Comment by tacker2000
3 years ago
Im sorry but if you are using Chrome as a “pro” nowadays, its your own fault. There are countless alternatives available, starting from Firefox, to Brave, to some exotic browsers, and if you must use Chrome, then there is a de-Googled one called Chromium.
Its clear that Google is milking every single one of its users using their browser, since they have access to your computers.
Probably this is the “vector” they use to gather the most info about users, apart from Android maybe.
> there is a de-Googled one called Chromium
There's Chromium and there's Ungoogled Chromium[1]. If you're looking for (some) independence from Google, you want the latter. Or just avoid it altogether and use other browsers.
I wouldn't recommend Blink-based browsers (Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc.) You're still indirectly giving Google power over the web by using their engine.
[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
IMO the browser is far too important to use third-party builds containing patches that don't receive serious audit.
For example, the Chromium packages provided by the vast majority of Linux distros disable security features like CFI (check your favorite distro's x86_64 Chromium package build log and look for the "is_cfi" argument). I think Arch is the only exception.
ungoogled-chromium has similar problems https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/
If you are going to use a Blink-based browser, I would recommend just using the official Google release, or maybe Edge or Brave if you trust the organizations behind them. Otherwise, just switch to Firefox. It has its own problems, like being overall less hardened than Chromium, but it's far less user-hostile. And regarding security, for browsing untrusted sites, I think you should always virtualize the browser since they're all routinely exploited anyway.
> Linux distros disable security features like CFI
Why would they even do that?
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Just want to pour one out to my fellow corporate drones on locked down work laptops, who can usually choose between a pre-installed and managed installation of Chrome (a rock) and/or Edge (a hard place).