:stallman-shining:
Chances are more and more of what you do when you use your computer is done through a browser (keeping in contact with friends, jobs, and even organizing).
So the importance of browsers cannot be understated. And having one piece of software do all of this means you have to be able to trust it.
Which brings us to Google & Chrome. Google Chrome has come to dominate the browser usage share, but even that is an understatement. Every single browser you have heard of, with the exception of Firefox, uses a version of Chrome (Chromium) in the background. Opera, Edge, Brave, you name it, they're all based off of Chrome.
Most people know Google is shitty already; if we're just talking about the web, they are regularly caught sabotaging Firefox to boost Chrome usage and, as any corporation would, continue to strengthen their monopoly by making it harder for alternative browsers to rise up (hence why Firefox is the only alternative right now). This is of course without mentioning the crimes they commit outside the web, e.g. how they help build the US's drones, or how they work closely with the NSA.
It goes without saying then that the authors of this post all urge you to switch from Chrome, or other Chrome-based browsers, to Firefox. This article shows you how quick & easy it is to switch, and transfer all your bookmarks, passwords, and other browser data to Firefox too!
Firefox isn't just the only viable alternative to Chrome, though. It also has a bunch of cool tricks and features up its sleeve.
Extensions
Firefox is very easy to customize to your liking via the settings or extensions, you can have vertical/tree style tabs via one of these extensions, there's also Gesturefy which lets you navigate the browser with mouse gestures.
There's also the Containers feature which "lets you carve out a separate box for each of your online lives", it basically provides you with separate profiles/browsers... and extensions like Facebook Container use it to isolate facebook related tabs and trackers into a facebook container seperate from everything else, or Temporary Containers which provides you with disposable containers, or Google Container among others. There's a lot more but that's what I can think of off the top of my head.
Firefox also comes with built-in tracking protection and anti-fingerprinting features plus tweaks you can apply.
Extensions on Chrome are actually much weaker than on Firefox because of Manifest v3 and other things, check this post for more on this.
If you want more screen space
Try the Compact mode in Firefox by going to Customize from the main menu and picking Compact from the Density menu at the bottom.
Build Beautiful Firefox Themes
check https://color.firefox.com/
Custom CSS styles that can change the whole look of the browser
Firefox also has a thing called userChrome (nothing to do with Chrome) which lets you basically change the whole look of the browser, you can see some examples here. Those are a few examples but if you want more you can check out /r/firefoxcss.
Firefox for Android
Unlike most browsers, Firefox supports extensions on Android so you can use uBlock Origin (adblocker), Dark Reader and other extensions.
It also comes with built-in tracking protection and an option to have the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
Plus you get syncing between your browsers and firefox has a feature to show tabs from other devices in the customization settings.
You should get Firefox from F-Droid instead of Google Play. It's called Fennec on F-Droid
Firefox for iOS
Firefox ship both the standard browser, as well as Firefox Focus with extra tracking protections (you can use it as a content block in Safari, too).
More detailed technical info about Firefox
Firefox is a unique browser in a lot of ways. Firefox runs on an engine called Gecko, as opposed to Apple's web engine called WebKit or Google's fork of WebKit called Blink.
Firefox was originally a spinoff of mozilla internet suite, which itself was a continuation of the netscape communicator project. Firefox then underwent the quantum update which made it much faster and made it easier to develop for while also dumping the XUL extension system. This means that the Gecko engine is entirely independent from chrome/safari. It is also a lot more tightly integrated into the firefox browser, which is one of the reasons why most browsers are based off of blink/webkit.
There are firefox based browsers though, the most notable of which is the TOR browser, which protects users by routing all traffic through the TOR network and it's also designed to be as difficult to fingerprint as possible.
We hope this post has convinced you to make the switch! Here's the switching guide again, in case you missed the first link. Feel free to ask questions in the comments, or alternatively check out the !libre weekly megathread, which is sticked :)
Check this post out if you want more open source apps on your Android.
I've used DuckDuckGo since the Snowden disclosures, and I would say give it another chance! The feature that made me stick with it wasn't the lack of tracking and privacy features but the "bangs" as they call them which allow you to pass your search into another webpage. If you've used pipes on a unix-like system, it's a bit similar to that, where if you type "mozilla firefox" into the search bar on DuckDuckGo, or in the address bar if you've set it as your default search, you can append
!aor!wto pass that search over to Amazon or Wikipedia for example. There's a whole list of bangs that are useful for day to day stuff, but it's made my browsing habits so much quicker since I don't have to move my hands from the keyboard as much. Check it out again, it's fun! https://duckduckgo.com/bangIf I append google will Google know its me or is it anonymous?
Yep, once you pass it over from DuckDuckGo with
!g, it's in Google's hands. It's more of a pass-through from DuckDuckGo to other search engines or services than an anonymizer. You can pipe it to startpage though with!sif you want to search Google anonymously but you won't be anonymous to StartPage's operators (unless you're using Tor).Is startpage good privacy wise?
Do you want the short answer or the long answer? :)
Short answer is it's fine, depending on what you're after. Long answer is StartPage's operators can still see what you're searching, where you're coming from, what time you're checking it, along with logging it. Like DuckDuckGo they're a private company as well as also not being open source so you can't validate their claims (at least at the software level) for what they do and don't do with your data.
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Nice! That feature sold me on DDG several years ago and haven't looked back since 😎
It's good but DDG is better and has more features plus it doesn't rely on Google's search engine. Try using DDG as your default and use !s when you don't get the results you want.
thanks! I'll try doing it your way.
Startpage isn't Tor friendly.
Do they still do a captcha? I haven't used their search in years outside of some testing at work.
I don't use it either but just checked and it's working now.