Yep, this news actually broke a couple days ago, I remember seeing a Brave fanboy having a meltdown over it and ranting about how Mozilla is the real shady company, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah if it’s the comment chain that I think they’re referring to, I believe it came down to Mozilla “being in bed with Google” because Google is the default search engine.
I’ll take the default search engine being Google over things like affiliate links being hijacked, but maybe I’m crazy for taking that position.
Typical Brave user hating google while using chrome with preinstalled extensions. Everything about that browser is the opposite of what it should be. Same with the users.
I follow Ghacks, a tech site, as well and boy there is a Brave shill on there who attacks everyone there for daring to say anything against it. He knows stuff, judging from his comments, yet is so anti Mozilla and pro Brave that I can’t understand. Almost thinks anyone not using Brave is inferior.
It’s not good to stereotype people. But, I would bet money that they have any three of these: bought NFCs NFTs unironically, supports OpenAI unconditionally, propose blockchain on everything, bought a pizza with bitcoin years ago that would be millions of dollars today and are still salty about it, have a Starlink receiver, drive a beaten down Tesla they can’t afford to repair because they spent their money paying for FSD early access, and would definitely be first in line to fly Starship to Mars if they were allowed to, they posts to imageai regularly.
Yes, that pizza for Bitcoin story is quite popular, though it happened in very early days of the currency. Also, I assume you meant NFTs instead of NFCs :p. For a second, I was wondering what did near field communication had to do with this.
Their public reports were a fair share of the money goes to its administration, were the dev funds are lower each years, were some funded orgs does not seem to exist, with the addition of actual user contribution being a drop in the ocean of money influx, is the source for the “shady” part.
Me (and many other) having long debates on their bugzilla about changes they made that ignore user settings, against all common practices, with no chance of reverting them because they knew better, until some big service (say, gmail) is impacted at which point all their arguments are forgotten and the changes are reverted, for the pissing of people part.
I’ve actually been attacked on several occasions by brave fan boys when I casually mentioned that I switched to Firefox and loved it. Idk what their deal is but I find it hilarious that all this stuff is coming out about brave recently 🤣
he uses this post as the sole way to access the internet. He is forever trapped here with no way out. He weeps for there are no memes to him but his condition, as he slowly falls into the pit of insanity. He is forever condemned to read about Brave browser quietly slippin VPN services, and the occasional comment. But eventually the activity will die, and he will be condemned to a lifetime of loneliness until bit-rot will consume the thread or death will free him of his pain.
It’s not possible to identify you if you use the tor browser without changing the window size or any other settings, because the fingerprint is literally the same amongst everyone that uses it this way. So you kind of blend in with the masses, it’s neither generic nor unmodified, I give you that :D
The Tor browser is a modified version of Firefox, but you are not meant to modify the Tor Browser, in order for everyone using the Tor Browser to look the same and blend in. This is done for maximum privacy and anonymity.
Simply the OS already makes that difficult, true. Nonetheless, it’s one of your best bets.
For those who truly want to stay private, installing plugins on the Tor browser is obviously a no go. Changing any setting or even the window size should not be done. Seriously.
And I’d venture that Tor on phones might be the most homogenous, though that still isn’t saying a lot, sadly. Plus, smartphones are a privacy nightmare regardless (tip of the iceberg).
And LibreWolf is better. It’s Firefox with all of the privacy settings preconfigured and uBlock Origin preinstalled. Also, crap like Sponsored sites and Pocket are removed.
Been very happy with Librewolf. Thought it would be another one of those softwares recommended by linux-losers but which never actually works, but it’s quite the opposite.
The Mullvad Browser is based on the Tor browser, but it doesn’t use the Tor network, whereas LibreWolf is based on Firefox + arkenfox user.js. LibreWolf is better for normal day-to-day browsing, where as Mullvad is meant to be used for high privacy/security tasks. Mullvad is kinda hard to daily drive, because it can’t be configured to save cookies, you can’t really use extensions and it lacks some other things. These features were removed in the Tor browser, because as I said, it’s meant for high thread model usage. Edit: I like the Mullvad browser and I use it myself, but not as my daily driver.
Thanks, just realized that this is not !privacy and people here are probably not aware of threat modeling. But in this context just the word ‘thread’ might actually fit better as the threat model pretty much stays the same.
