NYT: 'If You Care About Privacy, It's Time to Try a New Web Browser' (seattletimes.com) 135
This week the lead consumer technology writer for The New York Times urged readers to switch their browser from Chrome, Safari, or Microsoft Edge to a private browser.
"For about a week, I tested three of the most popular options — DuckDuckGo, Brave and Firefox Focus. Even I was surprised that I eventually switched to Brave as the default browser on my iPhone." Firefox Focus, available only for mobile devices like iPhones and Android smartphones, is bare-bones. You punch in a web address and, when done browsing, hit the trash icon to erase the session. Quitting the app automatically purges the history. When you load a website, the browser relies on a database of trackers to determine which to block.
The DuckDuckGo browser, also available only for mobile devices, is more like a traditional browser. That means you can bookmark your favorite sites and open multiple browser tabs. When you use the search bar, the browser returns results from the DuckDuckGo search engine, which the company says is more focused on privacy because its ads do not track people's online behavior. DuckDuckGo also prevents ad trackers from loading. When done browsing, you can hit the flame icon at the bottom to erase the session.
Brave is also more like a traditional web browser, with anti-tracking technology and features like bookmarks and tabs. It includes a private mode that must be turned on if you don't want people scrutinizing your web history. Brave is also so aggressive about blocking trackers that in the process, it almost always blocks ads entirely. The other private browsers blocked ads less frequently....
In the end, though, you probably would be happy using any of the private browsers... For me, Brave won by a hair. My favorite websites loaded flawlessly, and I enjoyed the clean look of ad-free sites, along with the flexibility of opting in to see ads whenever I felt like it. Brendan Eich, the chief executive of Brave, said the company's browser blocked tracking cookies "without mercy."
"If everybody used Brave, it would wipe out the tracking-based ad economy," he said.
Count me in.
"For about a week, I tested three of the most popular options — DuckDuckGo, Brave and Firefox Focus. Even I was surprised that I eventually switched to Brave as the default browser on my iPhone." Firefox Focus, available only for mobile devices like iPhones and Android smartphones, is bare-bones. You punch in a web address and, when done browsing, hit the trash icon to erase the session. Quitting the app automatically purges the history. When you load a website, the browser relies on a database of trackers to determine which to block.
The DuckDuckGo browser, also available only for mobile devices, is more like a traditional browser. That means you can bookmark your favorite sites and open multiple browser tabs. When you use the search bar, the browser returns results from the DuckDuckGo search engine, which the company says is more focused on privacy because its ads do not track people's online behavior. DuckDuckGo also prevents ad trackers from loading. When done browsing, you can hit the flame icon at the bottom to erase the session.
Brave is also more like a traditional web browser, with anti-tracking technology and features like bookmarks and tabs. It includes a private mode that must be turned on if you don't want people scrutinizing your web history. Brave is also so aggressive about blocking trackers that in the process, it almost always blocks ads entirely. The other private browsers blocked ads less frequently....
In the end, though, you probably would be happy using any of the private browsers... For me, Brave won by a hair. My favorite websites loaded flawlessly, and I enjoyed the clean look of ad-free sites, along with the flexibility of opting in to see ads whenever I felt like it. Brendan Eich, the chief executive of Brave, said the company's browser blocked tracking cookies "without mercy."
"If everybody used Brave, it would wipe out the tracking-based ad economy," he said.
Count me in.
What's wrong with Safari? (Score:2, Funny)
Safari doens't send anything to anyone else. You can set he search engine to something else besides Google, including DuckDuckGo.
Not that there's anything wrong with other browsers on the phone, I use a few myself. But privacy is not the reason to switch away from Safari on an iPhone.
