New browser?
I ran into a post on lobste.rs asking why, when you visit the site using the brave browser, it returns an error.
The brave browser is advertised as a 'privacy focused' browser, but this is misleading. As you browse it replaces the content you requested with their own ads and supposedly holds an attention based cryptocurrency in escrow for the site. From that post:
The content you see on a site may not be the content being sent - they’re deliberately replacing content being sent by the site to content that they profit from
They then claimed that they were doing this to “help” the site operators and were holding the earnings in escrow, but were not
Furthermore, they sell user data for AI training and they deliberately don't honor robots.txt because they don't want to be blocked.
When the discussion rolled around to what we should use instead there was some good advice:
If you want to use a chromium based browser like Brave but want to avoid Google and Microsoft, Vivaldi is a good option. It has several interesting privacy features, including an ad blocker built-in. And Vivaldi doesn’t do the shady things Brave does.
If you want to be in the Firefox ecosystem but avoid Mozilla, Librewolf is an independent fork focused on privacy, security and openness. It works very well on all the platforms Firefox does.
Chrome is owned by an ad company. They're in the process of shutting down the ability to block ads.. Firefox aspires to be an ad company.
I've been on the hunt for a better browser for a while. Firefox meets all my needs but the mozilla foundation refuses to fund the project except to add ads, AI, and other features that reduce privacy and try to monetize me.
I've tried pale moon, another gecko based engine, but it was forked from firefox years ago and doesn't support modern plugins like tridactyl.
I was unaware of librewolf. Here's what they say on the site:
How often do you update LibreWolf?
LibreWolf is always based on the latest version of Firefox. Updates usually come within three days from each upstream stable release, at times even the same day. Unless problems arise, we always try to release often and in a timely manner.
It should however be noted that LibreWolf does not have auto-update capabilities, and therefore it relies on package managers or users to apply them.
I installed the package from AUR and on first boot began the customary walk through the settings to turn off all the ad tracking, enable security settings, and disable the other unwanted features (like pocket, ai, and sync) only to discover they were already switched off or missing. The fact I barely had to change anything at all was encouraging.
Also, because it's based on the current version of firefox it accepted all my extensions, though with one irritating issue. I was unable to get any extension to add a button to the toolbar. This missing toolbar button completely breaks uMatrix and several other extensions, but is not quite enough to prevent me from moving away from firefox.
So I've switched my primary browser. I feel a little better using a tool use isn't trying to exploit me, but it's not comforting to be dependent on a project that's currently shitting itself.
The infrequently updated blog.