I can imagine that the case where one engine saves you but the other could not is infinitely small. My unprofessional and uneducated take is use what’s best for you, keep things up to date, and be careful what you click. Hope it was a good unexpected busy and not a bad unexpected busy.

No I mean things like sponsored by pocket and sponsored search results.

Firefox has ads by pocket on your homescreen and sponsored search results to name the two that come to my mind.

Brave did the affiliate link injection in 2020, but reversed and apologized shortly after. Similar to Mozilla’s Mr robot thing, it seems to be a one off fuck up that they reversed and apologised for.

Mozilla has made donations to the Mack group who have expressed hatred towards people who are white. It’s certainly less dangerous for a minority to spread hateful rhetoric to a majority, but rasicm is still racism, which is bad.

As sad as it is, the Brave and Mozilla issues are unfortunately nearly 1:1

• Both have ads baked in. Brave turns them off by default but tries to get you to turn them on and gives you fractions of a cent in crypto if you do. Mozilla has them on by default.
• Both try to upsell you on services
• Both have bundled things in their browser. Brave it was their VPN and affiliate link scandal. Mozilla was plugins like the Mr Robot plugin and changing people’s search engines to Bing without their consent when negotiating with Google.
• Both have made fringe political donations

So now it comes down do you want Chromium to support Google’s monopoly while having better performance, compatibility, and privacy defaults. Or do you want to buck their monopoly but have more tracking (unless LibreWolf), PPA, and worse performance/compatibility.

Most are just picking what they consider the less bad for their use case.

I’m sure they are the ones who will save us from those evil corps who want our data.

Nobody’s going to save us unfortunately. Unless maybe Servo or Ladybird become a thing.

Depends on your price point, but the 8a might be a good middle ground. It’s got the 8 year update support and is second to newest so it’s a tad cheaper.

I don’t know if you can or not, although I can confirm you can use Google Maps in a web browser if you grant the google maps website location access, and it’s pretty one to one with the app I believe. It does require you burn through mobile data if you don’t have unlimited since you can’t download offline maps, but the web version has gotten me out of a jam when open source map apps fail and if you don’t worry about data it might be worth trying.

If you are looking for a generic phone with good privacy and usability I would highly recommend a Pixel with Graphene OS. If you’ve never flashed a phone before, you can install Graphene within a web browser and never need to do any of the more complicated flashing stuff like most other setups require. It also allows you to optionally install Sandboxed Google Play Services (on the main profile or isolated on a second one), letting you access normal apps while still having some of the privacy and performance benefits of an otherwise de-Googled phone.

Been seeing that a fair bit too lately. Freetube, Grayjay, and Newpipe seem so sometimes get around it, even if the error is in the browser the video will sometimes load in those apps from the same IP. If you get lucky and find a working invidious/piped instance that might work too.

Otherwise, turning on a VPN and switching between servers will usually eventually lead to a working one. That, and if you’re up for it, check to see if your favorite creators are on places like Peertube, Odysee, or Rumble that don’t block IPs like YouTube does.

I think the ublock origin lite thing was a legitimate mistake, though I understand Mozilla’s depleting benefit of the doubt.

I believe that Google services collect a lot more data. You can also turn off telemetry in windows by disabling the service and such, so I’d probably say the big G is less private then Microsoft. Microsoft also has a slightly less tracking business model.