6 ms·

Can anyone recommend an updated browser that skips most unused features to run faster, use less memory or be more secure?

by pilom 10y ago

vonklaus 10y ago
Brave software. This was created by Brendan Eich the x ceo of mozilla. Eich does seem to have some problems with equality[0] which may have contributed to his ouster at Mozilla, but Brave is a top shelf browser. Super great team, pretty security conscious and given the Eich developed JS, well, they have a pretty good working knowledge of it. Brian Bondy is a super awesome guy (thanks for adding duckduckgo BTW), Yan Zhu is a pretty well known dev & security blogger and they had the woman who wrote a couple encrypted chat clients working there (apologies her name escapes me) but she isn't on the site. I assume the rest of the team is talented. So in essence, I ove Brave. I still wish they would make a goddamn search engine, but it is an awesome browser. [0] NaN === NaN returns false?. 0.0001 + 0.0002 !== 0.0003? weird.
- tbirdz 10y ago
  These are standard IEEE754 floating point behaviors.
  - vonklaus 10y ago
    I am aware. It was a bad joke.
- LionessLover 10y ago
  In addition to the reply with the pointer to the standards, sure NaN !== NaN. NaN means "no idea what we've got here". When you get to say that phrase, would you expect it to be used for exactly one thing and one thing only? To me "I have no idea" means the possibilities are endless (infinite). We can only compare for equality when we know what we are looking at, otherwise it's just "status unknown". Yes, it might be equality - the chances are infinitely small though. If you take the argument a step further and say "but I got the two NaNs that I compare doing the exact same operation, so even if I don't know what I've got from a mathematical point of view whatever it is it should be equal". In that case you are not actually comparing the NaNs but the path(s) that got you there. I must say I find the whole NaN, null, 0 vs. undefined interesting on so many levels. There is a world of a difference between knowing you've got nothing (null or 0) and not knowing what've you've got at all. "null": I have no bank account. "0": my balance is 0. "undefined" or "NaN": I lost my memory after yesterdays binge drinking and don't know who I am and if I got a bank account or not. Knowledge vs. no knowledge.
  - vonklaus 10y ago
    Again, I am aware of what the behavior is, although this was a nice refresher and I appreciate it ;) The joke was, of course, surrounding the Mozilla incedent where Brendan Eich stepped down from his position as CEO apparently because of a perception that he was promoting inequality. This characterization was due to his support of prop 8 (a bill about marriage equality, or lake there of). To completely ruin the joke's punchline[1], was that the "problems he had with equality" were actually his understanding of types and language development and are evident in javascript. Of course that is untrue, was a joke, and Brendan Eich is a legendary programmer whose contributions I am grateful for. [1] Joke's punchline could be ruined by it being both a bad joke needing an explanation, being in poor taste, and generally just not being a funny joke.
    - inanutshellus 10y ago
      > and generally just not being a funny joke. I thought it was damn funny. There was definitely an unintended outburst at my desk. But then...... I also thought it was spectacularly hypocritical of Mozilla to fire him for having what amounted to... ideals. Which is what Mozilla supposedly works to protect.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > But then...... I also thought it was spectacularly hypocritical of Mozilla to fire him for having what amounted to... ideals. They didn't fire him for having ideals. One, because they didn't fire him, and, more significantly, because the problem was not him having ideal, but him being unable to determine or unwilling to take the steps necessary to effectively manage a major PR incident affecting Mozilla's relationship with users, employees, and other important stakeholders. (Or, given that he actually resigned, maybe he was quite able to determine and willing to take the necessary steps, but those steps were inconsistent with him remaining as CEO.)
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  The ultimate goal for Brave (I don't know if it's doing this yet) is to replace blocked ads with ones sold by the Brave company. I cannot support this.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - BrendanEich 10y ago
    Couple of things: 1. Brave won't "sell ads", that's not how it works. Marketers buy space for ads and spend to create the ads themselves. Websites or publishers sell space for ads, sometimes directly to brands/agencies. If ads use no tracking and host the ads' images and other assets on a non-blocked domain, no problem. 2. Where we propose to do better is with "indirect" or programmatic ads. These are so out of control, publishers make money from them but disclaim responsibility when a piece of ransomware malvertisement places in the offered space. We aim to put tracker-free, sandboxed ads in these spaces and share revenue (equal shares to the user and to Brave: 15%) with the bulk of the revenue (55% direct, 70% in total per the default settings) to the website. We're thus working to align incentives in the system that currently work against the user's interest. We also support pure ad/tracker blocking, if you prefer. On top of either mode, we're buildling an anonymous system for micropayments as well as aggregated ad metrics, so no one can re-identify a Brave user from a revenue stream. Of course, we're not yet doing anything more than blocking all third party / indirect ads and trackers. To get better user-aligned revenue models in place, we'll need to scale up and win over some top publishers for trial/testing purposes. So if you want the fastest (native code wins in perf and mem use) browser that blocks ads by default, I hope you will give Brave a try.
    - asolove 10y ago
      Honest question: If Brave doesn't sell ads, where do the sandboxed ads come from that are under #2? Presumably your software is stripping out the bad stuff and putting in something, which marketers have agreed to pay you for. Or how is it determined what goes there?
0xfeba 10y ago
Not Chromodium/Chromodo Web Browser[0] [0] https://thestack.com/security/2016/02/03/chromodo-browser-disables-key-web-security/ https://thestack.com/security/2016/02/03/chromodo-browser-di...
superkuh 10y ago
I use Pale Moon, a firefox fork. I currently have ~200 tabs loaded (in a session with ~500 tabs) and it's only using 2.7 GB of RAM. > ... even though fairly close to Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla Firefox in the way it works, is based on a different layout engine and offers a different set of features. It aims to provide close adherence to official web standards and specifications in its implementation (with minimal compromise), and purposefully excludes a number of features to strike a balance between general use, performance, and technical advancements on the Web.