Re: (Score:2)
Umm safari doesnt in and of itself send stuff to trackers, but the sites you visit will and safari does nothing to stop it.
thats what this article is about not about your browser spying on you and reporting it back to a single mother ship the browser comes from.
iOS Safari comes defaulted with anti tracking tech (Score:3, Informative)
Safari by default includes anti-tracker technology [digiday.com] as well, and supports extensions [lifewire.com] that can do even more.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Then you can just use firefox with adblock, etc
Re: (Score:2)
Re: What's wrong with Safari? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Factually incorrect. Every single website you visit on any ios browser sends itself to Tencent
Factually incorrect. Try reading your own link which states:
and for devices with their region code set to mainland China, it receives a list from Tencent.
A) I do not have my region set to China.
B) If I did have my region set to China, It's not sending the website you are visiting to Tencent, it is instead ONLY downloading a list of problem sites. In fact if you'd bothered to read your own link even just a bit fu
Re: (Score:1)
No need for trust, because I know (Score:1)
Blind trust in a company like apple is just stupid.
Ignorance of technical reality, when you have the capability to no longer be ignorant, is far more stupid.
I don't "trust" anything, I verify. Have you never proxied your phones internet through a traffic sniffer like Wireshark or Charles before?
If you did, like I have, then you would know what it does and does not do as you browse.
I see no reason to trust anyone when verification is so simple.
What you appear to have, is a case of blind-distrust - the oppos
Re: (Score:2)
If you are not using an iPhone, then Safari isn't really an option. And if you were really serious about privacy, you wouldn't be using an iPhone. You would be using a dumbphone. Or, if you MUST have Internet access at all times, a Linux phone.
And Linux on your PC, laptop, tablet, etc.
Also you wouldn't use Facebook at all. You would use email, text, voice, and get-togethers to stay in touch with people you care about. No google services at all, either (search the net with DuckDuckGo, use LibreOffice or
Yeah but I'm only talking about Safari, not Androi (Score:1)
If you are not using an iPhone, then Safari isn't really an option.
Yes of course, I am just asking - why are they lumping Safari in with Chrome? Safari's not sending data to Apple the way Chrome is. Safari also has some anti-tracking stuff built in, pretty sure Chrome on Android does not...
I would have liked to see more of a comparison of what Safari does do compared to alternative browsers, for iOS users - mentioning that Android users have more of a reason to switch.
Re: What's wrong with Safari? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
brave is a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Sorry, what do you mean by this? Specifically.
Don't use Brave (Score:3, Informative)
Brave's CEO is blatantly a homophobe, and on top of that they were caught red-handed violating privacy (see reference below) .. so I wouldn't trust his browser, and more importantly why should evilness be propagated ?
Reference #1 - privacy violations: https://www.cpomagazine.com/da... [cpomagazine.com]
Reference #2 - homophobic CEO: https://www.leafandcore.com/20... [leafandcore.com]
Re: (Score:1)
also brave is based on webkit which just further reinforces googles dominance on what web standards are and will be.
Firefox with a few choice add-ons can be as good if not better than brave.
Small correction (Score:1)
also brave is based on webkit which just further reinforces googles dominance
Pretty sure you meant to say Brave is based on Chrome, I agree with the rest of what you say... if you are going to use an alternative browser, it's nice to use something that is not Chrome based so as to spread out the browser engine marketshare.
Re:Small correction (Score:5, Informative)
webkit is the underlying rendering used by chrome and safari and many other browsers
You seem to be a time traveler from several years ago. I regret to inform you that you arrived in the middle of a global pandemic. Also, there are no major browsers based on WebKit, nor have there been any for quite some time. Google and Apple had a falling out over their approach to multi process architectures, so Chromium forked WebKit some time ago, with their fork being named Blink. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, etc. are all based on Chromium, which is now based on Blink. Safari, meanwhile, is based on WebKit2, which is a fork of WebKit with Apple’s preferred approach to a multiprocess architecture.
Rational people (Score:5, Insightful)
Brave's CEO is blatantly a homophobe, and on top of that they were caught red-handed violating privacy (see reference below) .. so I wouldn't trust his browser, and more importantly why should evilness be propagated ?
