Just use Firefox.
Firefox + uBlock Origin + arkenfox user.js gives you privacy, security and anti-tracking. The only way to fly IMO.
A dns blocker cannot do anything more than ublock. It is nice for other apps though.
White list firewall. Because this is the real reason everyone has a right to ad block. Ads are hidden links to other websites. It’s like walking through a gauntlet of pick pockets bribing the credit card company just to make it to the checkout at your local grocery store, or some asshole you invite into your home that goes to the bathroom, opens a window, and lets a dozen random people in your home if they pay a dollar for the access. The entire system is based on stalking people. It is criminal.
It changes many default Firefox preferences in about:config to be as private as possible. The main selling point is resist fingerprinting (RFP). I highly suggest reading the wiki. It can break some websites, but you can configure it to fit your needs.
I bounced between the two for years, i guess i am going back to Firefox full time.
The only reason I haven’t switched to Firefox from Chrome fully is because for some reason Firefox for Android still doesn’t have tabs for large screen devices. Mozilla says it’s not a priority. 🤷
Firefox for Android removing the ability to open local html files killed it for me. Currently on Vivaldi.
So use edge
Its chrome-based… but at least its not brave, and the adblocker(which is off by default…) is decent enough
I used Brave for a few years but recently switched to LibreFox. I really enjoyed Brave as a browser but couldn’t handle all the sketchy shit that seems to keep coming up
I really enjoy the chromium grouping of tabs. So much so that’s it’s almost a deciding factor for which browser I choose. I hope Firefox adds that feature soon, so the switch back feels easier
I’ve switched on Desktop a year ago. Also with Android. But Firefox on Android has an odd bug that I cannot get rid of. Pages are really slow to load on initial render. I’ve noticed it gets stuck on the SSL cert verification step, sometimes around 5 to 10 seconds before it starts painting the page.
I’ve tried disabling all add-ons, logging out of Firefox sync, disabling the built in HTTPS everywhere, and literally any custom settings I’ve added. But I can’t get past this issue and seemingly no one else has it.
Chrome doesn’t present this issue.
Same issue here! I thought I was alone. It annoys me to no end and weirder still, issue doesn’t present itself with Firefox for Windows running behind the same IP.
Firefox Focus also doesn’t seem to present the issue. Just the primary Firefox browser for Android. And honestly, often enough that it’s nearly unusable.
If you ever figure it out, please let me know.
You’re not alone, I’ve been using Firefox on Android for two years now, and I’ve had this problem from the beginning. The first time I launch Firefox and load a page it stops a quarter of the progression bar for ten seconds, and then loads fine. Once pas that everything works perfectly. It’s very annoying and I don’t know why this happens.
Unrelated, but why is it that so many kbin users seem to keep a dedicated reducing account? Relatively frequently, an account that reduces a post or comment has no recent posts or comments but heavy initial usage a ~month ago as jpgr above. It’s weird.
I think those existed on Reddit too. It’s just that you could never actually confirm they existed.
I downvoted because it was a lazy comment not providing further elaboration. If anything, the fact that such a comment is highly upvoted shows that this community is not mature yet.
That I’m not engaging in online discussion doesn’t automatically mean this is a bot or “dedicated reducing” account. Please restrain yourself from judging strangers on the internet.
In a space dominated by people endlessly sharing opinions and articles and memes, it’s just extremely peculiar to find accounts like yours so frequently downvoting while absent other activities even if it’s relatively mundane. Take, for instance, the upvotes on nothingwise’s comment where 1/5 are blank accounts. The novelty of the information sets off alarm bells, so I apologize if I was mistaken. I’m not trying to start a witch-hunt or JAQ off so I’ll leave it at that.
Might as well take shits with the door unlocked; same level of exposing yourself.
It’s not really bad per se, it’s the default on most Android devices these days. The problem is that almost all modern browsers are Chromium-based which give Google a lot of power to implement changes (see manifest v3 & web DRM). Personally, I’m trying to slowly reduce my usage of Google products. I’m using Firefox on desktop and a mix of DDG+Fennec on my phone.
On mac? Love safari? But also want good adblock? Use Orion! It’s safari, but with support for chrome and Firefox extensions! Fuck yeah!
I always loved safari, and always got weird looks for it as a web developer (but after a month or two they love me for it because I always find non-chrome bugs because those peasants only use chrome), but that browser is so damn good guys… on mac, that is. Not sure if it even exists yet for linux/win.
Orion
Thanks for the tip! Do you know any similar solution like this for iOS? I’m struggling to find a fully featured browser with decent ad-blocking capacity.
Doesn’t Firefox do telemetry and other shady shit out of the box? Ofc you can turn it off but I don’t get the fanaticism over this browser.
Every now and then, you’ll see some journalist uncovering the great revelation that Mozilla is doing unthinkable things, but I have never these stories actually being relevant, if you do more research on the topic.
Some examples:
- Mozilla use Google Analytics! → Yes, but they have a special contract with Google to protect user data: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14
- Mozilla uses Google Safebrowsing! → Yes, but they have technical measures in place to limit user identification (on top of Google stating that they do not use Google Safebrowsing data for tracking): https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-in-firefox/
- Mozilla has privacy-invading ads on the new-tab-page! → Again, they have technical measures in place to avoid privacy issues: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/sponsor-privacy#w_what-data-is-shared
And telemetry by itself is not evil either. It depends entirely on what data is actually being sent. You can look at what Mozilla sends by typing “about:telemetry” into the URL bar. In my opinion, that is perfectly fine.
Ultimately, though, they enjoy so much trust, because they have no profit motive. The Mozilla Foundation is legally a non-profit and the Mozilla Corporation is a 100% subsidiary of the Foundation, so cannot pay out profits to anyone either.
