Alphabet
Blacklight detected this website sending user data to Alphabet, the technology conglomerate that encompasses Google and associated companies like Nest. The Silicon Valley giant collects data from twice the number of websites as its closest competitor, Facebook. An Alphabet spokesperson told The Markup that internet users can go here if they want to opt out of the company showing them targeted ads based on their browsing history.
As you see, don’t trust none of the companies or soft, not even FOSS, when they using surveillance advertising to earn money. Nothing to do with a free internet.
We’re not talking about Mozilla site, but about Firefox browser. Nobody is arguing that it would be better if Mozilla found a better source of funding than Google, but so far you haven’t demonstrated any problems with the actual browser no provided any viable alternatives to Firefox.
I use Vivaldi, no tracking, no ads, no tricks. It’s Chromium based, yes, but with the difference that you can desactivate all Google APIs in the settings, if you want. They made money with search engines and links from sponsores, which are include by default, but you are free to delete them. The only browser company (a small coop in Norway) active in the anti-surveillance campaign and user rights. Apart a great and friendly community.
Also 2 Linux distros currently include Vivaldi as default browser (Manjaro and FerenOS), other also will do so, because of their ethical and user centred policy.
Beside is the most advanced Browser out there, nothing to do with other Chromium or Chrome or other browsers.
Chromium based is precisely the problem there. Chromium is a Google project and they exercise tight control over it. Ads are the primary source of revenue for Google and it continues to push features and behaviors in the engine that are conducive towards ads and tracking.
If Chromium ends up being the only browser engine implementation on the market than it becomes the de facto standard. There won’t even be any real open standards anymore, it’s just going to be whatever Chromium is doing. This is how things worked back in the days of IE.
Firefox helps protect web standards by the mere fact of existing. Having at least two independent implementations of these standards ensures they’re followed and aren’t just whatever Google decided to do in Chromium.
If Google decided to take Chromium in a direction that’s actively harmful to the public then browsers like Vivaldi will be in serious trouble. The resources necessary to fork and maintain the engine independently are quite significant, and a small coop in Norway is not likely to muster them.
They know it and in every update of Chromium they need a week or so to eliminate some parts of the Chromium source, launching first a snapshot version, also if they include some new features and improvements, which are used by some some users and after this a stable versión of Vivaldi. Because of this the update of Vivaldi is something behind the Chromium updates.
The problem is valid for all browsers, all of the engines are influenced by Google, because Google also determine the Webstandarts and all engines (Blink, Gecko or WebKit) have to respect it or lose compatibility.
Google don’t need to modify Chromium. Because of this, currently is irrelevant the engine you use, all of them are FOSS. The webstandarts are best for the most used engine and this is Chromium with a great distance from any other.
As I said before, getting a free internet does not mean using one or another browser or engine, but fighting the underlying problem, tracking and surveillance, using products that do not, regardless of whether they are OpenSource or not.
Focusing on a browser that is only in 4% of the market, nothing will change if it use the same rejectable practices.
A way is to use EU browsers, because they adjust the EU norm of Privacy, which in US products don’t exist. Another Chromium I use, is the French UR browser which don’t track the user and it’s closed source. Vivaldi use 5% of the source of the UI protected but auditable, it mean, the user can modify it for its use, but can’t fork it to make another browser (avoid Google to imitate Vivaldi in Chrome, Jon won’t make the same mistake he made in old Opera, now prprietary of a Chinese Company and with the worst privacy, full of trackers (9 in the Android version and nearly a dozen in desktop)).
Let’s start with the fact that Vivaldi itself isn’t even even open source. It’s a freeware product based on Chromium that’s developed by Google. This seems far more problematic than Mozilla to me.
The problem is not valid for all browsers precisely because different implementation expose the inner workings and force them to be clearly documented. These things become explicit as opposed to being implicit. Mozilla and W3C also still have some power to prevent Google from simply ramming through whatever they want. That would no longer be the case if Chromium was the only game in town.
