“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar”

Re:“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar” by wayneftw on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @10:08PM (#28780983)

This is a good list of concerns to be aware of, but I think they need deeper inspection and should be balanced by comparison with the list of concerns about Firefox and Mozilla from bejelentkezni who you replied to. I think what it really comes down to is that every single one of them, including Firefox, has it's issues and you just have to pick your poison.

For Chrome, you can disable linking browser sign ins to web page sign ins and you can disable FLOC. For mobile - If you don't trust Google, you should probably be on an iPhone IMO. There I use Adguard with Safari and that works just as well as uBlock Origin and better than Firefox on iOS.

I use Chrome all day on desktop systems, but I don't sign in at all and because of that, I just don't do syncing. If I really wanted to do basic bookmark syncing though, I could do that with an extension like xBrowserSync, EverSync, etc. (or even my own). Of course those probably wouldn't sync to iPhone/Safari with some hackey procedure. I don't know if Manifest v3 will stop uBlock Origin because the maintainers have been steadily working on ways to implement the extension with it.

I don't entirely distrust Brave since they've been quick to apologize, explain and/or revert their mistaken behavior. I think they deserve some consideration for the level of innovation they're trying to achieve. For now, Brave is my backup plan for desktop at least, if Manifest v3 breaks everything completely.

Good for me that I pack lightly and I can move to another browser easily or use a mix of them if I wish to.

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Re:“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar” by Macha on Thursday October 07, 2021 @06:29AM (#28784485)

> For mobile - If you don't trust Google, you should probably be on an iPhone IMO

I'm sympathetic to that argument, but ultimately until Apple supports sideloading more generally, (which is likely never), that lack of control of my device outweighs my concerns with Google's privacy practices.

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Re:“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar” by wayneftw on Thursday October 07, 2021 @09:17AM (#28785808)

So you might as well be using Chrome then. They already got all of your data from your phone.

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Re:“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar” by Macha on Thursday October 07, 2021 @12:44PM (#28788801)

I've yet to see evidence of them siphoning off DNS queries for tracking or MITMing my queries to DDG to find out what I'm searching, but for Chrome everything you type in the address bar gets sent to google search for search suggestions.

If they did start doing so, I could switch to LineageOS or even Plasma Mobile, as my phone supports changing the OS without having to exploit a security vulnerability.

Which to be fair, the default in Firefox is the address bar gets sent to the search engine provider of your choice for search suggestions, but you can change the search engine and/or disable that in Firefox for Android, unlike Android Chrome. And on desktop you can separate the search and address bars still.

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Re:“looks like Firefox quietly added ads into the address bar” by wayneftw on Thursday October 07, 2021 @05:46PM (#28792536)

Yeah, I was just thinking about every other app that you might use on the phone.

If you only use a web browser then that's perfect for you. I am a fairly minimalist user and I generally prefer the browser over phone apps but I still use too many apps to list here easily.

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