Browser

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Browser

I just want to let people know of an experience I am currently having.

I am, or have been, a consistent user of Google's Chrome browser for years. Sometimes it has gone ape with all the surveillance, ads, and so on, so I would reinstall Firefox and bump and grind along with that as my default browser until Firefox got too clunky to use. Then i would go back to Chrome, which usually had fixed the really bad problems during that time. I once did a stretch like that with Opera, too.

But now I am using Brave and I am totally delighted. Also, rather than default to Google search, I am now using DuckDuckGo--but only as default. I still open Google search sometimes. I love how DuckDuckGo gives me the search terms I ask for instead of what it thinks I want like Google does. It's still got some growing to do, but after I started using it as my default search engine, I noticed that it serves about 90% or more of my search needs--without the aggravation I get from Google. Also, DuckDuckGo does not track my searches.

The reason I made this change is that Google made a change--a big one. Now, even if I sign out of Google (and this applies to everyone), it will automatically sign me back in if I use Chrome and it will continue tracking me despite my wishes. If I sign out of Google on Brave, I get signed out for real (I presume). If I discover this is not the case, I will uninstall Chrome.

I am going to go deeper into the why's of my change later. but just this last paragraph alone should be reason enough.

Brave represents a new philosophy based on protecting the individual rather than creating a collective it controls through a monster company that sucks up everyone's data and has gone way too far to the left for my comfort. I've learned a bit about some of the technology behind this new approach and I can attest it is substantive and technical, not just some marketing crap. It is a different animal for real

btw - The guy behind Brave, Brendan Eich, invented javascript, and did Mozilla and Netscape. He thought he was done with making miracles of coding and was fading out into the sunset in a sinecure at Mozilla. In 2014, he got the itch to be more active and was promoted to CEO of Mozilla. But then leftie activists went on the rampage against him (they wanted a leftie CEO). They railroaded him out of Mozilla with a bullshit campaign. Why? In 2008 he had donated one thousand dollars to Proposition 8 in California, which opposed gay marriage. This was normal in politics at that time, not like it would be today. The lefties howled for blood and in 2014, right after he got promoted, they got his scalp. 

And he got pissed. So he want back to the drawing board and is now helping to take down the entire structure that allowed nanny-state Internet giants to exist in the first place.

For example, he's including a new payment system in Brave based on blockchain, integrating it with the Tor browser so you can surf anonymously for real with different IP addresses if you want, and so on. And he's made all this drop-dead easy and extremely user friendly. There's this, too. Brave blocks ads and website trackers, and it's a whole lot faster than other browsers.

So for now, I recommend this change for everyone. The irony is that the Chromium code used for the Chrome browser was developed by Google and made open-source. That means anyone can use it and modify it for free. And that's exactly what Eich did with Brave.  

That also means I can use my Google Chrome extensions, which were easy to transfer once I learned how. And I have done so without one smidgen of guilt.  

Screw the lefties at Google...

Michael

[william.scherk]

I use Firefox, Chrome, Slimjet, Opera and Edge, and some little text-and-image-only thing as big as your thumb (under 1MB size), QTweb.

Firefox, Michael has a very cool text-to-speech extension called, well, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/text-2-speech-t2s/.  The thing that makes this one stand out is that it offers you a file to play or download, almost instantly (ie, a small file will be zipped out in moments). Here is an example of many that I am using as stocking-stuffers during my Election Night marathon live on Youtube.

Thanks for the neat information about this browser. I hadn't heard about it. I have mixed feelings about the finnicks of ad-space-replacement necessary to pay the bills in the revenue model going ahead.

I give Firefox one more kudo -- it integrates beautifully with the software I use to assemble the broadcast/recording stream. What this means is I can do away with a kludge or two that I used up till today. Yay, Firefox.