tbh ive never used firefox so i this browser good or bad?

  • Ephera
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    4 years ago

    What I don’t like about Brave is that it takes the worst browser for privacy, Chrome/-ium, and then just superficially patches out the direct Google tracking, and includes an ad blocker and such, which you can easily install via extensions.

    Chromium is millions of lines of code, written by a tracking company. Sure, not every individual line of code is awful for privacy, but you still don’t fix even most of what’s buried in there by just patching out a few things.

    For example, there’s a web standard for querying your device’s battery percentage. That’s used for tracking, because of course it is. If there’s multiple devices connected from behind a shared public IP, you can usually discern them by their battery percentage.

    It’s a web standard, no journalist will shit on you, if you keep this behavior, but it could obviously be done better. And guess which browser changed its implementation after noticing barely any legitimate use-cases and that it’s used for tracking.
    Not Chromium, not Brave, it was of course Firefox. Now it only returns rough categories, e.g. 20%, 40%, 60%.

    It’s not a huge change, you could patch this into your Chromium fork, but it’s also just one example where you see the difference between doing the necessary to not generate negative press and actually going out of your way to do the right thing.