Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it's always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.
But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you're right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.
God damn it. *crumbles in embarrassment.
The Servo fork? Oh I've never heard of that. I'll have to look into it.
Servo Folk. It's one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That's where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn't be Mozilla's problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla's market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.
Have you heard of Electron? It's the use of Chromium's Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn't there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko's way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It's a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink's based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.
https://servo.org/
Oh wow. Thanks for that explanation. It only has made me angrier at Mozilla. They have completely lost their way and forgotten their original mission.
I wonder why Mozilla didn't want their own rendering engine to compete with Blink...
I mean they already have one, Gecko. And since they also made Servo, they took a lot of the good parts and incorporated it into Gecko, which led to the speed up (they parallelized a lot of the processes and started using people's GPUs more).
And they have made Mozilla VPN and had it integrate with this this multi-account container add-on (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/) that lets you sandbox your internet browsing (like you can set up a google account container, a Facebook/Instagram container, a banking/finance container). So those have been privacy pluses in the years since Baker canned the Rust and Servo teams, blaming Covid-19 all while giving herself a raise. And Firefox seems to be competitive with Chrome in terms of speed of web rendering and whatnot: https://www.androidauthority.com/firefox-vs-chrome-which-web-browser-reigns-supreme-3294340/
And there's just some simple things in Firefox by default, like clicking on a simple button to disable most of the javascript that's janking everything up on a website and making it simple and readable, that just make it so much better than Chrome.
From what you've said though there seem to be benefits from cleaning up Gecko in order to make it feasible to turn it into something similar to Electron.