You don’t have to. Thousand of people who know what they’re doing does. But why would I trust any of them? I’m pointing out you have to choose who you trust, and from the history with the makers of Vivaldi, I trust them. Same as I don’t trust Google given their history.
Of course, I’m screwed anyway because there’s not reasonable competition in the phone space, and I have to use Microsoft products for work, and… {insert a dozen more things here}. Given all that, I’d like the browser that works better for me.
Although you could take into account what the makers are telling you. You have to trust someone, and at least to my knowledge, Google fails and it’s all over the news, Vivaldi has not. It’s not like I can validate the Firefox source either, I’m just trusting the website I download it from, or more likely my distro packaging. And people do look at call outs browsers make etc.
My problem is - last time I looked, which was a while ago to be fair - there weren’t good tab management plugins that also supported tab title search, a list of tabs to easily close ones I didn’t need anymore with ctrl+click or shift+click, no session management, problems with cross window tab viewing/searching, no tab stacks, and now workspaces are kind of awesome for me too.
I’m not saying there aren’t extensions for each thing, I’m saying I could NOT get them all to work together, and have a fast performant browser without weird hangs, and the UI was kind of all over the place and hard to remember cause none of the extensions were designed to work together from what I could tell.
What I don’t get is why Vivaldi didn’t code on top of Firefox, but I think it’s because there are sites that work in chromium and don’t in Firefox, and fail silently - and just like in IE6 days, they’re sites like my parents retirement site, they can’t NOT use them.
Mostly because the browsing experience IMO is much much worse with Firefox. I tried extensions to get functionality back, it made it worse - slower, buggy, extensions would stop being developed etc. I wish Firefox was better, I really do. But IME it’s frozen functionality like it’s 2010 or so. Like, they have tabs, who hoo. I really find save/restore, multi window control, tab stacks, sessions, workspaces, and easy UI config pretty important in day to day use. That said, I also think ads are a deal breaker, but I really wonder if this won’t bring back some of the ad-blocking proxies you run locally or something.
Or, someone forks chromium to keep Manifest v2 or whatever.
Not so much chrome, but many browsers (like my favorite Vivaldi) are chromium based. I wish they’d just keep uBlock going in the chromium rebuilds, but IDK if that’s possible. Seems like it should be to me though.
Also, we switched at work from Firefox because somehow they broke system level updates a few years ago, and nothing I could do was able to figure out why their installer stopped working without first having someone run the uninstall graphically to update to the new version. It would just say Firefox wasn’t a valid windows exe till I manually removed it. And even the Mozilla Enterprise list seemed flummoxed. Honestly, I think they should have reverted the installer change, or even just use a standard installer that doesn’t have this problem, but hey.
I feel like this is similar to being a non drinker, or atheist, or not into clubs, or not into drugs, etc. You will sort of limit your social circle because of what you’re not interested in doing. Privacy is the same. The question is - do you want to make new friends who are into those things? If so, then your have to moderate your views and be part of that scene.
I feel like this is similar to being a non drinker, or atheist, or not into clubs, or not into drugs, etc. You will sort of limit your social circle because of what you’re not interested in doing. Privacy is the same. The question is - do you want to make new friends who are into those things? If so, then your have to moderate your views and be part of that scene.
You’re going to need to specify what Windows and what distro at least. But I would argue that most people’s idea of computer security would include privacy. Not that they get it, but if you asked someone if they feel Facebook posts are secure because others can’t edit them, I think you would get some head scratches and people saying they are available to the world.
I use Fastmail - not too expensive, really good webmail client, has working shared calendar that isn’t OWA, and isn’t advertising scraping my e-mail. I would have liked a more private service, but back when I moved from self hosted to a service, that was about the best I could get that also had calendaring.
Huh, that’s my complaint with the latest AdGuard - now it seems to just… go away… on my phone pretty frequently. The older version didn’t ever stop unless I stopped it. I paid for a lifetime on my current phone, but when I get a new one I’ll be checking out the free options before paying yearly for AdGuard.
Sure, but I’ll say that FLOSS distros and builds have a much better privacy trust record than the alternatives - though I also have to say that at least I haven’t seen the news articles about Apple or Microsoft that you do about Google, Facebook et al. Some of this is literally around business models - Microsoft and Apple aren’t ad-tech companies really. They have obvious revenue streams that do not need to invade your privacy, and may actually hurt their business if they do. Not that I trust big corps to actually make sound business decisions though, and any cloud stuff is right out the window WRT privacy from governments.
