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Comment by nacs

9 months ago

As a Firefox user, this exactly.

The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on.

I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

26 comments

nacs

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HeckFeck  9 months ago

> I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.

  • cassepipe  9 months ago

    True, it's very handy... but can't Chrome do it with a Google account ? (I really don't know)

    To me the really seeling point of firefox is being able to switch off search suggestions. Now the bar only searches opened Tabs, history, bookmarks and I can tab into them quickly. If nothing turns up, pressing Enter will still launch a search. Being able to do casual navigation without having to go through a search engine is a killer feature (and it's better for the planet).

    Not only tab but you can search directly into opened Tabs/history/bookmarks with the right %/^/* symbols !

    EDIT : Almost forgot, it only really shines with that extension that prevent searches to turn up in your history --> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...

  • metasaval  9 months ago

    FYI, you can use a desktop fork and mobile Firefox with Firefox sync.

    source: I do that with floorp and Firefox for android.

    • MrAlex94  9 months ago

      Not to hang around like a bad smell every time they come up, but just think it’s worth noting they are not open source anymore, instead being “source available”. Really gives me the old school “greenwashing” vibes Microsoft used to do with their Shared Source licenses. Poor showing considering they used others work to get to where they are, then shut the door when others started doing the same.

      I would say feel free to give Waterfox a try - I’ve tried to strike the balance of useable web and privacy, with the added enhancement of Oblivious DNS enabled by default.

      1 reply →

  • CRConrad  9 months ago

    > I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices.

    I would love to use that functionality, but... How?!? Once you have a gazillion tabs open on your phone, the “Open tabs from other devices” (or whatever it's called) menu item on the desktop just shows an endlessly spinning spinner. :-( So maybe via bookmarks... But where's the “Bookmark all open tabs” menu item in FF for Android???

    Anyone got any tips?

skeaker  9 months ago

This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is the recommended extensions but that's tucked at the bottom of a page nobody uses anyways (everyone just googles the extension they want and grabs it from the web), but even that takes like 15 seconds once you know what setting it is in about:config. I actually don't even disable the two telemetry checkboxes because they're transparent about the data they take and what they do with it, so I'm happy to share it. You can easily do all of this in one or two minutes and it won't roll itself back.

With Windows you would be lucky to even have a supported method to disable their telemetry, and if you do get one it will probably be through an obscure series of registry edits that will ultimately get rolled back during a system update.

  • Aurornis  9 months ago

    > This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is

    It’s wild to me that this is being presented as if it’s not a big deal.

    Shows how far the goalposts have moved in this conversation.

    • shiroiushi  9 months ago

      How big a deal it is depends on what you're comparing to. Yeah, at first, when I read his post, I was wondering if it was a joke or something, with so many checkboxes in different places. Then I got to the point about Windows and realized he's right: compared to Windows, all those steps in Firefox actually aren't that bad, and actually stay unchecked unlike Windows which happily changes things back.

      3 replies →

    • skeaker  9 months ago

      It's not a big deal. They're easy to disable and easier to just ignore. It just doesn't matter in the way that you want me to panic over.

  • eviks  9 months ago

    "by just searching "studies" isn't "just", to have to remember the option names and be certain you remember them all (and not miss the newly added ones), it's not that trivial of a hurdle

  • adastra22  9 months ago

    I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not.

    • skeaker  9 months ago

      It isn't. I can without any sarcasm disable all of that in about a minute or two, and for the most part see no reason to do so in the first place (the worst bit is probably sponsored links on new tabs but that's also the easiest to remove). Acting like this invalidates the existence of the whole browser is what makes no sense to me.

      Also Windows configuration is terrible.

      5 replies →

worble  9 months ago

I don't use it myself, but Librewolf is a pretty popular fork that attempts to be private out of the box and is usually updated pretty quickly.