6 ms·

If you’re anyway using Google Drive, you could use Firefox with the Google Container extension [1] to limit Google’s tracking activities across Google tabs to t

If you’re anyway using Google Drive, you could use Firefox with the Google Container extension [1] to limit Google’s tracking activities across Google tabs to this container. Also install Cookie AutoDelete [2] and let the cookies, cache, local storage, etc., get cleared soon after you close the tabs. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-container/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai... [2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

giancarlostoro 4y ago
Honestly anyone concerned about a Chrome / WebKit browser monopoly needs to use Firefox now if you already are not.
- sneak 4y ago
  I don't see any problems with a monoculture of rendering engine. Browser (and features, especially privacy ones), absolutely. Renderer, not so much.
  - peanut_worm 4y ago
    I would prefer that an advertising company does not have majority control over the rendering engine
  - gorgoiler 4y ago
    Have you ever used a service in life where there is no competition? Straight up lack of competition examples are the easiest: DMV, airport food court, buying beer at a sports stadium etc. If you work in tech then you’ve probably had to use software over whose purchase you had no control: Jira, PeopleHR, Taleo, Concur. There’s no competition there because you, the end user, don’t have the option to choose from a free market. For the vendor, the software doesn’t have to be any good as long as the sales pitch to you boss is amazing. Without competition, software rots and/or never gets better. What examples are there of monopolies in Free software that caused a product to languish? OpenSSL, Python’s logging module, systemd since it was locked in as the only properly supported Debian/Ubuntu init, pre-Chrome Firefox/Mozilla, post-GMail Thunderbird. What examples are there of corporate-sponsored software that languish without competition? Internet Explorer is the classic example but if you think Google are better than Microsoft, at heart, then how’s Android working out for us all in terms of excellence-in-the-void-of-competition?
    - sneak 4y ago
      We are talking at cross purposes: your comment is a reasonable refutation of a browser monoculture, something we agree would be bad. FWIW I am typing my response to you in Graphene. Ultimately the issue is: what is the harm in using a library maintained by Google to do the webview rendering in a non-Google browser? I just don't see it.
      - jackmott 4y ago
      - nirvdrum 4y ago
        Google can do pretty much whatever it wants when it's the only player in the space. It certainly hasn't been shy about doing things outside of a standards body. Sure, it's open source, but can you meaningfully influence the direction of the project? If you decide to fork and deviate from what stock Chrome is doing, you're apt to be locked out similarly to sites that don't support Firefox or Safari. It looks pretty similar to what MS was doing with IE, just with a dash of "here you can skin this thing". The biggest differences being that Google has a strong interest in ensuring the web is the app platform of choice, rather than a desktop OS. On the other hand, Google needs to sell targeted ads, so it's unlikely to be the standard bearer for web privacy.
      - bogwog 4y ago
        If Google has a monopoly on the rendering engine, who decides what the future of web rendering looks like? Google, and nobody else.
    - jhanschoo 4y ago
      The argument needs to be more subtle to make sense, since Blink is open-source, whereas IE was not. Contrarily, I see another analogy; Blink being like Linux's dominance in infrastructure.
      - robin_reala 4y ago
        The Linux Foundation aren’t trying to develop Linux to cement their advertising business. The Linux Foundation are benign, and Google aren’t.
  - ivanmontillam 4y ago
    Chromium is such a big deal, that it also easily twists the arm of standardization bodies like the W3C. If a private party can do as they please and have such a strong say, why bother with standardization bodies?
  - pjerem 4y ago
    The problem is that you are giving full power for creating de-facto standards to the rendering engine. If Blink decides to support a feature, it becomes a de-facto standard even if the feature solely serves Google (think FLoC, AMP ...) or is hard to replicate. It's also an issue because now the web is at risk to become only usable from devices that are physically able to run Blink/Webkit which means nobody in the future will be able to create a new useful device/os that cannot run Blink or Webkit. It's also an issue with the good ol' technical debt : what happens when Blink/Webkit become a total mess full of hard to patch vulnerabilities or google/chrome specific code ? You basically cannot rewrite it from scratch unless you have the engineering power of a GAFAM. There are tons of reasons why having a monoculture of rendering engine is an issue.
