"Ralph Fox" wrote

| Google ran what has proven to be an effective campaign to push Chrome,
| on several fronts (including drive-by downloads).
|

There was an article this week in NYT claiming
that Firefox is making a comeback. Generally they
were saying that Mozilla has made big improvements,
especially with privacy, and put FF "back in the
running".

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/t...r-privacy.html

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Though the article is by Brian Chen. It's been my
experience that he and his AppleSeed sidekick,
Farhad Manjoo, are not in the business of writing
intelligent analysis of tech trends. Their articles
tend to read as loosely editied press releases. I
suspect that's probably what they are.

And Firefox hardly has a good privacy record. It's
good for privacy *only* for people who are intimately
familiar with the settings, prefs, and extensions. The
one advantage Mozilla has over Google is that they're
still, at least in theory, a non-profit and seem to have
a number of employees who consider decency to be
a mission.

| Not to mention the Google privacy
| questions...
|
| For this, look at one of the alternative Chromium builds such as
| SRWare Iron.
| http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php
|

Caveat emptor. I downloaded Iron recently because
I wanted to check my webpages in a variety of
recent browsers. So I got Midori in lieu of Safari
and Iron in lieu of Chrome. Iron tried to call home
immediately without asking, to start-iron.com.

When I blocked that it tried to call Google. That's
exactly what they claim it doesn't do. I wasn't even
doing a search or loading a webpage. I never let it
through the firewall to begin with. I was only loading
my local webpages to check the rendering. It just
started trying to call out.

Many people don't mind the trick of calling home
at first start, but there is a principle the Software
that does it is not respecting privacy/property. But
even if you don't mind that, for Iron to try to call
Google without asking makes their whole presentation
a lie.