Waterfox is similar, though it doesn’t install additional extensions but comes with a bit of look and feel customization options instead. It restores those non-floating tabs from quantum by default and is pretty speedy.
Waterfox is more for look and feel, whereas LibreWolf makes significant privacy improvements. You can choose for yourself. Btw: You can also customize the UI on LibreWolf, just enable userChrome.css customization under Settings -> LibreWolf -> ‘Allow userChrome.css customization’. Now, you can customize everything you want.
Well yes, Wolf is a lot more focused on privacy, but it’s also a secondary goal for Waterfox. In 6.0 they enabled DNS over Oblivious HTTP (no idea what that means but you probably do) by default and incorporated yokkoffing’s Betterfox preconfig of user.js. It’s for those who are concerned about privacy but not nearly as much as the privacy community. For me, I’d rather have cookies.
they enabled DNS over Oblivious HTTP (no idea what that means but you probably do)
It’s basically the standard DNS-over-HTTPS functionality that is already present in almost every browser but routed over a special proxy server. Unfortunately though, Firefox uses Cloudflare services for this.
For me, I’d rather have cookies.
I also have LibreWolf configured to store cookies. It blocks 3rd-party cookies though.
I love Firefox, used it for years. However I eventually had to switch because of weird bugs and issues with functioning sites. In my sparing personal usage I didn’t run into many issues, but using it at work I ran into really weird issues all the time.
Firefox, or on mobile, Fennec. It’s a Firefox clone with some added functionality, maintained by the developers of the F-Droid app store themselves, so highly trusted & fully compatible to stay in sync with the desktop Firefox.
For those rare occasions where a website absolutely doesn’t work with FF, and you must use it for some reason, I’d suggest Chromium portable on Desktop, and Kiwi Browser on mobile.
Last time I tried Mull, I could only use a handful extensions. I chose Fennec particularly because it supports all desktop extensions. Is that still the case?
Mull has the same limitation as Fennec in that you have a small curated list of available add-ons unless you sign in with a Mozilla account and make a collection or whatever.
I have Kiwi installed and like that desktop Chrome extensions can be installed on it for the odd occasion. However, IIRC, it is updated infrequently and isn’t recommended as a daily driver.
I’m team Firefox, very happy here. There’s a small amount of optional telemetry to disable to maximise your privacy, and it has the best plugins because there’s a lot of choice and they’re not purposely crippled.
I like Firefox because it allows, Atleast for now, customization via userchrome.css files. I once tried Edge and hated it’s bloated right click context menu. Meanwhile, in Firefox, I can trim down the context menu to only basic elements.
I do wish Firefox had proper PWA support, but otherwise I have been using it as the main browser on both PC and phone(since uBlock Origin is supported on it, the only Chromium browser to support it is Kiwi Browser on Android).
There does exists one. But when I last tried it, the experience was worse than what a native integration would give. It wasn’t streamlined as in other browsers. It doesn’t matter much since I only use YouTube Music as a PWA, which I have a relegated to another window in another browser.
Off topic, but screw you Google, for not giving a native app. Spotify meanwhile has command line third party clients even(looks at ncspot) for Premium users.
Check out this custom YouTube Music desktop client: github.com/th-ch/youtube-music. It has neat features like an adblocker and a download feature and many more things built-in and it’s open source. It’s available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Yes, this one I think I tried some time before. It is not perfect as you said but it is the closest Firefox has. I think I will give it another go to see how the extension has matured.
There is Fennec available on F Droid that is basically Firefox with some blobs removed. Not as hardened as Mull but still a worthy option. There is one more browser based on Firefox called Iceraven for Android but it is not available on F Droid even. Though it supports a much wider variety of extensions than mobile Firefox does as of now. The downside is that it gets security updates usually later than Firefox, being an independent project.
So? There is no way for the vast majority of users to read or understand the source for something like Firefox - to the point it may as well be closed source. Agreed of course plenty of security researchers will be examining the code which they can’t with Vivaldi - but presumably if that was a security advantage Firefox would have less vulnerabilities when compared to other browsers. (Actually would be interested to see if this is the case!)