And you’re never going to convince me that using closed source products that promote technologies developed by surveillance companies is the way towards free and open internet.
First, Vivaldi isn’t OpenSource in the sense of a completly free and open public source, but 95% of the source is FOSS and the rest of 5%, regarding the UI, is open for audit and accesible for the user , who can modify it to its like. But it avoid that Chrome or other Chromium can imitate Vivaldi, because this are the dead of a still very small company.
There is a brutal browser war in a very saturated market, with about 100 different browsers, most of them Chromium and another 70 that have been left behind discontinued, precisely because they are FOSS, because they were imitated by larger companies with more users.
There is no other possibility for a small business to protect itself against large competitors.
Vivaldi some time ago even dispensed with its own UA in favor of users, who have been excluded and even blocked by pages in the hands of large companies, not for lack of compatibility or security, but for browsersniffing with commercial interests. This forced to disguise Vivaldi as Chrome, with which these problems disappeared.
FOSS is a good system for sharing and develope new projects, but in a saturated marked it dosn’t make much sense, browser are not a new product and Google and MS only turn’s stronger with new FOSS browsers, forking their source for Chrome and Edge, with which a browser of a small company is death. (see Wiki, list of discontinued browsers)
Yes, Firefox is still a important alternative, but also is loosing users, because it’s going more and mor a way marked by Google and not by the user.
Brave “the privacy focused” browser, make money blocking only tracker and ad from sites which ar not the sponsored, but not so the sponsor ads and trackers, among them Facebook.
Opera is direct Spyware, because Privacy in China isn’t something known.
Fundamentally, the problem is that any software developed for commercial purposes will always be developed to make profit first and foremost. That’s the core imperative of a business. The needs of the users will always be secondary to the need of making profit. Plenty of companies start out with good intentions, and it always ends the same. FOSS is the only way to ensure that software puts the needs of the users first because profit is not the driving force behind it.
I’m a bit confused here, are you suggesting that Firefox sends telemetry to Google?
Yes, to Alphabet inc, which is a Google company, among others. At least when you download from Mozilla and sync with their server.
Blacklight analyse of Mozilla .org
As you see, don’t trust none of the companies or soft, not even FOSS, when they using surveillance advertising to earn money. Nothing to do with a free internet.
We’re not talking about Mozilla site, but about Firefox browser. Nobody is arguing that it would be better if Mozilla found a better source of funding than Google, but so far you haven’t demonstrated any problems with the actual browser no provided any viable alternatives to Firefox.
I use Vivaldi, no tracking, no ads, no tricks. It’s Chromium based, yes, but with the difference that you can desactivate all Google APIs in the settings, if you want. They made money with search engines and links from sponsores, which are include by default, but you are free to delete them. The only browser company (a small coop in Norway) active in the anti-surveillance campaign and user rights. Apart a great and friendly community. Also 2 Linux distros currently include Vivaldi as default browser (Manjaro and FerenOS), other also will do so, because of their ethical and user centred policy. Beside is the most advanced Browser out there, nothing to do with other Chromium or Chrome or other browsers.
Last interview with Jon von Tetzcher by the Linux community https://tube.cadence.moe/watch?v=ivDiL9XeDw0
Chromium based is precisely the problem there. Chromium is a Google project and they exercise tight control over it. Ads are the primary source of revenue for Google and it continues to push features and behaviors in the engine that are conducive towards ads and tracking.
If Chromium ends up being the only browser engine implementation on the market than it becomes the de facto standard. There won’t even be any real open standards anymore, it’s just going to be whatever Chromium is doing. This is how things worked back in the days of IE.
Firefox helps protect web standards by the mere fact of existing. Having at least two independent implementations of these standards ensures they’re followed and aren’t just whatever Google decided to do in Chromium.
