Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward a Chrome-only Web

Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by Not_a_pizza on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @03:53PM (#19372256)

Forgive me, but I dislike all this pandering. Obviously Chrome is good at what it does, but it still not the privacy-oriented browser of choice. A browser fueled by huge amounts of corporate money is generally going to look and act better, but at the end of the day, you're still corporately controlled, open source or not. If you want yourself (and the rest of society) not to be like that, then you have to step out a bit.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by _bxg1 on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @04:07PM (#19372435)

> it still not the privacy-oriented browser of choice

But multiple forks of it are, Brave being the chief example. The rendering and JavaScript engines do not impact privacy.

> A browser fueled by huge amounts of corporate money is generally going to look and act better, but at the end of the day, you're still corporately controlled, open source or not.

Partly true. They hold a certain amount of leverage, which I agree it would be great if they didn't have, but they can't just do whatever they want or people will simply jump ship. There's a ceiling on how hard they can push things in a given direction at a given moment. Of course they can push slowly over an extended period of time, which is the real danger. But I still think enough people are paying attention that the power center would shift if they started truly abusing it.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by anth_anm on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @05:13PM (#19373095)

> The rendering and JavaScript engines do not impact privacy.

Actually they absolutely do. You need to do mitigations against fingerprinting in order to protect privacy.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by _bxg1 on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @05:52PM (#19373436)

That has to do with what gets sent over the wire, not with rendering content or running arbitrary code

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by recursive on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @07:13PM (#19374043)

This is kind of puzzling. Fingerprinting (among other things) render to a canvas, and then send the resulting pixel data over the wire. So yes, fingerprinting requires sending stuff over the wire, but it also depends on running arbitrary code and rendering behavior.

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Re:Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward ... by j16sdiz on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @09:56PM (#19375024)

Fingerprinting with canvas depends your GPU and font installed. Don't think there are any way out without hurting the rendering performance servery..

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