It’s the closest I’ve been able to find to vivaldi. Unfortunately no one does workspaces as good as vivaldi, but their implementation deleted all my workspaces one day, with no back up, and that was after several other total wipes of my windows/tabs.
That feature was originally meant to be an image sharing platform, but had an unfortunate name and the button being called “Save” (although it did have a cloud icon on it) didn’t help either. Long story short, people mistook it for a screenshotting tool.
It was definitely a blunder, don’t get me wrong, but it was dumb rather than malicious.
Tbf, when Mozilla realized their blunder they cut out the sharing part and left it just as a screenshot tool because that’s the part that people liked.
I have a hard time seeing how anybody can be stupid enough to make such a colossal mistake by accident. Let alone how it can slip through all the layers of QA that are in place and then take so f’n long to fix it once the bug reports come pouring in. This is not a small woopsy, but goes completely against decade long establish GUI nomenclature. This was straight up from the malware dark pattern cookbook.
And even ignoring that, an upload into the cloud should always come with a big fat warning anyway. The whole process made it incredible unclear where the data is going, who has access to it, how long it is staying, how to delete it and all that.
All that from a company that has made “privacy” their main marketing feature.
Long story short, people mistook it for a screenshotting tool.
It IS a screenshooting tool.
when Mozilla realized their blunder they cut out the sharing part
The sharing part was great. The problem was never the functionality, but the malicious and misleading integration of it. Them removing that part just felt like they were trying to hide the evidence of their misdoings instead of fixing the problem.
This was straight up from the malware dark pattern cookbook.
To what end? They didn’t do anything to exploit it and deleted the sharing platform as soon as the confusion became apparent. What was Mozilla’s nefarious goal, to dig through people’s screenshots? 🙂
It IS a screenshooting tool.
It is now. Originally it was just a tool to capture pages as images and share them online. If it had been called “Share” they could have avoided the whole debacle.
The sharing part was great.
This only goes to show how conflicted the whole thing was. You can’t find two people who liked the same two aspecte of it. 😅
Trust me, you can’t get such a confusing mess on purpose. Please also remember who you’re dealing with, this is Mozilla, the inheritor of Netscape, which previously gave the world such blunders as Netscape 6.
This was a Pilot program that mixed multiple goals together and ended up as feature gore. I also wish they could have salvaged the sharing platform too but rescuing the image capture as a screenshot tool was a pretty good outcome, all things considered.
Brave. It ain’t perfect, but I actually like that it comes with Adblock, IPFS and Tor support out of the box. Gives you a fully functioning browser out of the box without having to mess with tons of plugins.
If you want something more minimalist, Librewolf might be worth a look.
PS: Depressing how many of you seem to consider such a drastic violation of privacy acceptable.
It’s more that I had hoped we left everyone who acts like any little thing Firefox does is the worst and most egregious privacy violation in the world back in r/Firefox where they let all the Brave astroturfing take over.
Sure, you’ve got one significant issue (that was already mitigated and addressed), but you’re ignoring how unique it was while also saying there is “many, many more” without any hint of what they would be. Is “The Megabar exists” one of them?
I don’t like brave because Brandon Eich (CEO, formerly with Mozilla) doesn’t support gay marriage and was pushing anti-vax stuff on twitter. I don’t look for this shit to titillate my tits like some folks, but when it hits me in the face I can’t ignore it.
When fact checking myself I found even more controversies, but I’m not wasting time reading articles that feed a confirmation bias.
I don’t like Brave because they’ve done dodgy things like this time and time again over the years, and each time Brandon Eich went on a marketing campaign across social media to drum up new users and drown the story out.
It’s crazy to me that people ever thought brave was “privacy focused” when it was clear that they were trying to jump on the crypto bandwagon with their own in-network crypto and ad network. It was always just a reskinned chrome with ublock built in and then their crypto and ad network tacked on top
I have Orion (macOS only for the time being) and it’s sooo good.
The amazing part is that it even works as a daily driver if you’re a not-so-techie person/normal user… but then on top there are all these little extra features and optimizations that make it like Safari if Safari was actually good.
