Best Browser?

Since a few weeks now It looks like my Firefox install is possessed by the
devil. In Facebook, it ramdomly refreshes when I barely touch the mouse,
but I don't really want a solution.

I'd like to know which browsers should I try. Chrome "always" try to
install itself if I'm not careful when I update some utilities but I'm not
sure about Google.


Facebook seems to work normally in Internet Explorer but some videos won't
play.

If I install Chrome, is there some parameters that I should be aware?

I have SuperAntiSpywarePro but it only finds the usual "tracking cookies".

I'm on Windows 7 SP1 - 64 bits

TIA

On 03/25/2018 04:36 PM, Dominique wrote:
Since a few weeks now It looks like my Firefox install is possessed by the
devil. In Facebook, it ramdomly refreshes when I barely touch the mouse,
but I don't really want a solution.

I'd like to know which browsers should I try. Chrome "always" try to
install itself if I'm not careful when I update some utilities but I'm not
sure about Google.


Facebook seems to work normally in Internet Explorer but some videos won't
play.

If I install Chrome, is there some parameters that I should be aware?

I have SuperAntiSpywarePro but it only finds the usual "tracking cookies".

I'm on Windows 7 SP1 - 64 bits

TIA

I've started finding reputable download sites stuffing an install of
Google Chrome in some of their installers lately. So yes, you do have
to watch out, but that should be said for all downloaded software.

I'm not aware of any issues with Chrome or special parameters. There
are the preferences/settings you should dig through to make sure it's up
to your wishes. I like it as well as Firefox but have drifted to
Firefox lately since the new Quantum has come out.
And yes, I find a few quirks still in FF and have to jump to Chrome now
and then but Facebook works for me. I guess nothing is perfect.

However, all that said, I am running Linux and both browsers are not
Windows versions of course.

"Dominique" wrote

| Since a few weeks now It looks like my Firefox install is possessed by the
| devil. In Facebook, it ramdomly refreshes when I barely touch the mouse,
| but I don't really want a solution.
|
| I'd like to know which browsers should I try. Chrome "always" try to
| install itself if I'm not careful when I update some utilities but I'm not
| sure about Google.
|

It's really a matter of preference. Firefox keeps changing.
I've been sticking with v. 52. If you're concerned about
spyware... Google *is* spyware. So whether you want
to use Chrome really depends to a great extent on whether
you mind Google knowing everything you do.

There is a cleaner version named Iron. I haven't
tried either one.

Edge/IE. Well, that's Microsoft. They've even broken
compatibility with their own browsers. IE11 is a kind
of in-between monstrosity. It no longer works like IE
unless you set compatibility mode for specific websites.
Yet it's still IE, which has never been compatible with
anything else.

If you stick with Firefox you might try this:
Go to about:config and set accessibility.blockautorefresh
to True. That will stop pages from updating by themselves
while you're trying to read. I don't know, though, whether
that has anything to do with Facebook updating according
to mouse movements.

There was interesting news this week about the
Austin "serial bomber". They tracked him down by
getting his Google searches and cellphone location data.
Pretty creepy, even if they were catching a murderer.
It's a simple example of how much you're being
tracked if you're not making an effort not to be.
Google arguably puts together more pieces of the
puzzle than any other entity. Their Doubleclick
ads are on most commercial sites. They track through
gmail. Through Google searches. Through Chrome.
Through Android. They even teamed up with retailers
to coordinate shopping data with individuals' online
activity, to get evidence for their online ads being
effective.

On 03/25/2018 05:16 PM, Mayayana wrote:
"Dominique" wrote

| Since a few weeks now It looks like my Firefox install is possessed by the
| devil. In Facebook, it ramdomly refreshes when I barely touch the mouse,
| but I don't really want a solution.
|
| I'd like to know which browsers should I try. Chrome "always" try to
| install itself if I'm not careful when I update some utilities but I'm not
| sure about Google.
|

It's really a matter of preference. Firefox keeps changing.
I've been sticking with v. 52. If you're concerned about
spyware... Google *is* spyware. So whether you want
to use Chrome really depends to a great extent on whether
you mind Google knowing everything you do.