Reference #1 - privacy violations: https://www.cpomagazine.com/da... [cpomagazine.com]
Reference #2 - homophobic CEO: https://www.leafandcore.com/20... [leafandcore.com]
Thank you for the insight. A direct quote from your first link:
For those not familiar with affiliate programs, the most important note is that this issue does not compromise user privacy or involve any sort of hacking.
As to the 2nd link, apparently because the CEO has political opinions we should not use the browser.
Maybe we should have all companies post surveys of the political opinions of their employees, because that's information the public needs to know. I'd hate to use a CAD/CAM program that was built using more than 10% liberals, or visit a web site that has a greater than 15% wokeness coefficient.
BTW, Brave's CEO is not a homophobe. That's not what the word means, you're using accusation inflation, and it's just another attempt to de-person someone who doesn't hold the same political views as you do.
Rational people should use Brave if it's a good product.
Irrational people can feel free to use less useful tools to make a point.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
BTW, Brave's CEO is not a homophobe. That's not what the word means
Then please enlighten us. What is a homophobe ? And how is funding organizations that try to make LGBTQ people second class citizens not homophobia ?
Irrational people can feel free to use less useful tools to make a point.
You seem to equate "rational" with "devoid of compassion and ethics". I don't think you know what rational means.
Re: (Score:3)
A proposition which passed, by the way, with 52% of the popular vote. Would you like to avoid doing business with, and spend the rest of your life trying to cancel, 52% of the population of California? Is being IN THE MAJORITY that big of a crime?
Of course, he's a name in the tech industry, and so you're trying to make an example of him, to prevent anybody straying from the orthodoxy.
By the way, I d
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would someone pay money to prevent gay people from getting married if they weren't afraid of gays? If not afraid of homosexuals, why refuse to allow gay partners the access and privileges of marriage (such as hospital visitation, legal protections)?
Conservatism is fear-driven.. fear of gays, fear of blacks, fear of foreigners, fear of vaccines. Etc. Homophobia fits.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Believing that something is wrong isn't the same as fearing it. Do you fear Conservatives? Probably not. You just disagree with them.
Well, that's how they feel about you.
Re: Rational people (Score:2)
These kind of absoluteness and fear driven behavior is really dangerous. We have seen this kind of cult behavior several times in history. It never ends well.
Re: (Score:3)
People with attitudes that lead to witch hunts exist in every generation. Reasons for hunting witches change with time, based on what ideology enables it best at the time.
In our time, by far the most effiicent ideology for witch hunting is the Socialism/Communism axis, which has millions of people in concentration camps right now. It's the same core belief system that the woke in anglosphere countries have. So it's not surprising that people with personalities that push them to hunt witches that live in tho
Re:Rational people (Score:4, Insightful)
Rational people should use Brave if it's a good product.
Rational people avoid contributing resources to people who use those resources for things they don't agree with (and often don't agree with because those things impact them in a directly material way).
And making a decision based on information that is available isn't the same as suggesting that everyone be forced to proactively provide information.
Your post seems like a rather emotional response to the information that's been presented to you so it's pretty rich that you bring up what a rational behavior supposedly is.
Re:Rational people (Score:4, Insightful)
> BTW, Brave's CEO is not a homophobe.
Yes, he is.
> That's not what the word means, you're using
> accusation inflation, and it's just another attempt to
> de-person someone who doesn't hold the same
> political views as you do.
No, the GP is using the word in the context of the common, modern, vernacular; as opposed to pedantically dissecting the word and piecing together the etymology of its parts. And in the real world, homophobe doesn't mean someone who's scared of gay people; but someone who hates them. And the vernacular definition very much applies to Brendan Eich. It's well documented and we have the receipts. But of course, you already knew all that. And you're just being a pedant; either to defend and support a vile bigot or simply to be a pedantic ass... or more probably both.
Re: Rational people (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Are you trying to argue that Brave is built with homophobia in the same way that smartphone are built with child labor? Because that would be pretty stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
You are free to criticize the CEO, or (as you did) suggest that people not use the browser, but I don't see how we would have "evilness be propagated" just by using software developed by a particular company.
