Spying on people’s behavior & profiling them is wrong. That’s why we have made sure that Google’s Topics is disabled in two separate ways in Vivaldi browser.
Brave and Vivaldi are very different companies. I don’t use Brave specifically because I’m not comfortable with the fact that, essentially, they’re an advertising company primarily looking to push their crypto.
It’s true that using a Chromium base poses some additional privacy challenges. Due to its customizability, it’s certainly possible to harden Firefox to a better level than any Chromium-based browser currently; projects like Arkenfox certainly help with this, as well as the tweaks ported to the browser by the TOR Uplift project. With that said, stock Firefox as shipped by Mozilla isn’t exactly privacy friendly without going to lengths to harden the browser. Mozilla collect an absolute ton of telemetry by default, complete with a unique identifier attached to each download. FF also comes with pre-installed addons with questionable privacy policies like Pocket.
I think concerns about fingerprinting are somewhat overstated, or at least over thought about. The reality is there’s an absolute ton of metrics that can be used to fingerprint a browser by advanced scripts and if a site wants to fingerprint you it will, and it doesn’t really matter if you’re using FF or Chromium. The only realistic way of avoiding this is by using browsers like TOR or Mullvad, which aim to all have the same fingerprint so you’ll be able to blend in with the crowd. Preventing naïve script fingerprinting is the best you can ever hope to do on any other daily driver browser, and addons like CanvasBlocker for Firefox or JShelter for Chromium are typically enough to prevent fingerprinting by opportunistic scripts.
It was not only about privacy but also about ‘[…]tons of implementation details[…]’ as said in the comment I linked above.
Vivaldi and the people behind it can be as privacy focused as they want, they still ship the product of a giant ad company as long as it is still chromium based. And therefore they support that companys monopoly on the browser market.
Supporting the Chromium monopoly is a valid point, but there’s also a reason why a lot of browser companies, even those who market their browser at more privacy-conscious individuals such as Vivaldi and Brave, choose to fork Chromium over Firefox/Gecko. A good portion of that reason is Chromium’s superior security architecture that is a lot more battle tested and mature; the rest of the reason often comes down to compatibility and mobile-readiness.
A lot of people are wary of any browser engine attaining a monopoly since IE achieved this back in the day. It’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison though, since Chromium is actually open source and IE/Trident was not. For that reason, anything problematic can be stripped out by those who fork it which is exactly why we have browsers like Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium, and others who remove anything that feeds data to Google from their releases. The option also theoretically exists to hard fork the project entirely and take it in a different direction which was never a possibility in the IE days, although that would be a monumental effort.
I get it if people want to support Firefox/Gecko for philosophical reasons. In an ideal world there would be several projects of equal maturity to the browser engines we have today. Realistically though, for all intents and purposes, the vast majority of the world is already using Chromium in some flavor or another and it’s a project that has a lot of the world’s best browser engine developers contributing to it. As a user, I care most about using a secure, privacy-respecting browser that I find innovative which caters to my needs through its features rather than fighting a philosophical battle that’s already been lost. Naturally if you find Firefox does cater to all your needs though, more power to you.
I mostly agree with you about wanting to use a browser that is ‘[…] secure, privacy-respecting […] innovative […] caters to needs’ etc, however I disagree that using Firefox amounts to a lost philosophical battle. I also disagree that you can simply fork chromium if Google decides to implement harmful features.
Since Chromium is dominating the browser market, most (web)developers do only take chromium compatibility into account, making other alternatives less attractive. This leads to more domination of Chromium, making people dependant on its use. Most people will not bother with looking at other Chromium browsers and will just use Chrome as they are already doing today.
At that point, Google, who contributes the most code to Chromium by far, can implement any number of harmful but profitable features into the project. Downstream browser makers would then be required to maintain their own fork if they do not want to incorporate these features, which I am not confident is economically viable.
So I do not quite understand why privacy- and monopoly-conscious people today opt for a Chromium based browser while there are perfectly good alternatives that are not primarily based on the product of a giant (ad) company like Google.