Any ‘evil’ shit they do to make money, they do it to pay wages and to invest further into Firefox & their other projects.
You can criticize that the CEO takes a salary she can’t possibly spend (yet is below industry-standard, to my knowledge). And you can argue whether they should be taking so much money from Google rather than other sources.
But all in all, that still leaves them far above companies who need to exploit users as much as justifiable, to make the maximum amount of profit.
The fact that they have (at least for now) foregone implementing Manifest v3 should be reason enough to use Firefox. Turn their telemetry off and use ublock origin, call it a day well spent.
If you’re inclined to, use Librewolf with ublock, NoScript, decentraleyes, and chameleon.
Copy the bypasspaywalls sites into ublock, add a redirect extension to avoid all the idiot megacorps, and use duckduckgo lite and learn to use shebangs for very fast web searching.
Firefox and mozilla aren’t your friend.
They like to play the “user and privacy friendly” company. Meanwhile they are hemoraging users, and laying off staff needed to actually build a great browser.
Mozilla ceo pay increase + layoffs in 2020:
In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated “I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That’s too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to.”
In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic.
With brave I never see any pc or YouTube ads. With Firefox even with ublock origin I can’t get rid of those damn ads. That’s what keeps me on brave
I don’t know why you’re getting ads… I run Firefox + uBlock just fine.
But I also run NoScript and AdBlockPlus. Maybe try those?
(Yes I know NoScript with uBlock is pretty redundant. Doesn’t really bother me to allow scripts on both to unbreak things. I like the double lock.)
The ceo is a bigoted asshole, Brave is chromium, it was initially funded by Peter Thiel and they’re literally just trying to make their own adsense network.
The self-proclaimed privacy focused browser is tracking your browsing and want to serve you personalized ads, and I think they want to use that tracking data for AI training as well, meaning other people can potentially access it.
And lets not forget about their crypto currency that you can earn by turning on special ads. Which they seemingly unironically called it “Basic Attent Tokens”…
TL;DR: The company is basically a sham company trying to usher in a dystopia. Where you’ll get paid for staring at ads, while having all your data stolen and sold back to you.
I see no reason to use any other browser than Firefox and maybe Librewolf.
I am forced to use Chromium on my work laptop because MS Teams doesn’t work (all the features) on Firefox.
Edit: I should elaborate this a bit. There are 2 reasons why I use Chromium on my machine.
- If I face a problem, company tech team only knows Chrome and they start crying when I open Firefox.
- On Linux, the official way to use Teams is through a web-app and Firefox doesn’t support PWAs.
All other MS services function fine on Firefox.
The fact that their founder wants to ban gay marriage is enough reason for me to avoid it like the plague.
I dont know why anyone would leave chrome and land on something like brave.
If youre ditching chrome, which you should, go to an actual different browser and use Firefox.
Personal anecdote:
When I initially decided to drop Chrome, I moved to Brave because - as a chromium-based browser - it supported the same set of extensions I’d grown accustomed to.
That being said, the crypto stuff weirded me out enough that, once I’d weaned myself off the extensions, I switched to Firefox.
What extensions does chrome have which are useful that Firefox doesn’t?
My only recurring issue with Firefox, which may have been fixed I dunno, is it for some reason it “isn’t officially supported” or whatever exact wording to use hardware security keys (like yubikey, which I use on every account that allows it). It’s only certain websites that don’t want to work though. Like google, Microsoft and many others were fine but I think paypal didn’t want to work properly but it does work on Edge, Chrome, probably Brave. Overall annoying as fuck at times but I deal with it to be out of Google’s-world
You can probably get around your paypal problems by telling them your Firefox is Chrome.
https://github.com/ray-lothian/UserAgent-Switcher
Chromium has metric shit tons of work done that seems to perform great. What I would love to see is for Mozilla to fork Chromium, staff it with enough people to maintain it, add/remove the features they feel are appropriate/inappropriate, and thus reuse the tons of free work Google and others have already done. As a software engineer, I don’t buy the argument that it’s easier to correctly implement every new web feature anew than maintaining a fork. Every large org that ships anything based on Android for example maintains a fork of an even bigger codebase. It’s not as complicated as people make it out to be. It’s not a new problem and there are strategies to manage it. If Mozilla does this, they’ll be able to play an active role in steering by far the biggest rendering engine’s direction, instead of playing opposition with no stake in it. Now downvote away! 😄
The more market share chrome based browsers have, the easier it is for google to inflict their agenda for the internet on everyone. If firefox didnt exist, every web developer would be optimizing their sites only for chrome, and responding quickly to any change google wants to make.
It really doesn’t matter what Firefox’es codebase is though. To a web developer it’s a black box. It may as well be COBOL. So long as enough people use it and it behaves differently to a web developer than Google’s Chromium or Chrome, the goal you mentioned is achieved. This is why I don’t buy this argument.
I was using Chrome as a secondary because unfortunately “designed for Chrome” is a thing now, and got sick of Google’s bullshit and thought I was doing better by going to Brave. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that Brave has its own large ethical holes.
I’ve tried Firefox several times but always end up back on chromium due to compatibility; a lot of sites don’t play well with anything but chrome anymore and this is very much something intentionally caused by Google, who have basically taken a page out of Microsoft’s playbook but with a much more mature product that is going to be substantially harder to replace then IE was
Brave is the only browser I know that can play youtube videos in the background on mobile. Please tell me another browser that can do that. The UX is just really good.
I have absolutely no idea how Brave got the reputation it has. It’s business model is disgusting and extortionate, it’s like paying for warez. Been clear as day since day one.