I will judge the software primarily on its own merits, and the personal beliefs of the people involved -- which, as far as I know, no one has ever suggested actually show up in workplace misbehavior, much less in effects on the software -- will be far, far less important than what the software does.
And
Re: (Score:3)
Come back with that hypothetical when you find software that is illegally made with child labor, and that I (or a typical /. reader) would be interested in using.
If I boycotted software -- or other products -- where some of its developers spent their salaries advocating for causes that I disliked, I would have to boycott almost every piece of software I use, and everything in most of the stores I patronize. People disagreeing with you about important issues is inevitable in a large, complex society... unle
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
How is it not hateful to prevent people who love each other from getting married?
Re: Don't use Brave (Score:2)
Re: Don't use Brave (Score:1)
Re: Don't use Brave (Score:3)
By that argument, it would be hateful to prevent anyone from doing anything.
The law does prevent a lot of things, some for good reason. Deal with it.
Re: (Score:1)
Well if it's a law that protects people it makes sense. How does blocking gay marriage help or protect anyone? It clearly doesn't, it only causes harm. You are fine with laws that cause harm?
Re: (Score:3)
Firstly, I support gay marriage. However marriage is traditionally understood as a relationship between a man and a woman with the word coming form religious practices. If you understand Christianity there are essentially three pillars to this: monogamy, marriage, and family. Many Christians still think that sex outside the purpose of creating children is "bad" and this is why Catholics do not use birth control. Marriage is the union that two people are bound as "one flesh" for again the purpose of family.
Re: (Score:3)
Keep your religion out of secular marriage.
Keep secular marriage out of your religion.
Stop conflating them and your problem is solved.
Re: (Score:2)
Except I gave an etymological argument as to why people believe this and you just told me to basically suck your dick... do you see the difference? One of us is using words with a systematic argument in effort to help you understand a perspective. The other one is just being rude and insensitive when referring to people they claim are insensitive. The irony and hypocrisy of the modern American philosophy can not be more well summed up than what you just said. This is why as an American, I will happily spend
Re: (Score:2)
Keep your religion out of government.
Keep religion out of government.
"Marriage has and always will be a religiously empowered word based on a philosophy about human sexuality which has become a tradition instituted and regulated by governments from these religious roots," is completely and utterly fall and bullshit.
You may believe in YOUR religious marriage, the rest of us are free to decline. You may fuck off.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That was my suggestion was to split the institution of marriage. You can't allow religion into government or vice versa, so there need to be 2 blast-door separated concepts, both called marriage, because everyone is a fucking idgit who either wants to force their religion on you via government, or some religious nut who wants to prevent the exercise of your civil rights and use the government as a stick.
Re: Don't use Brave (Score:2)
I know this is an unpopular notion, but how considering intentions rather apply the blanket hate label? It could be that he hates homosexuals, in which case hate was the motivation. It could be that he sees marriage defined as one man and one woman - not an uncommon belief, and not one driven by hatred. He might also be against polygamy and incestuous marriage, either due to hatred or other reasons.
That gay marriage is presumably a civil right in your view doesnâ(TM)t make it so for everybody else. Opp
Re: (Score:1)
Anti-wokeness is a major plus for overwhelming majority of people.
Re: Don't use Brave (Score:1)
Did you even read that first link? The article states very early that the affiliate link was not a privacy violation.
On the second point, he donated to Prop 8, against gay marriage. The author used this as the basis for fantasies about Eich, providing neither specificity nor any kind of evidence. Take your cancel mob elsewhere.
Re:Don't use Brave - bah! (Score:2)
Re: Don't use Brave - bah! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not personal views. The Brave CEO actively engages in (or engaged in) an activity that makes life difficult for gay people. Would you want your money going to fund activities you don't like? It's not merely a viewpoint, it's actions that harm people. You seem to think that people who are actively engaged in doing an activity are merely "holding a viewpoint".
