Remember that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (or, "Don't attack your teammates")

At least it looks that privacy essentials add-on has some useful protection mechanisms. There is the kuketz blog, it has a series of articles regarding Firefox with suggestions for using the right add-ons. The Librefox github site has good tips too.

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I agree with @madbilly. I like Mozilla Firefox.
/e/ may just discuss the question with Mozilla for invert the config: delivery Firefox with telemetry switched off , asking users to revert it by convince them with good reasoning. And, after all, the configuration of the app installation is open and may be changed :wink:

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Yes it’s a pity telemetry is enabled by default, let the end-user to choose on first start.
but to say “nightmare” :shushing_face:

Anyhow, Mozilla did a huge job for privacy online, that’s a great, modern et efficient software.
It just needs some tweaks regarding your expectations (to disable GLS, Google Safe Browsing, Telemetry, and so on.)

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I guess one could use IceCat which is more secure out of the box than its Firefox brethren. Took long enough but it finally got updated.

For anyone looking to understand these types of disagreement more, this seems like a clash of deontological ethics versus ethical pragmatism.

My two cents on the matter are: It seems to me like Google wants to fundamentally (and imo negatively) change the internet, and Chrome is one of it’s most useful tools for doing this. Firefox is the best realistic alternative to prevent that change from happening right now, so I use Firefox [while also advocating for an anticapitalist revolution, of course].

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i’ve been looking into the browsers recently, there are a lot of quite good alternatives. Most of them are described here:

but another good one is the Epic browser.
I too like Firefox, so i’m gonna go for the combo of Waterfox on my windows laptop and Icecat on my /e/ samsung phone.

There is also a Waterfox for Android, quite old and difficult to find.
Working fine on my Oreo /e/ :grinning:

Unfortunately a closer analysis reveals that Waterfox is spyware.

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/waterfox.html

I would not use it in any case.

Since this article is 4 years old, I wonder if there is any new information about Waterfox.
I say this because I’ve been using it for a couple of days now and didn’t notice those pratices pointed by the article.
We’ll I’m gonna dig deeper and let you know.
Thanks for sharing @kalman

Could install it in Debian 8 “Jessie” and used it there some years ago. From Debian 9 “Stretch” on it cannot be installed anymore, and now running the current stable Debian 10 “Buster” it seems it doesn’t exist at all anymore, not even for old-old-stable Jessie.
I am sure it was in the Debian packages list around 2014. Now it is still available as a tarball in Linux
https://www.waterfox.net/download/ Nice when you like an old-fashion computer and when you run an older OS it will work.

This is some interesting news…
https://www.ghacks.net/2020/02/14/waterfox-web-browser-sold-to-system1/

Waterfox official blog post about it
https://www.waterfox.net/blog/waterfox-has-joined-system1/

Well Epic browser is chromium based, as are many others on that list, so that still supports Google’s sneaky attempts to do the same as Microsoft tried to do with IE all those years ago.

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Interesting. I have been told to stop using startpage search as the company was sold to system1. Now Waterfox has been sold to the same company.

that is interesting. What are your views - is it necessarily a bad thing if initiatives like these fall in the hands of larger corporates? I think that it is possible for for-profit organizations to also have good policies, e.g. Qwant in the searching it provides, Magic earth (the maps app), etc. I’m not saying it happens often, i’m just saying it’s possible:). i don’t really know a lot about System1 - the initiator of Waterfox seems pretty positive about them in his blog!

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Waterfox has never been good enough for me (see analysis above) and now having a pay per click ad company as a background does not help much either. I hope projects like the Otter Browser will get more attention in the future.

Getting financing from a larger entity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A pay-per-click advertising agency jumping onto the privacy bandwagon is concerning. It’s already difficult to tell which ‘privacy-focused’ providers are genuine and which are vultures in disguise. As tech giants are laying their dirty hands on everything they can, my private conspiracy theory is that there’s a much bigger player behind System1.

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my2cent: After the nice discussion over many browser alternatives I’m confirmed in Firefox (an eventually derived Tor) for any installation. I believe that a community like /e/ may rise consistent usage and support to Firefox as a permanent and stable alternative contra-G. The configuration issue discussed here is a minor and solvable one.

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