles by Google and other tech giants.
Not Microsoft (Score:1, Insightful)
I really hope Microsoft doesn't gain traction on this because they simply cannot be trusted.
Anyone who lived through the IE6 days will know that this is nothing more than a marketing ploy, trying to tap into a wave of consumer anger.
Their handling of Windows 10 should have demonstrated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the contempt in which Microsoft holds users data and privacy. And they've shoved telemetry into every single product they release now. Even their SDKs and OSS tools like Visual Studio Code.
It do
No proprietary software can be trusted. (Score:2)
The reason why Microsoft's browsers can't be trusted has nothing to do with being written by Microsoft. Any so-called analysis along this line profoundly misunderstands the issue.
The reason why Microsoft's browsers can't be trusted is because those browsers are proprietary.
This is the proper hinge on which to understand this issue and it leads to radically different conclusions: All proprietary browsers can't be trusted regardless of authorship because those programs deny a user's freedom to run, inspect, s
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You're completely wrong about the "nothing to do with" part.
Just because one analysis considers the bigger frame does not invalidate the interior frame to a non-entity (not unless you're a lazy thinker).
You real argument looks like this:
* premise: humans are lazy thinkers who can mostly only think about one thing at a time
* analysi
They killed "do not track" (Score:2)
If we look at one of their attempts at "privacy first", it was the setting of "do not track" by default.,Therefore making that flag completely irrelevant.
That flag was broken to begin with, but the only way it could have worked is with some agreement between advertisers and users. Advertisers agree not to track users who set that flag and user agents only set it if the user wants it explicitly. Microsoft broke that trust and gave a perfect excuse for advertisers to do the same.
Privacy by Microsoft: make use
Mozilla Hypocrites (Score:1)
Mozilla talks the talk but they don't walk the walk. As long as Firefox has telemetry [mozilla.org] automatically sharing user information even when disabled, [reddit.com] and making recommendations [mozilla.org], while automatically opting users in for notifications [mozilla.org] they're no better than Microsoft offering an incomplete settings app in Windows 10 to partially opt out. No web browser respects your privacy.
Slashdot Hypocrites (Score:1)
For all the bluster about how much privacy matters, and user choice is important, we still treat Mozilla like dirt despite them still being on top of the pack when it comes to user interests. We don't really want to support them or anyone, we just want to have a free product that does exactly what we want, without having to do any work. We're just talk, and no action to back it up. We *could* join Mozilla, or start out own Mozilla, but we don't really care.
That's strange. (Score:1)
I disabled pocket on my install of Firefox. Since then I haven't received any notifications or recommendations at all.
I also made my homepage a local HTML file on which I put my most common links. And I don't have a Firefox account. Perhaps I have blocked all the channels they use to notify and recommend?
Software freedom helps you keep your privacy. (Score:2)
This is not true, as Mozilla Firefox is free software. You have all the freedom you need to make a Firefox derivative that respects your privacy. Other developers use Firefox as a basis for their work (Tor Browser, for instance) precisely because Firefox is free software (software we're all free to run, inspect, modify, and share). Your unwillingness to do this p
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>DuckDuckGo Browser
Sending 100% of your traffic to / through a US company service is like pissing your pants for warmth! Qwant is better and so is a lot of other browsers and search engines.
Re: List of Privacy-centered browsers, please ! (Score:2)
Here is the list:
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Re: List of Privacy-centered browsers, please ! (Score:2)
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We need more than forks (Score:3, Insightful)
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Pale Moon has been trying to break away from Firefox upstream for years. Their latest venture is something called the Unified XUL Platform, that can be used as a "back-end" for application code in a variety of projects, including ones that the Pale Moon folks aren't involved with (A few minor unrelated projects have even started using it).
PM is a fork in the more traditional sense of a fork, not in the sense of most other Firefox derivatives that take each new version of Firefox, apply their customizations
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"but who will actually become the “Satoshi Nakamoto” of the web?" Spoken like a technologist: the solution to technology running amok is... different technology.
No, the solution is for technologists to:
- Get into politics, and learn about the power of making laws. Accept that politics politics being 'slow' is a feature, not a bug.
- Stop looking down on the humanities and actually embrace their knowledge of ethics, ethnography, human complexity and cultural processes.
The more you learn about thes
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Waterfox more or less has them reigned in. Waterfox is basically Firefox 56 (the last version before quantum) with some security fixes backported, so it predates a lot of the latest silliness from Mozilla. On the other hand, I'm not sure how much longer it's going to be viable. It works for just about everything, but at some point the web is going to move past Firefox 56.
I'm not totally sure on this, but for the official builds on Windows I think they had to go back to using MS's compiler due to a few qu
What’s Microsoft got to do with this? (Score:5, Insightful)
They’re not currently particularly privacy oriented. They’re not currently marketing their browser as privacy-first. They’re just not Google - and that’s how they’re selling it, with no particular discussion of what they will or won’t be doing with your data themselves.
So why does the title mention “privacy-first browsers” on a submission where the summary barely mentions any privacy-first browsers?
Duck Duck Go (Score:2)
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Because that's what Heroes do. (Score:2)
Because that's what Heroes do.
What about Mobile? (Score:2)
Chromes popularity is the fact it is on a bunch of mobile devices. I can't speak for everyone, but most web browsing I do is on my Phone. So having a Winning PC Web Browser will not change everything like it did in the late 1990's.
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For most sites, you just need to type a very little, the rest is just reading content.
Out of the frying pan an into the fire (Score:2)
>"Microsoft is positioning itself to pick up the slack from people who may be fed up with Google's Chrome browser and its questionable privacy practices. Microsoft is expected to release an overhaul of its latest browser, called Edge, in the coming months."
As if we can trust Microsoft more than Google? And to make matters worse, moving Edge to "Chromium based" hands another large chunk of the web right into Google's lap. Make no mistake, Google will control Edge's engine, like they do with all other "C
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