Brave and Vivaldi are very different companies. I don’t use Brave specifically because I’m not comfortable with the fact that, essentially, they’re an advertising company primarily looking to push their crypto.
It’s true that using a Chromium base poses some additional privacy challenges. Due to its customizability, it’s certainly possible to harden Firefox to a better level than any Chromium-based browser currently; projects like Arkenfox certainly help with this, as well as the tweaks ported to the browser by the TOR Uplift project. With that said, stock Firefox as shipped by Mozilla isn’t exactly privacy friendly without going to lengths to harden the browser. Mozilla collect an absolute ton of telemetry by default, complete with a unique identifier attached to each download. FF also comes with pre-installed addons with questionable privacy policies like Pocket.
I think concerns about fingerprinting are somewhat overstated, or at least over thought about. The reality is there’s an absolute ton of metrics that can be used to fingerprint a browser by advanced scripts and if a site wants to fingerprint you it will, and it doesn’t really matter if you’re using FF or Chromium. The only realistic way of avoiding this is by using browsers like TOR or Mullvad, which aim to all have the same fingerprint so you’ll be able to blend in with the crowd. Preventing naïve script fingerprinting is the best you can ever hope to do on any other daily driver browser, and addons like CanvasBlocker for Firefox or JShelter for Chromium are typically enough to prevent fingerprinting by opportunistic scripts.
It was not only about privacy but also about ‘[…]tons of implementation details[…]’ as said in the comment I linked above.
Vivaldi and the people behind it can be as privacy focused as they want, they still ship the product of a giant ad company as long as it is still chromium based. And therefore they support that companys monopoly on the browser market.
Supporting the Chromium monopoly is a valid point, but there’s also a reason why a lot of browser companies, even those who market their browser at more privacy-conscious individuals such as Vivaldi and Brave, choose to fork Chromium over Firefox/Gecko. A good portion of that reason is Chromium’s superior security architecture that is a lot more battle tested and mature; the rest of the reason often comes down to compatibility and mobile-readiness.
A lot of people are wary of any browser engine attaining a monopoly since IE achieved this back in the day. It’s not exactly a like-for-like comparison though, since Chromium is actually open source and IE/Trident was not. For that reason, anything problematic can be stripped out by those who fork it which is exactly why we have browsers like Brave, Vivaldi, Ungoogled Chromium, and others who remove anything that feeds data to Google from their releases. The option also theoretically exists to hard fork the project entirely and take it in a different direction which was never a possibility in the IE days, although that would be a monumental effort.
I get it if people want to support Firefox/Gecko for philosophical reasons. In an ideal world there would be several projects of equal maturity to the browser engines we have today. Realistically though, for all intents and purposes, the vast majority of the world is already using Chromium in some flavor or another and it’s a project that has a lot of the world’s best browser engine developers contributing to it. As a user, I care most about using a secure, privacy-respecting browser that I find innovative which caters to my needs through its features rather than fighting a philosophical battle that’s already been lost. Naturally if you find Firefox does cater to all your needs though, more power to you.
I mostly agree with you about wanting to use a browser that is ‘[…] secure, privacy-respecting […] innovative […] caters to needs’ etc, however I disagree that using Firefox amounts to a lost philosophical battle. I also disagree that you can simply fork chromium if Google decides to implement harmful features.
Since Chromium is dominating the browser market, most (web)developers do only take chromium compatibility into account, making other alternatives less attractive. This leads to more domination of Chromium, making people dependant on its use. Most people will not bother with looking at other Chromium browsers and will just use Chrome as they are already doing today.
At that point, Google, who contributes the most code to Chromium by far, can implement any number of harmful but profitable features into the project. Downstream browser makers would then be required to maintain their own fork if they do not want to incorporate these features, which I am not confident is economically viable.
So I do not quite understand why privacy- and monopoly-conscious people today opt for a Chromium based browser while there are perfectly good alternatives that are not primarily based on the product of a giant (ad) company like Google.