    - sneak 4y ago
      Neither FLoC nor AMP are part of the renderer. AMP isn't even clientside, it is a feature of the Google search webapp. If Google were trying to leverage the renderer to assert Chrome over say Brave or Edge, sure, but they're not, and if they do, it will be forked. Do we have the same concerns over type layout engine monoculture?
      - grosswait 4y ago
        We have the same concerns over any lower level components, yes. I don’t think a type layout engine is comparable to a web render.
      - dmitriid 4y ago
        > If Google were trying to leverage the renderer to assert Chrome over say Brave or Edge, sure, but they're not, and if they do, it will be forked. Google has already asserted that. Brave and Edge are a footnote to a footnote to a distant appendix, and are almost entirely reliant on Google to provide the rendering engine.
  - frognumber 4y ago
    In general, I like to have at least two implementations to make sure multiple implementations are possible. If the rendering engine bit-rots, goes the way of the original Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc., you don't want the internet to break.
    - dwighttk 4y ago
      Eh. That’s kinda like “don’t put all your money in dollars” If the US Dollar goes to zero or the only rendering engine bit rots, other things are happening such that I won’t be too concerned about not having money or not being able to browse the web.
      - frognumber 4y ago
        No, it's really not. It's more like "don't put your money in one stock," but it's much more like "architect your code sanely." In general, if I have a modular abstraction barrier in my code, I try to have at least two implementations. For example, if I have a generic key-value store so I can switch databases later, I'll make an implementation for e.g. PostgreSQL and redis. That way, I don't accidentally couple to one or the other. Otherwise, I'm fooling myself. That's just basic software engineering, but for open industry standards, it's really critical. You don't want CSS rendering depending on some browser bug or quirk. It's critical to have multiple implementations, or it's not a standard. The flip side of allowing multiple implementations also means it's possible to build things like web crawlers, screen readers, and other technologies without spending millions of dollars re-engineering IE or Chrome to be identical, bug-for-bug. It's also possible to build new things we never imagined. Indeed, we had a lot more diversity in HTML 2.0 days, when things were simple enough that anyone could build a novel web technology over a weekend (with full HTML 2.0 parsing). (Before I get accused of over-engineering, I usually don't have these types of modular abstractions; if I don't expect to ever swap databases, I'll e.g. code to PostgreSQL directly
  - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
    I see the problem if the monoculture is dominated by for profit big tech corpos
  - squidbeak 4y ago
    You've forgotten what it was like at the turn of the century. It took a long while for us to break the previous monoculture and clear the way for the innovation we've enjoyed since.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      The innovation we've enjoyed since was mostly caused by Google getting tired of waiting for either Microsoft or Mozilla to improve on the browser paradigm and footing the bill to roll their own.
      - hedora 4y ago
        History doesn't really linenup with that: Web 2.0 was based on some IE extensions that were introduced when Firefox was the viable other game in town. Concretely, Google Maps (the poster child for AJAX) launched in 2005, and Chrome launched in 2008.
        shadowgovt 4y ago
        I was referring to the innovations in browser capabilities. Process sandboxing massively improved both the robustness of the browser experience and the boldness with which features could be used (because a crashing site wouldn't take the whole browser with it). It paved the way for the actual "browser is the OS for the web" experience we have today, unlike IE's attempt to wed a crash-prone application to its core OS functionality. As a result, the browser capability specs themselves exploded, which eventually rendered Flash, Silverlight, and ActiveX plugins mostly redundant and allowed browser vendors to make their way towards stripping them out in favor of web-engine-only solutions.
  - gaius_baltar 4y ago
    > I don't see any problems with a monoculture of rendering engine. Remember IE6 ? That's what we get with a monoculture.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    Forget the monopoly part, the reference to IE6, all that stuff. Let's say we don't care about that. What happens when the Chrome rendering engine has a security bug, a big one, a zero-day? That's the issue we had with OpenSSL, suddenly 90% of the Internet er vulnerable and there are no alternatives until Google fixes the bug. Given the complexity and feature set of a modern rendering engine I don't think it's to fare fetched. I like the entire Internet not being vulnerable all at once.