I would at this point a) not be able to go back to either Safari or Firefox (edit: nor Ungoogled Chromium) as well as b) immediately trust an Orion user on most of what they have to say about a “tech” related opinion :D
Based on your comment, I’ve just downloaded Orion to give it a shake. Very much enjoyed the OS X-esque intro video. Took me right back to installing Snow Leopard for the first time.
Sounds interesting. I’d thought I’d heard of all the browsers that exist lol. Gonna give it a spin .
Wow, Orion is pretty slick! And Orion+ doesn’t offer any actual features aside from early access and input on the roadmap. So far so good. Custom buttons is really cool, built in tree style tabs is slick. Also!! orion has workspaces that are as good if not better than vivaldi’s! This is really slick, thanks for sharing
Thanks for pointing me to LibreWolf. I like to use separate browsers as information silos and have been using Brave as my secondary. Been looking forward to switching it out for a long time, LibreWolf sounds like just the ticket.
Paired with the Foxytab plugin to automatically open websites in specific containers or restrict containers to a list of websites. Firefox also has profiles, and a simple extension (with a tiny thing to install in your PC) makes them as easy to use as they’re on Chrome
Let’s sell a browser to a crowd obsessed with privacy, feeling better than others, adverse to “normies” so let’s call it Brave. Or Bold. Or Freedom Eagle.
It tries so hard it ends up sounding like a 14 year old boy trying to sell you a NFT.
“Hey kiddo, we are Brave, we are sticking it to the man, we aren’t afraid of those who try to silence us - which is why we are going to insert affiliate links and trackers into your URLs 😎”
I don’t understand when and why Brave became such a household name. It seems so many people use it and swear by it, but its reputation is “suspicious” at best.
Just use Firefox. It’s been around way, way longer and it doesn’t use the Chromium engine. Google doesn’t need more of a monopoly on the internet.
Chromium is still controlled by Google, so having an overwhelming market share of Chromium-based browsers reduces competition and increases Google’s control of the market’s position and future. Using Firefox (and Safari, if it were not locked to a single ecosystem) reduces that threat.
It just means if they want to do something bad then they can
If Google wanted to they could ban VPNs on all Chromium browsers and all the forks downstream would have to comply
More likely they can make it so only verified websites will load and down the line charge to be verified. It kills the open internet and the ability for anyone to make a website/host it where they want
When we say “controlled”, that’s still only accounting for the primary fork, right?
As long as it’s open source, it feels like the idea is that the day Google pushes “feat(): Users now automatically have $1 sent to Google a day” commit, someone creates a “chromium-nongooglefucked” fork repository from the prior commit, and everyone uses that.
Well Chrome(ium) has almost all of the browser market share and google is trying to push something called web environment integrity which would implement a sort of certification system where web servers evaluate the authenticity of the client. If you extrapolate that idea a bit further it boils down to “we won’t serve you content if we don’t like your browser, device, OS, etc”. Which I would consider as hostile to the open but rapidly closing internet as we know it.
Edit: I forgot to make my point lol. Firefox is a completely different browser engine from the chromium based browsers which is why you see a lot of people recommending firefox because they don’t comply with web integrity. I don’t think it’s working though because this is something only the techbros and the cybersisters care about while everyone else just goes about their day.
It’s not a stupid question, some people just don’t know.
Mainly it’s because:
Chromium holds too much market share which is bad for the health of the Web.
Chromium is controlled by Google which is concerning because they have been known to plant trackers even in software that shouldn’t have them.
Chromium is inherently less secure, it contains features that might seem nice but are extremely risk to give access to websites i.e. letting websites access Bluetooth.
There are probably plenty more reasons but these are the big ones, and of coarse this is a simplification, in reality things are always a bit more complicated.
I use it as my YouTube/spotify browser because the ad block just works. Firefox is janky because I have other extensions running that screw up playback on some sites (this has gotten a lot better but I still just use brave out of habit)
The only real problem I ever had with Firefox was this privacy option that would disable auto playback on sites like Twitch and TikTok but that was a setting I wasn’t even aware of. Other than that, I rarely ever have an issue with FF outside of web dev when it doesn’t yet support some cutting-edge web API feature.
Yea, it was something with various extensions I had going. I’m not blaming Firefox at all. I love Firefox. Just easier to use the other browser on the occasions when my configuration causes issues than try to troubleshoot it.