Can anyone recommend an updated browser that skips most unused features to run faster, use less memory or be more secure?

by pilom 10y ago

Can anyone recommend an updated browser that skips most unused features to run faster, use less memory or be more secure?

vonklaus 10y ago

Brave software. This was created by Brendan Eich the x ceo of mozilla. Eich does seem to have some problems with equality[0] which may have contributed to his ouster at Mozilla, but Brave is a top shelf browser. Super great team, pretty security conscious and given the Eich developed JS, well, they have a pretty good working knowledge of it. Brian Bondy is a super awesome guy (thanks for adding duckduckgo BTW), Yan Zhu is a pretty well known dev & security blogger and they had the woman who wrote a couple encrypted chat clients working there (apologies her name escapes me) but she isn't on the site. I assume the rest of the team is talented. So in essence, I ove Brave. I still wish they would make a goddamn search engine, but it is an awesome browser. [0] NaN === NaN returns false?. 0.0001 + 0.0002 !== 0.0003? weird.

tbirdz 10y ago
These are standard IEEE754 floating point behaviors.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  I am aware. It was a bad joke.
LionessLover 10y ago
In addition to the reply with the pointer to the standards, sure NaN !== NaN. NaN means "no idea what we've got here". When you get to say that phrase, would you expect it to be used for exactly one thing and one thing only? To me "I have no idea" means the possibilities are endless (infinite). We can only compare for equality when we know what we are looking at, otherwise it's just "status unknown". Yes, it might be equality - the chances are infinitely small though. If you take the argument a step further and say "but I got the two NaNs that I compare doing the exact same operation, so even if I don't know what I've got from a mathematical point of view whatever it is it should be equal". In that case you are not actually comparing the NaNs but the path(s) that got you there. I must say I find the whole NaN, null, 0 vs. undefined interesting on so many levels. There is a world of a difference between knowing you've got nothing (null or 0) and not knowing what've you've got at all. "null": I have no bank account. "0": my balance is 0. "undefined" or "NaN": I lost my memory after yesterdays binge drinking and don't know who I am and if I got a bank account or not. Knowledge vs. no knowledge.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  Again, I am aware of what the behavior is, although this was a nice refresher and I appreciate it ;) The joke was, of course, surrounding the Mozilla incedent where Brendan Eich stepped down from his position as CEO apparently because of a perception that he was promoting inequality. This characterization was due to his support of prop 8 (a bill about marriage equality, or lake there of). To completely ruin the joke's punchline[1], was that the "problems he had with equality" were actually his understanding of types and language development and are evident in javascript. Of course that is untrue, was a joke, and Brendan Eich is a legendary programmer whose contributions I am grateful for. [1] Joke's punchline could be ruined by it being both a bad joke needing an explanation, being in poor taste, and generally just not being a funny joke.
  - inanutshellus 10y ago