Re: (Score:1)
Brendan Eich, or the Brave CEO?
Context matters. What you do on your time is legally different than working hour.
Re: (Score:3)
I keep seeing this inference or assumption that he is engaged in some ongoing conspiracy against the gay, funding it from whatever he gets from Brave. While it's entirely possible, some evidence might actually be a good thing. All we know is that five years ago he donated $1,000 to a proposition to block gay marriage and had previously made campaign donations to Republican candidates (Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, Tom McClintock, Linda Smith).The total donations we know of between 1991 and 2014 comes to around $5
Re: (Score:2)
And I consider myself a liberal who for a long-time was thoroughly interested in gender and religious practices but these people just want witch hunts which is as you put it the nature of extremism.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I am definitely not switching now. I used Brave before it was popularized. I supported LGBTQ before it was woke. Yet, fuck these people with their shitty ass antics. Btw, if you haven't heard of Epic Browser, it's interesting too for this discussion... but nonetheless yet another fork of chrome...
Re: (Score:1)
LOL! Do you idiots actually believe that nonsense?
Do you know what we thought when you were all drinking milk to "own the libs"? We thought you were the dumbest people on the planet.
Really, every time you morons do something stupid to "own the libs", that doesn't actively hurt anyone, we laugh at you. That is, assuming we see it at all. See, we're really not paying that much attention to your silly antics.
Yeah, go ahead and use Brave. We actually like that we have that much power over your decisions!
Brave? (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't used Brave for a while, but the last time I tried it, it was a complete joke.
The "developers" working on Brave can't even properly answer user questions about their browser because they are completely clueless.
When I first tried Brave, 2+ years ago, one of the things I didn't like was there didn't seem to be any way to change the location of the browser cache. I posted a question on their support forum and got a reply from one of the "developers" who seemed to be genuinely puzzled and couldn't seem to understand why I would want to do such a thing.
After some back and forth trying to explain why this is a good idea, and pointing out that every major browser (even pitiful old Internet Explorer) has had this feature since forever, I was told that someone had already submitted a request for this and I could track it at [some url].
Fast forward to today. I check the support url and the request for user configuration of the browser cache is still open and nothing has been done. The only discussion on the issue has been someone who tried to create a symlink from the default cache location to a RAM disk, but somehow the symlink is reset every time you start Brave. And the entire discussion got derailed, talking about that and nothing else.
Then it occurred to me, Brave is just another Chrome clone. What if I just used the same command line switch that Chrome uses?
So I search the interwebs for "change chrome browser cache location" and I find the appropriate command line switch. And it works. *facepalm*
These idiots don't even understand how their own browser works. Have they actually done any development work on Brave? Have they actually done anything other than a search/replace in the source code, changing all occurrences of "Chrome" to "Brave"?
Re: (Score:1)
Clearly this is an attack on the big tech corporations. The other corporations seeing how much power the big tech corporations seized, being able to silence anyone, promote any one, disconnect anyone, person or competing corporation.
Have become perturbed by the extent of power and have decided to attack them and cut them down to a more manage able size.
This story is about browsers but a declaration of war on corporations that invade privacy and censor and have way to much power. So Google, M$, Facebook, Tw
Re: (Score:2)
Brave is a cryptocurrency scam.
Firefox is the best option at the moment. Recent improvements like cache partitioning are really next level stuff.
Re: Brave? (Score:2)
Re:Brave? (Score:4, Insightful)
everyone with a fast and a sow disk would want to do that.
But Chrome and Edge (Score:2)
are basically the same code with "different branding" and maybe different telemetry.
I've never used Safari.
More like cat and mouse (Score:5, Insightful)
"If everybody used Brave, it would wipe out the tracking-based ad economy," he said.
