I feel like there is no web browser with a sane default configuration that I can recommend to other people. All browsers are preconfigured in a way that harms the privacy of their users or include services that no one wants such as Pocket and BAT.

Here are my problems with some popular browsers.

  • Mozilla Firefox: Pocket integration, no ad-blocking without extensions.

  • Brave: Everything related to crypto. Also its start page is horrible.

  • Chromium: No ad-blocking without extensions and soon Manifest v3 will cripple all content blockers.

Now, these suboptimal defaults wouldn’t be such a big problem if the configuration files were easy to backup and restore and respected the XDG base directory specification.

  • stillwater@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    10 months ago

    They were definitely astroturfing for a while, especially around the time of that Firefox Megabar stuff on the Firefox subreddit. I can understand not liking the Megabar but there were so many people acting like the sky was falling and saying they were going to abandon Firefox after 15 years or so… for Brave.

    A few years later and almost none of those accounts look like real users. A bunch of them were active on Brave subreddits well before the Megabar.

    The impotent r/Firefox more missed all this of course, and let a bunch of trolls go rampant and unchecked.