Is there such a thing as "CleanChrome", meaning the good technical bits without this kind of Google business-driven terribleness?

As background, I feel like I've given Firefox enough chances, and am not interested in Brave given their history of anti-creator choices. (I'd consider Safari, but its extensions model seems too limited for "Tabs Outliner"-style extensions.)

Vivaldi if you are willing to live with UI coded in Javascript (slow).

edge, right?

It's the circle of life.

I keep wondering why people who seemingly care about their privacy continue to use Google products/services, doing all their online activity while logged in to their Google account.

Younger people growing up are used to living in the shadow of an ad company. Ad company keeps pushing the envelope on privacy but those who most vocalize opposition are getting older. Cycle repeats until ad companies win.

Sure, only if ad blocking community stop fighting.

I have actually been running the Edge beta for about a month. It's pretty good. I've noticed that since I no longer use Chrome, a lot of the ad-tracking related items have gotten much more generic over time (such as the news articles on my phone on the chrome homepage).

I at least I feel like I'm being tracked a little less by a single entity.

As much as I want to use Firefox more, it doesn't "just work", unlike Chrome.

Every other update it destroys my containers and I have to recreate them. Or it will just stop responding to keyboard input after an update. I have to go in and disable all add-ons, restart and enable them. I get it, add-ons are hard.

I'm just afraid that if I start syncing my bookmarks etc that I do with Chrome, Firefox will destroy them someday and I'll be left spending half a day recovering.

I do want to use it more, but I also need it to just work every time.

>Every other update it destroys my containers and I have to recreate them.

I've used containers since Firefox 52 and this never happened to me.

Have you ever filed a bug report for the issues you've come across?

The opportunity cost of privacy on the web is greater than your average person is willing to pay.

Because Chrome is the fastest browser[] and Google services are usually the best.

[]Perhaps that will change once they nerf ad blockers.

Chrome is the fastest browser for YouTube because Google intentionally made it slow on other browsers. So, sometimes this speed is just the result of monopolistic actions.

I think this is the value of others like Vivaldi and Microsoft standardizing on the Chrome web page engine. They will strip away any ad company privacy layers. Only Firefox is truly free at this time and Safari doing whatever they do.

Safari's implementation of AdBlockers is the same as the one that's planned and criticized for Chrome - isn't it a bit wierd to bring it into this debate?

I just see Apple has been being naughty with Safari. Slap on the wrists for them.

For me Chrome is the fastest browser all around. It may not be substantially better than Firefox anymore, but it's still the best. The day it stops being the best I will consider shopping for another browser.

(I mention Firefox specifically because it's the only browser that uses something other than webkit/blink, now that Edge is out)

For a desktop with a powerful processor and GPU, the difference goes away entirely if you force-enable webrender.

Add tree-style tabs to that, and there's no question of which one is best to me.

>As, the Verge already explained, Chrome is turning into the new IE6 (in case you wonder, that’s not a compliment). Not only is Google making some services running faster on Chrome, the browser also sends information only to Google.

Did Microsoft make their services run faster on IE6? Did IE6 send information only to Microsoft?

> Did Microsoft make their services run faster on IE6?

Yes. Internet Explorer used to send out-of-spec TCP packets during the initial handshake that IIS would respond to also in an out of spec way. This had the effect of speeding up subsequent requests, but only in the case of IE talking to IIS.

I presume you are referring to this sort of thing: http://grotto11.com/blog/slash.html?+1039831658

It is perfectly within spec to send data on a half-closed TCP connection, from the other end. That is exactly what the shutdown(SD_SEND) socket call is for. It signals the stack to send a FIN so that the other side can send data but knows to not expect more.

They were probably implementing a version of HTTP 1.1 (before it became a formalized standard) that did not break existing clients (or servers) but speeded up theirs.

BTW, I find it hard to believe IIS was sending more data after sending a FIN. Let's just say I worked in the vicinity of the Windows networking org in those days.

I know it's not a popular history to believe among the SV crowd, but Microsoft in those days would bend over backwards for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors, or companies that wrote software for Windows) if they just whispered "your products are using undocumented APIs that I don't have access to". Regardless of whether that claim was true or not, they would work overtime to dispel the notion.

The were just getting put under the anti-trust microscope, with a consent decree signed in 1994 and a bigger suit was obviously coming soon.

Of course, when google does something similar with QUIC/SPDY, it's the second coming of Christ. Definitely not a way to boost their browser/core business.

edit:typos

> Did Microsoft make their services run faster on IE6? Did IE6 send information only to Microsoft?

The web is the new OS. Microsoft made use of certain private Windows APIs to win the browser war (by providing features exclusive to IE). I think it’s a pretty apt analogy.

Yeah, that’s kinda weirdly explained - IIRC MS had OS features that were only available to IE (I don’t remember whether those features were performance-related), while Google has browser features that are only available to Google properties.

Isn't this comment really tied to a particular version of Chrome though? Even Microsoft couldn't push later versions of IE due to IE6 domination.

> Did Microsoft make their services run faster on IE6?

Yes, the pillar of Web 2.0, the AJAX, was implemented in IE5.5 first with XMLHTTPReques.

the browser also sends information only to Google It's trivial to replace chrome by chromium tough

The x-client-data header is also sent by Chromium.