    > and generally just not being a funny joke. I thought it was damn funny. There was definitely an unintended outburst at my desk. But then...... I also thought it was spectacularly hypocritical of Mozilla to fire him for having what amounted to... ideals. Which is what Mozilla supposedly works to protect.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > But then...... I also thought it was spectacularly hypocritical of Mozilla to fire him for having what amounted to... ideals. They didn't fire him for having ideals. One, because they didn't fire him, and, more significantly, because the problem was not him having ideal, but him being unable to determine or unwilling to take the steps necessary to effectively manage a major PR incident affecting Mozilla's relationship with users, employees, and other important stakeholders. (Or, given that he actually resigned, maybe he was quite able to determine and willing to take the necessary steps, but those steps were inconsistent with him remaining as CEO.)
LeoPanthera 10y ago
The ultimate goal for Brave (I don't know if it's doing this yet) is to replace blocked ads with ones sold by the Brave company. I cannot support this.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- BrendanEich 10y ago
  Couple of things: 1. Brave won't "sell ads", that's not how it works. Marketers buy space for ads and spend to create the ads themselves. Websites or publishers sell space for ads, sometimes directly to brands/agencies. If ads use no tracking and host the ads' images and other assets on a non-blocked domain, no problem. 2. Where we propose to do better is with "indirect" or programmatic ads. These are so out of control, publishers make money from them but disclaim responsibility when a piece of ransomware malvertisement places in the offered space. We aim to put tracker-free, sandboxed ads in these spaces and share revenue (equal shares to the user and to Brave: 15%) with the bulk of the revenue (55% direct, 70% in total per the default settings) to the website. We're thus working to align incentives in the system that currently work against the user's interest. We also support pure ad/tracker blocking, if you prefer. On top of either mode, we're buildling an anonymous system for micropayments as well as aggregated ad metrics, so no one can re-identify a Brave user from a revenue stream. Of course, we're not yet doing anything more than blocking all third party / indirect ads and trackers. To get better user-aligned revenue models in place, we'll need to scale up and win over some top publishers for trial/testing purposes. So if you want the fastest (native code wins in perf and mem use) browser that blocks ads by default, I hope you will give Brave a try.
  - asolove 10y ago
    Honest question: If Brave doesn't sell ads, where do the sandboxed ads come from that are under #2? Presumably your software is stripping out the bad stuff and putting in something, which marketers have agreed to pay you for. Or how is it determined what goes there?

0xfeba 10y ago

Not Chromodium/Chromodo Web Browser[0] [0] https://thestack.com/security/2016/02/03/chromodo-browser-disables-key-web-security/ https://thestack.com/security/2016/02/03/chromodo-browser-di...

superkuh 10y ago

I use Pale Moon, a firefox fork. I currently have ~200 tabs loaded (in a session with ~500 tabs) and it's only using 2.7 GB of RAM. > ... even though fairly close to Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla Firefox in the way it works, is based on a different layout engine and offers a different set of features. It aims to provide close adherence to official web standards and specifications in its implementation (with minimal compromise), and purposefully excludes a number of features to strike a balance between general use, performance, and technical advancements on the Web.