Well, that's one of those statements that are less a "yes" and more a "yes, but...". Long story short, moving to more privacy focused browsers just takes the game from where we are to a more "cat and mouse" kind of game. Third parties you do business with are always selling device prints to other people. Use the Amazon mobile app to order something and that device's online characteristics gets sent to Amazon who in turn sells it to someone else to try and pick you out of a dataset. You can erase cookies and what not all you want, but third parties keep selling device information all of the time and it's not just the big guys either.
A lot of fingerprinting categorization code is in a ton of online frameworks. That's because this framework relies on that other framework, that relies on such-and-such framework, and the other framework that, that one depends on does a lot of that privacy invading legwork. So when Joe's Online Petship or whoever brings in such-and-such framework for better CSS control, they also get built in an API to start building a profile about your device.
Okay so where am I going with all this? Well foremost let me be thankful, major props to all the folks who still value privacy, y'all doing the good bit's work. But there's just a massive mindset that online just isn't private and you shouldn't expect it to be private. And that mindset conspires to provide cover for (I'm going to go into the positive light here) missteps that companies and developers take that continue to erode privacy. Additionally, it puts your average user into a "I just give up" kind of mindset and without that; there's no fire to company's feet to change course on privacy.
While we should try to use privacy minded browsers if not all, at least most of the time. The bigger problem is a mindset problem that will take a lot of advocacy to change course. That has a less simpler solution to it. So while swapping out would put ad-tracking economies on notice, it wouldn't wipe them out because there's a lot of places you go to today, that want to help out that economy, be it that you wish to support ad-tracking industries or not.
Just my two cents on the matter.
Brave (Score:1)
I tried out Brave a couple of years ago and someone saw it on my office computer and told me she felt uncomfortable because I was promoting homophobia. It wasn't doing anything fantastical anyway .. it's not like it displayed dancing girls (well not unless I went to such a website) .. so I said F it, and uninstalled it.
Re: (Score:3)
What's wrong with Chrome Incognito mode? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
They'll all be pretty effective at erasing the records from the first party.
So, you.
The advantage of a hardened firefox/etc is somewhat preventing shit from getting downstream after which local erasing means fuckall.
The advantage of the mentioned browsers is perhaps one less required click in achieving the worthless feature described in the first sentence of this post.
Privacy is a multi-dimensional spectrum of methods, parties, and types of data. There is no silver bullet, certainly not simply using a certa
Pale Moon seems technically advanced. (Score:2)
The Pale Moon Release notes [palemoon.org] serious attention to all the technical issues.
It was sad when a new version of Firefox prevented many useful add-ons. No reasons were given why Firefox developers thought that was okay.
Pale Moon Release notes SHOW serious... (Score:2)
Re:Pale Moon seems technically advanced. (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem is that Pale Moon is utterly dysfunctional on modern web, and developers refuse to address it. Instead there's an endless stream of "just message site's admins to fix their site for our browser".
Which is why one of the most popular sections of their help forum is dedicated to users helping users messing around with browser settings just to get it to display specific pages somewhat correctly. It just doesn't work properly any more due to age of relevant code and refusal to adapt to modernity.
And that's genuinely sad, as it was a great browser when firefox went off the rails with "we're about cutting edge teeagers doing ui design and wokeness. Making a browser? Nah, that's for bigots". And for a while, it looked like they could carry the torch.
What about Pale Moon browser doesn't work well? (Score:2)
I haven't noticed any dysfunctionality. What about Pale Moon browser doesn't work well?
Re: (Score:2)
Ability to display many modern widely used web technologies correctly.
I've never had a problem with Pale Moon. (Score:2)
Please give a web site that doesn't display correctly.
Re: (Score:3)
https://forum.palemoon.org/vie... [palemoon.org]
Short list from the first page includes such rarely used sites as twitter, netflix, paypal, tinder, xe, wide variety of US government websites down to sites critical to survival like social security.
And that's just a small portion of incompatible websites.
