Regardless of current politics, this is great advice anyways for a lot of people. These alternatives are very user friendly now a days, including many Linux distros. They will do almost if not all what a user needs. Few exceptions.

I recently bought a Garmin to get rid of a $30 Whoop subscription and to get better battery than a smart watch with a Fitbit subscription. Garmin seems to give me everything I needed that the whoop does for only the cost of the watch.

It does mention all health data will be free still so for the time being I’m not opposed to them locking AI behind a paywall. I understand AI cost resources and is expemsive. I however, will not be using that shit. I think the default health insights are plenty for what i do. Granted I’m not a full on athlete like some Garmin users.

As long as they don’t lock what’s available now beyond a paywall I’m okay with this. But overall, I’m sick and tired of subscriptions in general.

Got me this morning

Not sure if you use that feature but does it work like an indexer and allow direct downloads of “Linux isos”?

I think when I tried them out a while back they also had a usenet search? Can anyone clarify on this?

Completely agree. But whatever their reason for pouring money into it, it did make a really good browser Google aside. So much so that it became basically the largest In the market.

Absolutely. What I’m saying is just speculative concern. Not necessarily a definite. All I’m really getting at is just the money power they have to actively develop, test, and maintain.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree. What Im getting at is more of the “they have the funds and manpower to keep it up”. I’m not saying it can’t be done, just wondering what ifs.

While chrome is an extreme example, what I’m getting at is resources. Projects are very expensive. And they may require funding to upkeep. In other words, if sold off, it would need to be to a company of scale that could afford to continue to develop and maintain. Plus, My guess is if actually sold off, it would be under some deal that would allow Google to still influence. Whether that’s like the Firefox deal to default to Google search or some other manner. Either way, I don’t see a sale of chrome being a “win” without knowing other factors.

Edit: forgot to answer your other question. I don’t see Firefox as less secure but tying back to my original text, they recieve a ton of funding. A lot of which is from their Google deal I believe among other things. Which i could see ending up happening if chrome were to actually sell too.

To me im not sure what the right answer is. Do I think Google is great? Not anymore. But that fact that they have significant presence with chrome and do invest heavily in android and chrome, I could see their arguement on selling. Without their investment, would updates come regularly? Would vulnerabilities be found as quickly?

One of the major pros unfortunately of massive companies and their technology is their investment in defending it.

And so so so many people and businesses rely on chrome by default.

Unfortunately, I say yes. And hear me out first please.

The Fediverse in my eyes should be free. Free to have instances for everyone, including those we disagree with. Because in my opinion, the right to say and think what we want is very important (absolute free speech). And unfortunately, i think that means everyone should be allowed to say what they want. HOWEVER, free speech does not mean free of consequences. The option of federating with those groups or not is up to each community and fortunately I think many would not be okay with including them.

I’m always open to hearing input as these are personal thoughts so by all means add to or let me know the errors in my thinking. Thanks!

So from what I understand, theres 2 common ways that browsers combat this. Someone add to or correct me if I’m wrong.

1. Browsers such as Mull combat this by looking the same as every other browser. If you all look the same, it’s hard to tell you apart. I believe this is why people recommend using default window size when using Tor.

Ex: Everyone wearing black pants and hoodies with the facemasks. Extremely hard to tell who is who.

2. Browsers such as Brave randomize metadata that fingerprinting collects so that it’s more difficult to piece it all together and build a trend/profile on someone.

Ex: look like a dog in one place, a cat in another place. They get data for a dog but that doesn’t help build anything if the rest of the data is a cat, hamster, whatever. No way to piece it together to be useful.

In both my examples, there are caveats. Just because everyone dressed the same doesn’t mean someone isn’t taller or shorter, or skinnier or fatter. There can still be tells to help narrow down. Or a cat that barks like a dog suddenly is more linkable to a dog if that makes sense lol.

In other words it still depends user behavior that can contribute to the effectiveness of these tools.

EDIT: got distracted. To answer your question I don’t think so. I think it’s more about user behavior blending in or being randomized. I think the only thing an extension would be able to do is possibly randomize the data but I’m unsure of such an extension yet. These aren’t the only options, these are just ones I’ve read about recently. Online behavior, browswr window size, and I’m sure so much more also goes into it. But every little bit helps and is better than nothing.

EDIT2: Added examples for each for clarity.