Some thoughts on Privacy
Particularly Microsoft always had a rather sinister agenda and only recently that realization really sunk in. It is best to avoid everything from them whatsoever.
One product from Microsoft that I will continue using however is the Xbox series of consoles, at least when I can get them on a steep sale. I don't consider this to be intrusive, since it's essentially a sandbox in itself for Microsoft services and I use it only to play games - mostly legacy titles from Xbox 360, because of the great backwards compatibility.
But I do have to get away from Google more this year, even though it is a daunting prospect. I use my Google account mostly for YouTube these days, but I did use it for other services and I know they will only get (officially) rid of the data if I delete the entire account. While I do now of the alternatives, like FreeTube and NewPipe, I'd still like to create a new dedicated Google account later on for YouTube, if not just to be able to interact with content creators and participate in discussions here and there.
I'm well aware of how to harden my browser privacy and I'm currently looking into LibreWolf, I'm just not quite sure yet if it is indeed intended for daily use.
#Privacy #Microsoft #Google
Some thoughts on Privacy
@okabe_rintarou LibreWolf is basically just a de-spywared Firefox. It apparently has automatic user-agent spoofing which is nice, but you're still dependent on Mozilla's Gecko browser engine and I don't know if the LibreWolf team would be able to fork it if Mozilla adds spyware and/or other anti-features in the engine itself.
re: Some thoughts on Privacy
@okabe_rintarou
>I heard about a very interesting and promising new browser project, surf, but it's years away to be used as a daily driver
Surf uses web-kit which is what Apple uses for Safari. It's also designed to be ultra-minimalist (as with all of the other programs by suckless), so don't expect things like add-ons, bookmarks, or even tabbed browsing. The suckless guys are even more autistic than the free software zealots.
>And secondly, there's not really an alternative right now.
PaleMoon has their own engine, Goanna which is a fork of Gecko before Firefox went Quantum, but I wouldn't trust PaleMoon for much longer as their lead developer has been blocking add-ons for moral reasons (he thinks that blocking ads, using anonymizers like Tor, or changing user agents "breaks the web").
re: Some thoughts on Privacy
The developer is very eccentric and it's sometimes hard to understand his decisions. For example, there's no multi-core support, despite some people offering their help in the past to get that, and it runs everything in one process. As a result, it doesn't perform well after some time and becomes unstable during long sessions with many tabs open.
Then there's the fact that I feel it's outdated in regards to privacy.
And lastly, existing add-ons are deprecating and/or new ones not coming out for it. Last month, when I happened to update Pale Moon and look at it again, there was even some bizarre drama. A user who maintains forks for, I believe, uBlock Origin and uMatrix, did something that made the developer of Pale Moon disable them completely. If you're curious, here's the thread: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=26204
#PaleMoon #Browsers
re: Some thoughts on Privacy
I don't worry too much about this right now. For one, I'm confident they will be able to remove such elements. And secondly, there's not really an alternative right now. I heard about a very interesting and promising new browser project, surf, but it's years away to be used as a daily driver: https://surf.suckless.org/
What I was mainly referring to in my original status with "I'm just not quite sure yet if it is indeed intended for daily use" in regards to LibreWolf is that after I imported my Firefox profiles from Windows (they worked flawlessly btw.), LibreWolf overwrote my profile setting for "Delete cookies and site data when Firefox is closed" and activated it. When I started it the next day, all my data was gone. I haven't tested it further yet.
#Browsers #LibreWolf #Firefox