Twitter problem fixed in one day. (Score:2)
There are MANY problems with these browsers, also: Browser scores [caniuse.com]:
Chrome 89: 391
Firefox 87: 365
Safari 14: 335
The Twitter problem with Pale Moon was immediately fixed, in one day:
Twitter not working [palemoon.org]. The problem occurred due to a change Twitter made.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm glad you have at least gotten over the denial so far as to admit that clear and obvious problems with Pale Moon and website compatibility exist. Even if your admitting to being wrong was about pretending that this is not a forum choke full of such problems, almost all of which in fact do not get fixed. Including many problems with twitter which remain unfixed for years.
Incidentally the main reason why I migrated off it.
I do love the immediate "but what about other browsers?!" line. What about them? They
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's the modern web that's dysfunctional, not Pale Moon.
Re: (Score:2)
"It's not me that's insane, it's the world that is insane" is what insane people think.
Re: (Score:2)
A decade ago, people cared about standards compliance and graceful degradation. Not anymore. I come across way too many web sites that outright ban web browsers that aren't a popular brand name, regardless of what features they support. That's completely the wrong way of designing web pages, but nobody gives a damn.
I quit web development for a reason.
Re: (Score:2)
Even so, would you not agree that the only job that browser has is to display the web page that user has requested as well as possible?
Re:Pale Moon seems technically advanced. (Score:4, Informative)
It was sad when a new version of Firefox prevented many useful add-ons
The old add-on system was a carry over from the Netscape days. Back then, Netscape had a period where they "revolutionized" their browser by making everything, literally everything, use the CORBA [wikipedia.org] style of communications between parts. Everything was a component.
The biggest problem is the constant converting data into a serializable format to only be passed to something else and then de-serialized. And for the most part this was a pretty easy fix, but for some parts it would be near impossible to fix. Additionally, the old CORBA system basically assumed single thread. It just wasn't built with the idea of multi-threaded. This meant, that while one system was working on a message it received, every other system had to pause until the reading of the message was complete. This lead to some add-ons killing performance or just locking the entire browser completely.
A work around for the single threaded but while still handling some of the parts of XPCOM that couldn't be de-CORBAed, was to make the chrome in one thread and the rest of the browser in another thread. However, XUL had all these weird attributes for exposing the UI and separating the chrome from the rest meant that a special communication channel had to be built to support the old add-ons while breaking the system into two threads. This presented all kinds of new problems that needed to be fixed.
In the end the XPCOM system just had too many assumptions that just prevented a clean break from the old CORBA system and basically meant that XUL would forever be locked to a single-thread operation that could get into loops that would bring browsers crashing down. Basically the design of the add-on system from back in the late 90s was just built on way too many assumptions that didn't align with modern CPUs.
So the call was made to either rewrite the entire system to bring support to XUL in the 21st century or to just abandon the whole thing. The new XUL API that was cooked up (never implemented) was submitted to the OASIS group and failed to get more than two votes. Basically, this meant that Mozilla would go completely alone on implementing the API they had come up with. Seeing that nobody in the open source community wanted to take up the challenge and seeing that Google's Chrome API got near unanimous support. Mozilla decided to go in that direction.
No one has since modernized the XUL engine since then. It's still mostly the old 90s design that runs in a single process that requires messages going in and out of it to communicate. Most other parts of the browser, yes even in Pale Moon, have moved on to new designs, but Pale Moon's XUL engine is still the old 90s engine and there's zero plans to modernize it. Thus the constant swapping message formats into and out of the engine serves as a bit of a bottle neck to the browser. There's band-aids that have been deployed to work around some of the bigger issues and to put some shine back on the old engine. But my two cents on the matter, the XUL engine is really showing it's age. Chrome and Firefox's models for add-ons are without question faster and can be multi-threaded and optimized by the GPU if the GPU supports that.
Now is all of that a proper justification for leaving the old model? I leave that to whoever to decide, but looking at the old code in the XUL engine, it's a mess. It would easily take an entire team just to detangle the stuff, much less rewrite it to modern hardware.
Pale Moon seems extremely sophisticated. (Score:2)
1) The Firefox developers should have explained that. My experience is that the Firefox developers provided only minimal explanation.
