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If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Okay I’m going to step into it. I’ve been liking Vivaldi recently as a browser. Is that screwed too because it’s based on chromium? Or am I safe for now?
Vivaldi is my favorite browser as well. It's fantastic
Depends what you mean by safe really.
I have no idea about telemetry. Chromium does have black box code though I think?
As I understand it ad blockers could potentially become unusable with chromium.
I'm reading this on Vivaldi right now.
It's fine. People hate on Chromium browsers all the time but ask them why and none of them have any explanation other than "because Google".
Because they're planning to cripple ublock and other adblockers in manifest v3? They also made it so that chromium can't sync with Google accounts anymore. I love vivaldi too and I hope they are able to survive whatever Google is planning.
That's in Chrome. What part of "Chromium is not Chrome" did you not understand?
...that's great!
Except it's not a monopoly and they don't have control. It's an open source project. They provide basic building blocks. Say it with me now: "Chromium-based browsers are not Chrome".
If that's your view, you'd better avoid Graphene, Calyx and basically every other mobile OS that isn't iOS because they're all built on AOSP.
It is a monopoly. They've been doing crap like not adhering to common standards and adding their own stuff on top so that chrome compatible websites might not work in Firefox. That wouldn't be the case if they weren't so big so as to force others to follow whatever design choices they make.
Then those standards can be installed in their respective forks. I don't know how many times I can say "Chromium is not Chrome" before you people understand this.
I perfectly understand that chromium is not chrome. Unfortunately the development of modern web browsers is so fast and complicated that it isn't possible to maintain a fork that is secure by a small organisation. You can do cosmetic things like Vivaldi or brave or whatever but forking the engine itself is a herculean task. See how well palemoon or waterfox are faring.
Brave is well-funded, which is also on why it's one of the better browsers. You don't need AdBlock because it has that functionality built into the browser itself. You can even import/create your own blocklists right in the browser. This has the additional benefit of reducing fingerprint data.
Brave has been criticised for their in-browser shady crypto and most recently about sharing user data to be used for training AI, or something along those lines. In contrast ublock or umatrix are completely transparent plugins created by the community that has pretty much become the standard.
Vivaldi has adblock built in as well, but I'm not a huge fan of that either.
The crypto is a shitty gimmick but if you don't use it then it doesn't affect you at all.
I've never heard anything about user data being sold, do you have a source for that?
I see that as a pro. Just less bloatware on my other ROMs. It's not like I use the AOSP ones anyway...
Vivaldi (or Mozart... whatever) is a joke regarding privacy. IMHO it's not as bad as Opera, Chrome, Edge, but still not good enough. For some privacy, you should always use a VPN service + Hardened Firefox / Brave / LibreWolf.