There is a cleaner version named Iron. I haven't
tried either one.

Edge/IE. Well, that's Microsoft. They've even broken
compatibility with their own browsers. IE11 is a kind
of in-between monstrosity. It no longer works like IE
unless you set compatibility mode for specific websites.
Yet it's still IE, which has never been compatible with
anything else.

If you stick with Firefox you might try this:
Go to about:config and set accessibility.blockautorefresh
to True. That will stop pages from updating by themselves
while you're trying to read. I don't know, though, whether
that has anything to do with Facebook updating according
to mouse movements.

There was interesting news this week about the
Austin "serial bomber". They tracked him down by
getting his Google searches and cellphone location data.
Pretty creepy, even if they were catching a murderer.
It's a simple example of how much you're being
tracked if you're not making an effort not to be.
Google arguably puts together more pieces of the
puzzle than any other entity. Their Doubleclick
ads are on most commercial sites. They track through
gmail. Through Google searches. Through Chrome.
Through Android. They even teamed up with retailers
to coordinate shopping data with individuals' online
activity, to get evidence for their online ads being
effective.


Don't do any social networking huh?! :-) Facebook knows everything
you like and shop for, and they do a good job of targeting ads.
I try to use Duck-Duck-Go now. At least it gives me some sense of
privacy if nothing else.
I found an add-on that would strip some extra info from bookmarks. I
looked at a few of mine and sure enough, not that it's tracking info,
but more credit to the web page you got the link. Like
walmart.com?came from google.com
Not that this is a proper example but the add-on would find the stuff
after the ?something and strip it. It was pretty good. Not sure
where the add-on is/was or even if it was FF. Since I've move to
Quantum, it would be useless now anyway. I just wrote a C++ program to
look for such instances and print them to a file so I could manually
edit them in the browser. Bottom line was every time you clicked that
bookmark you were giving the source web site credits for sending you
there. I don't mind once, but over and over and over??? nope!

On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 20:36:56 -0000 (UTC), Dominique
wrote a question: best browser???

I have used Opera since it was first sold (now free).
I have MSIE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari - primarily for my website
testing.
I cannot tolerate the user interface and crap on other browsers.

I do not understand Opera's limited popularity.

(Opera sometimes fails in part on a website, then I try Chrome.)
(Historically, Opera was strictly conformist which some websites,
(.g.some banking) were (and are?) not.

"Big Al" wrote

| Don't do any social networking huh?! :-) Facebook knows everything
| you like and shop for, and they do a good job of targeting ads.

Maybe they know about you. I not only don't
use FB and never have, I've got the following in my
Acrylic HOSTS file:

127.0.0.1 *.fbcdn.net
127.0.0.1 *.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 *.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 *.fb.com

I also block Twitter and have never seen Snapchat
or the others. I don't see any reason to let a sleazy,
for-profit spyware company middleman my social life.
And I certainly don't see any reason to hang around
at a website where no one says anything that can't
fit into a one-liner. Though I do end up seeing reprints.
Much of the mainstream media have degraded themselves
to the point of just making up news by stringing
together wiseacreing snippets from Twitter. In fact,
it's so intrusive that I added code to userContent.css
for Pale Moon to remove them from the Washington
Post:
.twitter-tweet {display: none !important;}


| I try to use Duck-Duck-Go now. At least it gives me some sense of
| privacy if nothing else.
| I found an add-on that would strip some extra info from bookmarks. I
| looked at a few of mine and sure enough, not that it's tracking info,
| but more credit to the web page you got the link. Like
| walmart.com?came from google.com


I know what you mean. Google's been that way for
awhile. I usually clean up their links if I use them at all.

Recently I had a copy of an email from an acquaintance
who emails political links. She gets various political news
emails sent to her and sends many of the links on. I was
amazed at how much data was in her links. One had her
name, email address and home address all encoded as
base-64 and tacked onto the links that she was sending
on. She had no idea. Inflammatory politics is a category
all its own.

