I suppose I should probably kick off the discussion with a question. What do you think is the most privacy respecting web browser that still maintains the vales of the FOSS movement?
@derek I'll try to hold the fort 😅
@lorendias @derek @Zaedus Heard about dissenter, havent tried since its been mixed reviews.
I think 'Dissenter browser' was just a result of Mozilla banning the Dissenter plugin from their expansion/plugin repos.
@lorendias @derek @Zaedus
Don't recommend it. Not a fan of the nazi folks that run Gab.
@lorendias @derek @Zaedus I've never heard of that one. Will have to check it out!
@yngvarskjaldulfsson
@derek @Zaedus
Which code is not open source?
@yngvarskjaldulfsson @derek @Zaedus isn't some of the code of firefox proprietary as well?
@chriscochrun @derek @Zaedus really? Oh shit oh no 😳
@Zaedus the tor browser.
@Zaedus Tbh, Brave is not that bad, they have had some hiccups, but even so, they werent really privacy related afaik, a bit sketchy maybe, but all opt in right now
Brave fits my purposes well. I use the Brave Nightly to sink with other devices.
@Zaedus I really recommend Librewolf if you like firefox. Ungoogled Chromium is the best chromium based option if you take the time to setup. Brave works well out-of-the-box
@Zaedus wget
@Zaedus I'm honestly torn, because while I still like Firefox, that Mozilla blog post was an absolute disaster that ruined what little audience Firefox had. IceCat would be the "purest" FOSS browser for me.
@Zaedus ~1 year ago. I mentioned Brave on some certain 4kanal website (which i don't frequent btw..) .. And was told basically "Dude, why don't you just use Firefox with plugins..LOLMAO normie!!"
... I guess i leveled up from 'normie' recently 🤣
@Zaedus GNU Icecat
@warfist1984 @Zaedus Only been trying it for a while. The default settings are very aggressive in a free, libre way, but with some tweaking could be a decent daily driver
@Zaedus MIDORI it's a good browser, light, secure and is open source you can check that out
@Zaedus Currently using Waterfox & Brave on my main machine. Chromium & Brave on my laptop. Can no longer use or recommend Firefox unfortunately.
@Zaedus icecat in my oppinion then ungoogled chromium then brave
@Zaedus Hardened Firefox (and its forks, specially Librewolf). There's no reason to use any other browser without making concessions. It's open source, regularly updated thus making it private and secure.
I don't really care if they support a free internet or not as long as we can use the browser as the free tool that it is. Once this is not possible, we shall look for alternatives.
@Zaedus Brave or Chromium
@Zaedus Lynx
@Zaedus un-google chromium or Brave.
@Zaedus qutebrowser, surf, brave, icecat and ungoogled chromium 🤔
@Zaedus GNOME Web?
@Zaedus a privacy respecting tool is a tool one crafts by hir self.
@Zaedus Lynx. The internet is amazingly fast in text.
@Zaedus Tor browser? Probably overkill on the privacy part for most people though lol.
@Zaedus I don't think there is a "best" solution, just a "least worst" one. With that said, I am currently using Brave with all of the crypto stuff deactivated.
@Zaedus I've been on Waterfox, a no telemetry fork of firefox
@MickK Yeah I've tried it but fear that rumor of "firefox forks are not very safe cuz security updates takes up to 2 weeks to arrive to waterfox"
@yngvarskjaldulfsson oh, well then. Maybe this will just be a temp solution!
@Zaedus Nyxt browser! It is criminally underrated! If you are so inclined, check it out at https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/.
@Zaedus It is not even close, IMO. It's Tor Browser: https://www.torproject.org/download/
Some but not all of their anti-fingerprinting has made it to firefox. Also, they have done some amazing work on reproducible builds.
Even if you turned off the tor integration, their aggressive privacy protections are significantly stronger than just, say, taking chromium and removing the calls to google services.
@Zaedus It's GNU Icecat for me as I still think the chromium based browsers lack several functionalities that I can't surf the web without them.
@Zaedus I'm using one called Dissenter Browser - it's based on Brave/Chromium and has Gab comment built in ???
@Zaedus gnu icecat
@Zaedus I love FOSS and I use it on my day to day basis. But I think there are not a single FOSS browser which is as performant as firefox. I looking for a alternative to firefox and I am not getting any sucess, 😃
@Zaedus I use firefox, but I disabled some of the spooky stuff using ffprofile.com
@Zaedus I had to switch back to Firefox from qutebrowser due to being required to use Voicethread.com for school.. but if I understand correctly, qutebrowser is built on chromium... so... for full functionality (working with webapps requiring mic and camera) I don't really see any alternative to firefox... but I would love to see something like qutebrowser without any google code. I guess surf is kinda like that?? I think the only barrier is all the webapps that don't respect privacy either...
@Zaedus Surf?
@Zaedus if you use a chromium/blink based browser (such as brave) you're assisting google in their effort to control (well, maintain control at this point) the development of web technologies. Do you really want to grant a company that lives off of tracking users the power to decide what goes in the *user* agent?
@kenny @Zaedus I use firefox with https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js, not that there's much choice anyway. I'd rather stay away from ff forks, they tend to lag behind in features and bug fixes (which is especially annoying considering web is an high-pace moving target). You could also look for a WebKit-based browser, however I have no experience with that.
@Zaedus Dissenter
@Zaedus yeah i would very much like to know which one is that, for now I am using brave btw....will look for answers from experts as they come in..
@Zaedus Brave. (Runs away before the haters arrive!) 😎