  - ajvs 4y ago
    I'm not sure how anyone can believe this after seeing Android. Google's modus operandi is to make the open core less and less functional over time after everyone has migrated to it, and then put the useful stuff into their proprietary version (Google Pixel, Google Chrome).
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    So why not just get rid of all browsers and have only Microsoft Edge then? Because that is the problem you end up with a bunch of proprietary features that only whoever maintains the main browser rendering engine has and everyone on Linux and probably Mac has to suffer for it.
- oxff 4y ago
  Can't do that when Firefox simply isn't good enough. Vivaldi beats it in features and what I need from browser as a power-user.
- zmxz 4y ago
  I'd love to, but it's simply unusable compared to Chrome when it comes to web development.
  - depressedpanda 4y ago
    How so? I use Firefox for web dev, and I don't find it unusable compared to Chrome.
  - markussss 4y ago
    I have not found any shortcomings in Firefox for web development, so I'm wondering if you could you elaborate on what features are missing, or what killer features for web development Chrome has that Firefox doesn't?
    - jakear 4y ago
      The entire local file system api, for one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_Access_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... , which severely neuters any tooling designed to help you do real work on your own files.
      - ajvs 4y ago
        Also a massive vulnerability surface letting arbitrary websites write whatever they want to your disk.
        jakear 4y ago
        Definitely not. You have to explicitly select a directory from a native file system UI then confirm both read and write access for each directory, across each domain, typically each session. And system directories are blocked outright with no way to override. This attitude is why people dismiss Firefox: “well if FF doesn’t implement it, it must be bad. Other browsers surely have glaring security holes” (Source: I implemented the file system integration for vscode.dev)
    - 4y ago
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  At this stage, I think we can draw a line between WebKit and Blink, so even having more WebKit based browsers would be a welcome change. I'd still prefer to see a mainstream Gecko based browser, of course! I think outside of the tech crowd FF is pretty niche.
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  What are your thoughts on brave browser? I’ve used it over firefox for about two years now and I really enjoy it.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Brave is just chrome underneath so you’re definitely not helping to browser diversity.
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      Appreciate it!
LinAGKar 4y ago
That's not really usable until they fix the issue where it wipes the tabs history.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

giancarlostoro 4y ago

Honestly anyone concerned about a Chrome / WebKit browser monopoly needs to use Firefox now if you already are not.

sneak 4y ago
I don't see any problems with a monoculture of rendering engine. Browser (and features, especially privacy ones), absolutely. Renderer, not so much.
- peanut_worm 4y ago
  I would prefer that an advertising company does not have majority control over the rendering engine
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  Have you ever used a service in life where there is no competition? Straight up lack of competition examples are the easiest: DMV, airport food court, buying beer at a sports stadium etc. If you work in tech then you’ve probably had to use software over whose purchase you had no control: Jira, PeopleHR, Taleo, Concur. There’s no competition there because you, the end user, don’t have the option to choose from a free market. For the vendor, the software doesn’t have to be any good as long as the sales pitch to you boss is amazing. Without competition, software rots and/or never gets better. What examples are there of monopolies in Free software that caused a product to languish? OpenSSL, Python’s logging module, systemd since it was locked in as the only properly supported Debian/Ubuntu init, pre-Chrome Firefox/Mozilla, post-GMail Thunderbird. What examples are there of corporate-sponsored software that languish without competition? Internet Explorer is the classic example but if you think Google are better than Microsoft, at heart, then how’s Android working out for us all in terms of excellence-in-the-void-of-competition?
  - sneak 4y ago
    We are talking at cross purposes: your comment is a reasonable refutation of a browser monoculture, something we agree would be bad. FWIW I am typing my response to you in Graphene. Ultimately the issue is: what is the harm in using a library maintained by Google to do the webview rendering in a non-Google browser? I just don't see it.