I’ve had issues with add-ons on some sites too. For those times I just use a different Firefox profile (each has its own set of add-ons and settings :D)
I think if Firefox can find a way to have full parity with chrome extensions, that might be a big shift. I’ve talked to more than one person that has a specific extension they rely on that they can’t duplicate with Firefox options. They have many of the big names, but also some holes
Not OP, (and Firefox is still my main), but I keep Chromium-based browsers around for Ichigo, an addon which automatically translates raw manga - which is a godsend for avid manga readers like myself who frequently run out of existing translated manga to read. There’s also Scan Translator which works in a similar way, but sadly Firefox has nothing like them.
I just spent awhile trying to switch from Vivaldi to Floorp before going back. It just doesn’t work as smoothly, things like tabs wouldn’t save properly between sessions, pinning tabs doesn’t prevent you from closing them, UI elements would disappear, etc.
Haha, you're so fucking hilarious. Maybe if you'd spend as much time being big brain comedy boy and masturbating over the next Debian point release you'd know how to lock down a Windows system.
Nobody does. Windows is closed source and its inner working is a trade secret. This means you cannot know how to lock down windows. Of course there are best practices based on info from microsoft or people who know a thing or two about info sec but it's all guess work and/or trusting the developer by its blue eyes.
There's no fucking guesswork. Everything in and out of the system can be monitored. If you knew anything about Windows you'd know that, but your entire Windows knowledge comes from shit-tier memes and snarky stories from The Register.
Thats something Ive never understood about closed source.
The OS, in its entirety, is on your computer. Why are you not able to open it up and root around within it? Is it just encrypted to a degree it cant be cracked? Or is the legal ramifications of unraveling it just not worth unraveling it?
And yet there are people that do that every single day, and it's pretty much trivial to do.
It's fucking hilarious how many high horses Linux users ride on while knowing absolutely nothing about any other system. You just repeat shit that The Register or Slashdot told you was true.
Prove to me that your windows system is actually “hardened” and that you have no backdoors or telemetry broadcasting at all. At the very least, Microsoft still knows what you are doing, you cannot trust your 3rd party firewall because windows can still sidestep it.
I don’t even know who the fuck those people are, all I can tell you is that there is a reason that any professional application that requires legitimate security, runs on foss systems, or at the very least source available. If you are too stupid to realize that, then you really don’t have any say in this matter whatsoever. It doesn’t even just include baremetal Linux either.
I don’t know who you’ve been arguing with on this, but I actually make a living working on Linux machines, I’m not even coming at you from a freetard perspective, solely work experience.
"Windows just ignores firewall rules" - CITATION FUCKING NEEDED
You know nothing.
EDIT
Oh, to be fucking clear you know nothing about Windows. I don't give a shit how much experience you have with Linux. You very obviously do not know how to administer Windows systems.
you very obviously do not know how to administer windows systems
ahem
Active directory, Azure, Windows Server. Those three things are on my resume. I have extensive systems administration experience, being a good systems administrator requires you to be able to administrate more than one operating system.
Yes, windows will ignore your firewalls rules if you try to block certain applications from broadcasting telemetry. I don’t need a citation because you can very easily test this for yourself. The fact that you need a citation tells me you don’t know shit about what you are talking about because it is incredibly easy to reproduce.
You can rip these components out at the expense of usability, to the point where you could potentially have a secure windows system that is so useless, that you might as well just run desktop Linux or BSD. You will never see patches to potential backdoors, you will never see any bugfixes, hell to even begin the process of hardening windows, windows update is the very first thing you have to disable. Even windows AME’s team says that their spin of windows is not as secure as the average Linux distro for these very reasons.
It's good users are now aware that Brave includes redundant features that you have to pay extra for to activate. Users browser will update everytime the browser or the VPN software needs an update.
For example Firefox VPN from Mozilla is separate software. They don't force millions of users to download it even if they don't want it.
This is yet another example why people should not be using Brave and should be skeptical of its intentions.
Brave is shit but calling this a reason to be skeptical is fucking stupid. Almost every piece of software includes features that some subset of users will never touch. That isn't a reason not to include it.
