i wonder how many years (decades?) out this is still. it would be wild to be able to run something like that locally in a browser. although, it will probably be punishable by death by then.
this group is known for exposés with mixed outcomes. good luck fundraising for awareness through hot media, but it seems like we have a long way to fall before anything happens.
> (window size, font size, and many other factors that do not even require JS
Yeah, they require CSS, which you can also block using noscript and other tools, if you want.
Also, while you might be more "trackable" to those who fingerprint, if you are blocking those cross origin or same origin scripts from loading you are already stopping some of that. You can even blacklist some known hosts completely in your browser's policy settings and prevent those requests from ever reaching their destination.
It would be nice to see Firefox implement a few features browsers like brave have, like being able to automatically clear cookies for a site when leaving it, and to make containers available when in private browsing, ah well.
This is pretty handy and I've been using it for years[0].
I like the idea of Brave but we have a bigger fight that requires us to have no chromium. Chromium winning is Google winning, allowing them to control the Internet. I don't want that power in any single entity's hands. So I do ask that more people switch to Firefox or Safari as those are the best options to fight back and have decent market shares (even if small). If we lose the internet we'll lose our privacy too
The real power is in who owns the product. Since chromium is open source. A fork can be made at anytime. For the web there is a lot of common code that is useful to share between browsers.
Your take is quite naïve. The problem is that Google is controlling all the protocols. We're already in a situation where chrome, and consequently chromium, is "the most up to date browser" because Google has a heavy influence in dictating what those standards are. This is, of course, why people fork chromium in the first place, because it gives them a leg up not needing to build everything from scratch and allows them to pull in security updates and new protocols as Google releases them. But that last part is the problem.
So in a way you're right. But the owner is Google as long as you are forking chromium. Because they control to protocols. Maybe they don't own the roads, but does that matter if they get to dictate how all the roads get used and how all the maps are made? You don't need to own the roads to control them
>if they get to dictate how all the roads get used and how all the maps are made?
That power comes from the market share of Chrome, the product. It doesn't come from the market share of blink, the browser engine. If you want to challenge the power of Google you need an alternate product, and not an alternate browser engine. Maintaining an opinionated fork is cheaper than maintaining an alternate browser engine. This allows you to invest more resources into the product itself instead of the browser engine engine.
> you need an alternate product, and not an alternate browser engine.
Sorry?
The engine is what reads the protocols. It's how the internet is navigated. It is... the car to the road.
> Maintaining an opinionated fork is cheaper than maintaining an alternate browser engine
I believe I EXPLICITLY mentioned this.
> This allows you to invest more resources into the product
Incorrect.
It allows you to invest more time into a different aspect of the product. A browser isn't just a UI interface. It isn't just the style of the car. It isn't just the paint job. Chromium browsers are like taking the engine and drive train, chassis, power train, and suspension out of one car and putting it into a new body. Sure, that's a different car and saves you a lot of time and effort but the cars are going to have very similar performance and capabilities.
Let's put it this way. If Jeep was the dominating car company and decided all cars have good suspension and then Jeep, due to their "expertise in cars" got an unequal say in how roads were designed, then they might want to do things like make roads more rough and bumpy because their cars can handle it and a Porche couldn't. Does that make roads a better place? For everyone? No, that just kills Jeep's competition, further embeds their market dominance, and let's them dictate a critical part of our infrastructure.
You're so focused on the trees you've missed that they're part of a forest.
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