2) The developer of Pale Moon seems EXTREMELY knowledgeable. There is an extensive forum. [palemoon.org]
Pale Moon has a Bounty program [palemoon.org] that gives payments to those who fix problems. There are 33 Search Plugins. [palemoon.org] There are Release Engineering Guidelines [palemoon.org]. There are 36 Language Packs. [palemoon.org]
I have almost no understanding of the issues surrounding XUL. Se
Fuck, no (Score:4, Informative)
By running a very uncommon browser and having the same e.g. static or dynamic IP (which rarely changes) you make yourself easier to track and identify.
If you wanna get lost, you need to do a whole lot more:
Lastly consult with browseleaks [browserleaks.com], Am I unique [amiunique.org] and EFF's Cover Your Tracks [eff.org].
TLDR: it's near impossible to keep yourself off the radar while browsing the web nowadays with a modern JS enabled web browser. As for browsing the web without JS - good luck with that.
You can still keep yourself off the radar by browsing the web solely via the Web Archive [archive.org] but that's only for old static pages.
Re:Fuck, no (Score:5, Insightful)
By running a very uncommon browser and having the same e.g. static or dynamic IP (which rarely changes) you make yourself easier to track and identify.
Well, it depends on what specifically you are concerned with. You have to do a threat assessment.
If you are worried about someone in the government tracking you, *personally*, then your point probably stands. The agent can grep the logs on your terrorist message board and look for the guy using the weird browser that only has a few thousand users.
But that's not what most people are concerned with. People are concerned with companies like Google and Facebook tracking you everywhere -- even when you're not explicitly using their services -- and then using data mining and machine learning to match you to various profiles. Now for the most part customers for these services just want to show you advertising, but there are other less benign uses for them. For that particular concern using an oddball browser is not a risk factor.
Laughable. (Score:3)
"if you care about privacy" my ass. They are suggesting a browser for a smartphone. If you care about privacy then a smartphone is completely the wrong way to go about having any privacy at all. Seriously, there is no more intrusive device than a smartphone.
It's the Seattle Times, not NYT (Score:5, Informative)
Stop reading at Brave (Score:1)
Privacy is bullshit at this point... (Score:5, Insightful)
... the general public has taken up client-server everything over the last 23 years. We went from local win32 apps 25 years ago to fully client-server because the public is computer illiterate, windows 10 spies on you by default.
What exactly are people protecting when they are playing mmo's, drm infected games, steam, uplay, etc? Any client-server software is privacy violating and security risk by default. So whether you brows the web using something private or not it doesn't really matter if you have foreign code on your PC that you can't audit like steam/windows 10/countless client server apps.
Um quick question (Score:4, Insightful)
"If everybody used Brave, it would wipe out the tracking-based ad economy," he said.
If that's the case, then how do you think you'd get all that free stuff you get on the internet?
I'm just curious what people think pays for stuff.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Keep that in mind next time someone on Slashdot complains about a paywall.
Re: (Score:3)
Keep that in mind next time someone on Slashdot complains about a paywall.
If a site would let me pay a few cents to look at one page (which is all they would make from ads anyway), that would be fine.
The problem is, people with paywalls almost invariably want you to sign up for a very expensive long-term subscription just to look at one page. Screw that.
Re: (Score:2)
Where's that old Slashdot spirit? (Score:2)
I'm finding that xlinks2 has some interesting advantages for many sites.
Not very thorough (Score:2)
As they have limited themselves to a small number of mobile browsers we may as well consider it a personal opinion of limited utility to the rest of us.
Field report (Score:2)
Privacy vs Time vs War (Score:3)
Yes I care about privacy. Also, my time on earth, it turns out, is limited. I have some other things to do besides wage war with the information-collecting barons. I have given up on privacy.
There needs to be a second choice (Score:2)
That and the fact Brave has ads in it and the ad blocker in DDG isn't all that great.