"Oh no, Firefox includes a bookmark toolbar! I don't use bookmarks so they need to get rid of this!"
brave is basically installing a future minefield with system-wide access waiting to be triggered by them, or an exploitable bug by others, on all brave users' pcs and not just those who sub to their vpn service.
They don’t force millions of users to download it even if they don’t want it.
Mozilla has been forcing Pocket on Firefox users for years, as well as Mr Robot ads and numerous other things. They don’t exact have the moral high ground here.
Pocket is Mozilla’s bookmark/sync pay-cloud-service. Comes with Firefox by default and can’t be easily removed. From a company that claims to care about privacy I would expect a self-hosted local-first approach for such problems, not a cloud service.
Because it's Brave and people like to jump on bandwagons. This is like the 6th time I've seen this article posted in lemmybin also.
And since we have the reddit-minded folk here, no, I do not support Brave and never will and I would much rather they disappear from the internet, but using ragebait to complain about the browser installing the necessary files to have one of their advertised services working, like pretty much every other software does, is not the way to move forward.
Yea i don’t get the hate boner for brave. I get it’s sketchy and don’t use it myself, but they aren’t sneakily installing some VPN to redirect all your web traffic without you knowing. They tell you about it right up front because it’s a service they want to sell.
If you don’t like the browser, don’t use it. There isn’t a need to go on some crusade to smear them with bullshit.
It’s a bunch of people upset with the company’s CEO or whatever over personal views. The browser itself wasn’t that bad after you disabled the ad and crypto stuff, which they heavily pushed on you.
I had switched to it from Chrome last year but ended up not caring for it, so I went to Firefox and Librewolf. People can use whatever the hell they want, idgaf. But for those who will eventually end up complaining about YouTube ads and continue to use Chrome, I have no sympathy for if you can’t take the few minutes to download and install a new browser and move your favorites over.
Brave to me is like an online advertising racket. They push ad-blocking software by default in their browser, then extort companies into using their own ad network to advertise to their users. Brave Ads are of course opt-in and the main incentive of enabling them is to earn BAT (Basic Attention Token) which is their cryptocurrency. In terms of their intrusiveness, they’re like push notifications you get up to six times an hour, and from my experience using the browser, it was all mainly crypto marketplaces and VPN’s advertising.
Compared to 2020, when you could earn hundreds of dollars in a year from frequently being served Brave Ads, BAT isn’t really worth shit anymore thanks to the crypto crash, so the main financial incentive to use Brave is gone.
If you want privacy, Firefox is that way. Or if you absolutely need to use something based on Chromium, everyone and their fucking mother has forked that browser.
Blame YouTube for screwing over legitimate content creators and forcing them to be paid shills for shitty VPN and mobile game companies to pay the bills.
Anyone who claims “We’re the best most privacy conscious, secure, and safe product” is already extremely suspicious.
Brave has already been caught Red handed doing anti-privacy and crypto shilling before, yet people decided to forgive them. You don’t forgive these things EVER.
Google is paying Mozilla to keep their search engine the default in Firefox. Period. There is no Google spyware (or any spyware in general) in Firefox. Just because Google is the default search engine in Firefox doesn’t mean Firefox is Google-controlled spyware.
Also Librewolf’s privacy is in some ways selfish on their part. It strips out Firefox’s troubleshooting data collection so Mozilla loses a good chunk of clues on how well the browser works. Lack of any data would lead to lower browser quality, ends up as a worse Firefox release, and Librewolf gets to be affected directly as a downstream of Firefox. By removing troubleshooting or usage data (which practically doesn’t affect privacy in any way), Librewolf is just hurting itself in the long run. If they’re really aggressive against directly contributing data back to Mozilla, then they should just run their own collection server and contribute the final data back to Mozilla.
telemetry and troubleshooting information can be used for fingerprinting. This isn’t an issue for most people but I can understand why some wouldn’t like it. Tor browser strips a lot of that as well for similar reasons.
My understanding is that google primarily funds Firefox because if chrome becomes a monopoly then google would have to face antitrust laws. Getting broken up would be more expensive to them than keeping Firefox viable with a minority of people using it as their browser.
Maybe I need to change to Linux, this one is Windows 10 and I am tired of getting errors because of things that Windows change. Last week I had the search bar activated with thr last update. Thanks for the tip
I would strongly recommend looking into it. There’s not much you can’t do with Linux these days and it’s easier than ever to adopt. Check out Linux Mint for a good distro for those new to Linux.