If Google decided to take Chromium in a direction that’s actively harmful to the public then browsers like Vivaldi will be in serious trouble. The resources necessary to fork and maintain the engine independently are quite significant, and a small coop in Norway is not likely to muster them.
They know it and in every update of Chromium they need a week or so to eliminate some parts of the Chromium source, launching first a snapshot version, also if they include some new features and improvements, which are used by some some users and after this a stable versión of Vivaldi. Because of this the update of Vivaldi is something behind the Chromium updates.
The problem is valid for all browsers, all of the engines are influenced by Google, because Google also determine the Webstandarts and all engines (Blink, Gecko or WebKit) have to respect it or lose compatibility.
Google don’t need to modify Chromium. Because of this, currently is irrelevant the engine you use, all of them are FOSS. The webstandarts are best for the most used engine and this is Chromium with a great distance from any other.
As I said before, getting a free internet does not mean using one or another browser or engine, but fighting the underlying problem, tracking and surveillance, using products that do not, regardless of whether they are OpenSource or not. Focusing on a browser that is only in 4% of the market, nothing will change if it use the same rejectable practices.
A way is to use EU browsers, because they adjust the EU norm of Privacy, which in US products don’t exist. Another Chromium I use, is the French UR browser which don’t track the user and it’s closed source. Vivaldi use 5% of the source of the UI protected but auditable, it mean, the user can modify it for its use, but can’t fork it to make another browser (avoid Google to imitate Vivaldi in Chrome, Jon won’t make the same mistake he made in old Opera, now prprietary of a Chinese Company and with the worst privacy, full of trackers (9 in the Android version and nearly a dozen in desktop)).
Let’s start with the fact that Vivaldi itself isn’t even even open source. It’s a freeware product based on Chromium that’s developed by Google. This seems far more problematic than Mozilla to me.
The problem is not valid for all browsers precisely because different implementation expose the inner workings and force them to be clearly documented. These things become explicit as opposed to being implicit. Mozilla and W3C also still have some power to prevent Google from simply ramming through whatever they want. That would no longer be the case if Chromium was the only game in town.
And you’re never going to convince me that using closed source products that promote technologies developed by surveillance companies is the way towards free and open internet.
First, Vivaldi isn’t OpenSource in the sense of a completly free and open public source, but 95% of the source is FOSS and the rest of 5%, regarding the UI, is open for audit and accesible for the user , who can modify it to its like. But it avoid that Chrome or other Chromium can imitate Vivaldi, because this are the dead of a still very small company.
There is a brutal browser war in a very saturated market, with about 100 different browsers, most of them Chromium and another 70 that have been left behind discontinued, precisely because they are FOSS, because they were imitated by larger companies with more users. There is no other possibility for a small business to protect itself against large competitors.
Vivaldi some time ago even dispensed with its own UA in favor of users, who have been excluded and even blocked by pages in the hands of large companies, not for lack of compatibility or security, but for browsersniffing with commercial interests. This forced to disguise Vivaldi as Chrome, with which these problems disappeared.
FOSS is a good system for sharing and develope new projects, but in a saturated marked it dosn’t make much sense, browser are not a new product and Google and MS only turn’s stronger with new FOSS browsers, forking their source for Chrome and Edge, with which a browser of a small company is death. (see Wiki, list of discontinued browsers)
Yes, Firefox is still a important alternative, but also is loosing users, because it’s going more and mor a way marked by Google and not by the user.
Brave “the privacy focused” browser, make money blocking only tracker and ad from sites which ar not the sponsored, but not so the sponsor ads and trackers, among them Facebook.
Opera is direct Spyware, because Privacy in China isn’t something known.
Fundamentally, the problem is that any software developed for commercial purposes will always be developed to make profit first and foremost. That’s the core imperative of a business. The needs of the users will always be secondary to the need of making profit. Plenty of companies start out with good intentions, and it always ends the same. FOSS is the only way to ensure that software puts the needs of the users first because profit is not the driving force behind it.