    - jackmott 4y ago
    - nirvdrum 4y ago
      Google can do pretty much whatever it wants when it's the only player in the space. It certainly hasn't been shy about doing things outside of a standards body. Sure, it's open source, but can you meaningfully influence the direction of the project? If you decide to fork and deviate from what stock Chrome is doing, you're apt to be locked out similarly to sites that don't support Firefox or Safari. It looks pretty similar to what MS was doing with IE, just with a dash of "here you can skin this thing". The biggest differences being that Google has a strong interest in ensuring the web is the app platform of choice, rather than a desktop OS. On the other hand, Google needs to sell targeted ads, so it's unlikely to be the standard bearer for web privacy.
    - bogwog 4y ago
      If Google has a monopoly on the rendering engine, who decides what the future of web rendering looks like? Google, and nobody else.
  - jhanschoo 4y ago
    The argument needs to be more subtle to make sense, since Blink is open-source, whereas IE was not. Contrarily, I see another analogy; Blink being like Linux's dominance in infrastructure.
    - robin_reala 4y ago
      The Linux Foundation aren’t trying to develop Linux to cement their advertising business. The Linux Foundation are benign, and Google aren’t.
- ivanmontillam 4y ago
  Chromium is such a big deal, that it also easily twists the arm of standardization bodies like the W3C. If a private party can do as they please and have such a strong say, why bother with standardization bodies?
- pjerem 4y ago
  The problem is that you are giving full power for creating de-facto standards to the rendering engine. If Blink decides to support a feature, it becomes a de-facto standard even if the feature solely serves Google (think FLoC, AMP ...) or is hard to replicate. It's also an issue because now the web is at risk to become only usable from devices that are physically able to run Blink/Webkit which means nobody in the future will be able to create a new useful device/os that cannot run Blink or Webkit. It's also an issue with the good ol' technical debt : what happens when Blink/Webkit become a total mess full of hard to patch vulnerabilities or google/chrome specific code ? You basically cannot rewrite it from scratch unless you have the engineering power of a GAFAM. There are tons of reasons why having a monoculture of rendering engine is an issue.
  - sneak 4y ago
    Neither FLoC nor AMP are part of the renderer. AMP isn't even clientside, it is a feature of the Google search webapp. If Google were trying to leverage the renderer to assert Chrome over say Brave or Edge, sure, but they're not, and if they do, it will be forked. Do we have the same concerns over type layout engine monoculture?
    - grosswait 4y ago
      We have the same concerns over any lower level components, yes. I don’t think a type layout engine is comparable to a web render.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      > If Google were trying to leverage the renderer to assert Chrome over say Brave or Edge, sure, but they're not, and if they do, it will be forked. Google has already asserted that. Brave and Edge are a footnote to a footnote to a distant appendix, and are almost entirely reliant on Google to provide the rendering engine.
- frognumber 4y ago
  In general, I like to have at least two implementations to make sure multiple implementations are possible. If the rendering engine bit-rots, goes the way of the original Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc., you don't want the internet to break.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    Eh. That’s kinda like “don’t put all your money in dollars” If the US Dollar goes to zero or the only rendering engine bit rots, other things are happening such that I won’t be too concerned about not having money or not being able to browse the web.
    - frognumber 4y ago
      No, it's really not. It's more like "don't put your money in one stock," but it's much more like "architect your code sanely." In general, if I have a modular abstraction barrier in my code, I try to have at least two implementations. For example, if I have a generic key-value store so I can switch databases later, I'll make an implementation for e.g. PostgreSQL and redis. That way, I don't accidentally couple to one or the other. Otherwise, I'm fooling myself. That's just basic software engineering, but for open industry standards, it's really critical. You don't want CSS rendering depending on some browser bug or quirk. It's critical to have multiple implementations, or it's not a standard. The flip side of allowing multiple implementations also means it's possible to build things like web crawlers, screen readers, and other technologies without spending millions of dollars re-engineering IE or Chrome to be identical, bug-for-bug. It's also possible to build new things we never imagined. Indeed, we had a lot more diversity in HTML 2.0 days, when things were simple enough that anyone could build a novel web technology over a weekend (with full HTML 2.0 parsing). (Before I get accused of over-engineering, I usually don't have these types of modular abstractions; if I don't expect to ever swap databases, I'll e.g. code to PostgreSQL directly
- shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  I see the problem if the monoculture is dominated by for profit big tech corpos
- squidbeak 4y ago
  You've forgotten what it was like at the turn of the century. It took a long while for us to break the previous monoculture and clear the way for the innovation we've enjoyed since.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    The innovation we've enjoyed since was mostly caused by Google getting tired of waiting for either Microsoft or Mozilla to improve on the browser paradigm and footing the bill to roll their own.