I will do that, I mean there is something wrong with windows, it was slowing ff for some reason. And not only that, other apps. I mean I have 16gb of ram, and only running that and whatsapp
Did it a little over a year ago. Has been fun thus far, my computer really feels like my device now which it didn’t really do before. Its like when a meal tastes better because you make it yourself. Still have issues once and again ofc but I had that on windows too tbf. Not an OS advisor, not OS advice
Eyyyyy high five. Any good or bad stories or something to recommend? I will start. I am now the go too person on work for people who have issues with their usb drives. Not matter what, on linux I can always read the filesystem or make their flash drives work again. And people are always super thankful :)
Haha that’s really cool! I had something similar at work - when the adobe suite stopped working properly with the computers there I was able to get GIMP and and Libreoffice working for everyone instead. I most recommend the application “cherrytree” and avoiding flatpak. Also, if you’re thinking about self-hosting check out YUNOhost. How about you?
I will try it, i am really angry at ms, it is not normal that it was running ff slow, with 16gb if ram and onky running WhatsApp in the backgroud. Thanks for the recommendation
I have issues with FireFox running YouTube on windows 10 - it gets super laggy - the issue is nonexistent if I used the Piped frontend. I think it depends a lot on what website you are using - some don’t play well with FireFox.
That being said, I did not have issues with FireFox on Mac when I used that, or on Linux, though I don’t use my Linux laptop a lot for web heavy stuff
It’s believed to be that Google will serve different websites to non-Chrome (maybe non-Chromium) browsers, or they specifically use features that only they implement to ensure that it performs worse on other browsers. And I don’t mean they add a new feature and it’s only them, but that they use deprecated features that only they have. Honestly, fuck Google.
I do have lag issues with YouTube on FF as well, but only the video not the audio. I just assumed it was a codec issue, or just RAM management, since it only occurs when I’ve been running FF plus a game like wow all day
Check out the Freetube application for watching youtube videos. You can import all your subscriptions from youtube, make playlists, download video/audio etc.
Brave browser has been automatically installing VPN services on Windows computers without user consent, but it remains inactive unless the user subscribes.
They’re installing extra software that’s useless unless you give them money. Plus you really want to be aware of your VPN since all your traffic will be going through it.
It doesn’t auto enable and chromium also gives you a lot of unnecessary features. While I think Brave is bloat I don’t see how this is any more than the usual.
Because a vpn can monitor all the websites that you visit. Not directly what you’re looking at, but definitely where you’re looking. Just line your provider can, if you’re not using a vpn. But at least with your provider, you have a contract with them - you pay them to transport your data and nothing more. Some very scummy providers aside, that’s where it stops.
A free vpn, however, needs to pay for transporting your data somehow. And if you’re not paying for it with money, then who/what is?
It’s not even free, the service itself is a payed subscription. But it’s there and it could be working and funneling data without the user knowing it if they wanted to.
I’m interested to hear what you think a vpn will protect you against. Or what you think the flaws in Toms arguments are.
Edit: I don’t know about you, but I trust my own, GDPR-backed isp far, far more than I trust whichever foreign based vpn company. Especially if they for it for free or cheap.
The only thing you’re “protecting” yourself from by using a vpn to surf the Internet, is your own provider. It won’t stop any spying software on your phone, or any nefarious scripts on the websites you visit.
Tom’s argument was more nuanced than that, which is why I linked it. I suggest you watch it and explain where he’s wrong if you want to give your argument to ignore him any weight. Ad hominems and “imagined” arguments alone won’t get you very far, I’m afraid.
I actually work in cyber security and I was really happy Tom Scott released that video. VPN companies are some of the scummiest companies out there, and their rampant sponsorships on YouTube were shameless misinformation and fear mongering in order to scare you into giving all your internet traffic to them. Seeing so many sellout tech YouTubers take their sponsorships despite knowing better COUGH NetworkChuck, was one of my biggest pet peeves.