I’m also left personally in a really weird situation - I don’t especially like or trust Google, but I use Android. There are several competing interests here - While Google may spy on me, Android (so far anyway) does allow FDroid and third party apps like AdGuard much easier than iPhone from what I understand. So at least for quite a while I was trading OS level telemetry vs every app and website telemetry. I think Apple might be better now, but I still think you have to jailbreak to install non App Store apps. In the third party apps are things like Syncthing, which lets me basically back up and sync my phone contents without touching any cloud at all.
The other benefit of Android is just the huge variety of vendors and phones available - I can get a brand new Android phone that’s “good enough” for $300, and my current one has lasted over 4 years (but at the cost of security updates, so YMMV). I’d love to get a phone I had root on, but most of those cost a stupid amount (to me) and also seem like the fun I had with the Pyra - they’re “in development” for 5 years with no real sign anything is actually going to come out, and then when one does it’s 5 years old tech.
It’s also not particularly useful to have Android without the play store. I tried that once a long time ago with a chinese tablet. You couldn’t install apps really. Like, yes, I can get FDroid - but how do I get my online bank’s app? - kind of needed to deposit checks, and they no longer have the scanner from a computer option. How do I get ParkMobile - now used instead of putting coins in the meter? Most shopping apps? Yes, you can make your smartphone de-googled, and about as useful as a feature phone from 2010, but then why bother - just get the cheapest flipphone I guess.
I don’t have answers - most companies don’t want to make privacy respecting tech, so unless you can realistically live your life mostly outside of current society - you’re sort of screwed.
I don’t know if the US is that far ahead here - we have the regular credit score which is used for all sorts of stuff it really ought’t be. And it’s proprietary, so honestly who knows what goes into it. We just get hidden companies rather than the government - and often the government hides behind the companies so they don’t have to do pesky things like get a warrant. I’m not sure which is better.
It’s more that I got scammed once buying a car at the side of the road not realizeing it was fly by night, so now I won’t buy cars except from established dealers. Idk I saw the part where they said buy some new crypto coin, and then the bit where it works because someone is buying this coin so they can pay some people running the search. YMMV, I just pass on anything that talks about crypto at this point.
Well, because I tend to find crypto full of scams, and I think search engine that both blasts crypto in your face and is apparently based on it is likely to be built on a shaky foundation. I think decentralized search is likely to be slower, and very slow if based on waiting for crypto processing to happen.
To me, this is like walking up to a car wash that’s proudly saying “run by Madoff”. It doesn’t matter how good the car wash itself is, I am concerned about it’s long term viability and judgement vs getting funding from almost any other source.
Distributed is also very likely less private because you have to send the data to multiple places, or you have the issue of waiting for consistency across front ends. If it doesn’t have multiple servers, then it’s the backend that has to be distributed right?
Look, it might be a fine search, but if you doubt Kagi for needing an account, I would doubt this for the crypto association.
I’ve been using it for a while, and I think as @ProfessorYakkington said, it depends on what you’re using it for. I use it for work, and have work pay for it. In this case, I don’t need absolute privacy, I need a contractual data guarantee, and their public TOS is (more than) sufficient for what I need for basic search.
It’s hard to imagine a functional business relationship in most realms where the company you’re doing business with has 0 knowledge of who you are, especially on the Internet. To provide search results kind of requires “knowing”, at least for a second, what you’re searching for. I think Kagi has a more private model for tailoring the results than traditional search. Instead of hidden filter bubbles, Kagi has transparent “lenses” you can choose to apply or not. The most useful one to me is the “forums” one, which refocuses on actual forums for results, like technet, askubuntu etc…
Not having to fight off ads, and having a pretty obvious method for them to make money(i.e. you pay them for service) is all to the good IMHO. The results seem to be on par with StartPage, with one difference. The forums lens is better at finding “real answers” for tech questions than StartPage which often finds the same “SPAM” results Google does. This is unsurprising as StartPage is anonymized Google. This may or may not be a good thing. If you’re OK with ads or ad-blocking(you should be) - why pay for Kagi when you can use StartPage for free? The main reasons are to support a different search model, to get the lenses -especially forum focused, and for their GPT like results with citations.
I looked at both, and went with fastmail because at the time it had a shared calendar you could use, which I do with my family to track events and do scheduling. Fastmail is standard commercial privacy though. Good enough for me, but no where near Proton Mail from what I understand.