    - hedora 4y ago
      History doesn't really linenup with that: Web 2.0 was based on some IE extensions that were introduced when Firefox was the viable other game in town. Concretely, Google Maps (the poster child for AJAX) launched in 2005, and Chrome launched in 2008.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        I was referring to the innovations in browser capabilities. Process sandboxing massively improved both the robustness of the browser experience and the boldness with which features could be used (because a crashing site wouldn't take the whole browser with it). It paved the way for the actual "browser is the OS for the web" experience we have today, unlike IE's attempt to wed a crash-prone application to its core OS functionality. As a result, the browser capability specs themselves exploded, which eventually rendered Flash, Silverlight, and ActiveX plugins mostly redundant and allowed browser vendors to make their way towards stripping them out in favor of web-engine-only solutions.
- gaius_baltar 4y ago
  > I don't see any problems with a monoculture of rendering engine. Remember IE6 ? That's what we get with a monoculture.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Forget the monopoly part, the reference to IE6, all that stuff. Let's say we don't care about that. What happens when the Chrome rendering engine has a security bug, a big one, a zero-day? That's the issue we had with OpenSSL, suddenly 90% of the Internet er vulnerable and there are no alternatives until Google fixes the bug. Given the complexity and feature set of a modern rendering engine I don't think it's to fare fetched. I like the entire Internet not being vulnerable all at once.
- ajvs 4y ago
  I'm not sure how anyone can believe this after seeing Android. Google's modus operandi is to make the open core less and less functional over time after everyone has migrated to it, and then put the useful stuff into their proprietary version (Google Pixel, Google Chrome).
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  So why not just get rid of all browsers and have only Microsoft Edge then? Because that is the problem you end up with a bunch of proprietary features that only whoever maintains the main browser rendering engine has and everyone on Linux and probably Mac has to suffer for it.
oxff 4y ago
Can't do that when Firefox simply isn't good enough. Vivaldi beats it in features and what I need from browser as a power-user.
zmxz 4y ago
I'd love to, but it's simply unusable compared to Chrome when it comes to web development.
- depressedpanda 4y ago
  How so? I use Firefox for web dev, and I don't find it unusable compared to Chrome.
- markussss 4y ago
  I have not found any shortcomings in Firefox for web development, so I'm wondering if you could you elaborate on what features are missing, or what killer features for web development Chrome has that Firefox doesn't?
  - jakear 4y ago
    The entire local file system api, for one: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_Access_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... , which severely neuters any tooling designed to help you do real work on your own files.
    - ajvs 4y ago
      Also a massive vulnerability surface letting arbitrary websites write whatever they want to your disk.
      - jakear 4y ago
        Definitely not. You have to explicitly select a directory from a native file system UI then confirm both read and write access for each directory, across each domain, typically each session. And system directories are blocked outright with no way to override. This attitude is why people dismiss Firefox: “well if FF doesn’t implement it, it must be bad. Other browsers surely have glaring security holes” (Source: I implemented the file system integration for vscode.dev)
  - 4y ago
rpastuszak 4y ago
At this stage, I think we can draw a line between WebKit and Blink, so even having more WebKit based browsers would be a welcome change. I'd still prefer to see a mainstream Gecko based browser, of course! I think outside of the tech crowd FF is pretty niche.
Forgeties79 4y ago
What are your thoughts on brave browser? I’ve used it over firefox for about two years now and I really enjoy it.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Brave is just chrome underneath so you’re definitely not helping to browser diversity.
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Appreciate it!

LinAGKar 4y ago

That's not really usable until they fix the issue where it wipes the tabs history.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]