There are seemingly legit VPN companies out there, and there are some legitimate use cases for them, but what Tom is addressing are the shady ones that lie to you about what they’re for and how they help you for their own monetary and in some cases data mining benefit. In most cases you do not need a VPN, and it doesn’t do anything to protect you from “internet criminals”, or provide extra “security” and it only “protects” your privacy by shifting the for-profit company that gets to see all the websites you visit.
I too would like to know why you think a VPN is needed “on today’s web”, I would bet money it came directly out of one of theirs ads scripts.
When I’m away from home, I use my own Wireguard VPN back into my private network, where all of my traffic is filtered.
That’s your own VPN, not a commercial VPN service and you’re using that for what I would assume is DNS filtering. Thats entirely unrelated to what a commercial VPN service does and what Tom Scott’s video is about. And that’s not even a benefit of your VPN, your VPN is just a tool you’re using for remote access to your DNS filter/server which is what’s actually providing you that service. I could do the same exact thing with a recursive DNS server and Pihole using DOH without a VPN at all.
I use a VPN for my job as well, and it isn’t to protect company products (we don’t make a product). It’s to keep prying eyes out.
That is again an entirely different use case and product than what a commercial VPN service is offering. That’s not even for privacy, it’s for secure remote access to your company network.
I’m sorry, but when my wife and kid’s phones are showing them ads for things we talked about 5 minutes ago, they appear horrified by it. Then they move along like nothing happened. That’s the typical user.
That’s not a problem a VPN service solves.
I will continue to not be spied on 24/7 by corporations and my government.
With a VPN service like ProtonVPN, all you’re doing is changing the corporation that can see which sites you visit from your ISP, to Proton. It isn’t inherently any more private or secure, you’re just choosing which corporation you allow the ability to spy on you.
I don’t remember if I saw that video from Tom Scott or not, but I imagine his argument was along the lines of, “if you aren’t doing anything nefarious or you don’t live in a nation state that censors you, then you have nothing to worry about”.
No, his argument was that outside of spoofing your location, and hiding which sites you visit from your ISP specifically, VPN services don’t provide the average consumer with any additional benefit over what you get for free by default due to the wonderful inventions of TLS, and HSTS. The point is that VPN service companies use scare tactics to get you to purchase a product you don’t need to solve problems you don’t have. NetworkChuck made a whole sponsored video about how somebody can man-in-the-middle you at a coffee shop to steal your credit card information to demonstrate the effectiveness of a VPN service and the attack he demonstrated was literally impossible. He created a fake, non-real world scenario straight out of 2003 to deceive the less tech literate public in order to shill a VPN service.
Tom Scott provided a fantastic public service by educating people on what a VPN actually DOES and what it DOESN’T DO. So people can actually make a decision as to whether they need one due to the facts, not misinformation and false advertisement. You on the other hand still can’t seem to articulate what exactly you think a VPN services does for you and how it does it. You have a lot of buzzwords and vague statements about “being spied on”, and never actually said why you think commercial VPN products should be used by the average user “On todays web”.
It's "all your mail is now redirected to a third party that makes money by mining it for data without you knowing" level of nastiness. Absolutely deplorable and a reason to never touch anything made by the people behind Brave even with a ten foot pole. Brave is a scam and why people pretend its not is beyond me.
that's what the new outlook 'app' (replacing win 10/11's mail 'app') does with gmail accounts. routes all your mail from gmail through microsoft servers before delivering to the app on your pc.
Probably because nobody cares about Opera doing that since the ones pointing this out are at least privacy aware people that won’t use Opera. It is also a problem when Brave does it because it is a “privacy focused” browser. They sure have the balls to do this.
Opera was also 100% up front about it and sold it as a feature. They didn’t sneak it into installers and crap. IMO that’s the issue, the lack of communication.
It’s crazy to me that people ever thought brave was “privacy focused” when it was clear that they were trying to jump on the crypto bandwagon with their own in-network crypto and ad network. It was always just a reskinned chrome with ublock built in and then their ad network tacked on top
Please Brave: cutout the bullshit defaults game. Everybody’s getting smarter and companies are getting stupider
Edit: said this b4, don’t fuck with your own competitive advantage where you haven’t had a joint and duly qualified computer science lawyer who explains how easy it is to lose trust and commercial viabillity for a sketchy, underhanded product (see LastPass). Also FUCK LastPass, may this Pass be their Last
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