Waterfox Browser

Pilawt said:
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2019/...ome-surveillance-software-its-time-to-switch/

Saw that this morning. Downloaded, installed and switched to Waterfox.

Thanks for the tip.
Click to expand...

You're welcome.

I use Google Chrome only to visit YouTube for one particular client for whom I edit and upload a lot of videos. I figure it's a good way to throw them off. They probably think I'm in the business my client is in. It's disinformation.

On my first Android phone, when I opened the Google account, I represented myself as a 7-year-old girl named Leticia Snipe. That way Google couldn't snoop on her / me because of COPPA restrictions. Then as soon as Leticia turned 13, I closed the account.

Waterfox is still my favorite browser, but I have to say that Edge is a lot better than it was a few months ago. I read somewhere that they were completely rebuilding it on the Chromium codebase, which is basically the open-source version of Chrome.

Rich
 
Pilawt said:
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2019/...ome-surveillance-software-its-time-to-switch/

Saw that this morning. Downloaded, installed and switched to Waterfox.

Thanks for the tip.
Click to expand...
Yep, that article ran in the Washington comPost this week. Still not quite sure exactly what they ran for tests - every site downloads cookies, private mode erases them (which is why WaPo itself blocks people using private mode). But there is no question that Google, both Chrome and Android, are surveillance machines. It's gotten worse of late. And the war about tracking and ads is on.

Regardless of browser, you need to be running both a mode that erases cookies (private or private containers), one that screws up browser fingerprinting, and at least one ad blocker. And even that may not be good enough as some stuff gets by the ad blockers.
 
Anymouse said:
It's a company with a poor IT department that forces you to use a particular browser. Makes me wonder where else they're being lazy.
Click to expand...

There are some 3M + different user-agent strings passed by browsers. Granted most of these are just variations that most sites dont necessarily care about (e.g. running Firefox 67 on Windows 7 vs Windows 10) but there are other variations with significant that sites do care about such as screen resolution, touch capabilities, mobile vs desktop platforms, etc.

Often times too the implementation of these user-agent strings is flawed and doesn't actually represent the browser (see: History of the Browser User Agent String ) but rather the browser the mainstream browser/development kit that it is supposed to emulate/improve. Of course this creates its own issues when the new browser doesn't render sites the same way the old browser does.

While I've certainly had my own issues with Chase site at times, blaming it on the IT department/developers of the website for their incompatability is misplacing blame on the website owner when it is often times more on the browser developer.
 
I've got to give it a try. FF user for an very long time and it is getting more and more bloated. 2 Years ago built my "new" computer and loaded Linux Ubuntu right off the bat. A bit of a learning curve, but I will say my CLI ability has improved greatly. I'm also a big fan of OO and I will send an ods / odt files as an attachments to a MS user with a link to OO download.
 
It is getting to the point where the sites demand that you give the full access or you will not be able to use them.
I used Flightradar24 for many years and recently I was getting ads in Russian and all kinds of cookies. I finally stopped giving them access and stopped using it. That is also true with some acft sale sites, you will not be able to see the pics, just the text, unless you give them full access.
If you look closely you see that many sites will direct your IP to Google sites before you can log in, it just seems that there is no way to protect your privacy / yourself on the Inet anymore, unless you want to stop using it.
What I do is just use a tablet without any real personal data on it, to use the Inet for certain sites.
 
I just switched back to Waterfox, and added a few plugins to block tracking and ads. I’m on my phone or I’d lost the names. Privacy Badger was one. Anyway... so far I’m very pleased with it. Zero site issues, almost all (or maybe even all) ads just disappeared.
 
I've been using SeaMonkey/Iceweasel/Tor since they were first released. I guess Waterfox is a Windows-only 64-bit version of the same codebase.

If I stopped using a browser because I didn't like their psycho management team, I don't think there would be many choices left...
 
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