"masonc" wrote

| I do not understand Opera's limited popularity.
|

It's not one thing. Originally it was an independent effort
with lots of config options. But these days only the name
is the same. The browser is a version of Google's and
the product is owned by a Chinese company.

I liked Opera back when it was an honest effort, but
it did have some problems with display, so I never used
it very much. I thought the developrs were stubborn.
They had ideals about how the Web is *supposed to*
be rendered and they stuck to their guns, even if it
broke webpages.

| (Historically, Opera was strictly conformist which some websites,
| (.g.some banking) were (and are?) not.
|

Exactly. But conforming to standards can be done
with flexibility. That was the original idea of the Web.
Both HTML and browser rendering should degrade
gracefully. In other words, if it's not proper HTML the
browser should just do its best. If a web developer
wants to use script they should write the page so
it still works without script. Many people don't follow
those guidelines anymore. The Opera people never did.

On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 15:31:29 -0700, masonc
wrote:

On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 20:36:56 -0000 (UTC), Dominique
wrote a question: best browser???

I have used Opera since it was first sold (now free).
I have MSIE, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari - primarily for my website
testing.
I cannot tolerate the user interface and crap on other browsers.

I do not understand Opera's limited popularity.

(Opera sometimes fails in part on a website, then I try Chrome.)
(Historically, Opera was strictly conformist which some websites,
(.g.some banking) were (and are?) not.

AND now there is * Vivaldi * created by some abandoned Opera's
It's worth considering.

On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 16:44:56 -0400, Big Al wrote:
I've started finding reputable download sites stuffing an install of
Google Chrome in some of their installers lately.

Not just lately. Avast did it to me a couple of years ago when I
downloaded and installed an update -- an update!


--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...

On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 20:36:56 -0000 (UTC), Dominique wrote:

I'd like to know which browsers should I try.

Edge.

"mechanic" wrote

| I'd like to know which browsers should I try.
|
| Edge.

Edge is not available for Win7. Strangely,
MS have made a phone app version for iOS
and Android.

I guess the idea is that Microsoft are trying
to say you shouldn't be asking for desktop
software anymore. But that's a self-fulfilling
loop: It only runs on Win10 and has about a 4%
share. That makes it like Safari. Only the most
dedicated web designers are going to bother
to specifically accomodate a niche browser.
So such a browser *must* mimic the popular
browsers closely. But MS have never done that.
Therefore people are unlikely to support it.
Therefore it's likely to become increasingly
incompatible. Even if they make it the most
compatible browser, few people are likely to find
out.

On top of all that, Microsoft themselves are
so insecure about Edge that they spoof the userAgent.
This is typical:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393

Note that while it says "Edge" it pretends to
be both Chrome and Firefox.

Microsoft have come out with the ridiculous view
that webmasters should check for support of
functions, not browsers. Easy for them to say. They
don't have to write all that spaghetti code to make
a webpage work with different versions of MS
browsers.

On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 08:23:32 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote in

"mechanic" wrote

| I'd like to know which browsers should I try.
|
| Edge.

Edge is not available for Win7. Strangely,
MS have made a phone app version for iOS
and Android.

I guess the idea is that Microsoft are trying
to say you shouldn't be asking for desktop
software anymore. But that's a self-fulfilling
loop: It only runs on Win10 and has about a 4%
share. That makes it like Safari. Only the most
dedicated web designers are going to bother
to specifically accomodate a niche browser.
So such a browser *must* mimic the popular
browsers closely. But MS have never done that.
Therefore people are unlikely to support it.
Therefore it's likely to become increasingly
incompatible. Even if they make it the most
compatible browser, few people are likely to find
out.

On top of all that, Microsoft themselves are
so insecure about Edge that they spoof the userAgent.
This is typical:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like
Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.79 Safari/537.36 Edge/14.14393

Note that while it says "Edge" it pretends to
be both Chrome and Firefox.

Microsoft have come out with the ridiculous view
that webmasters should check for support of
functions, not browsers. Easy for them to say. They
don't have to write all that spaghetti code to make
a webpage work with different versions of MS
browsers.


+1
--
Web based forums are like subscribing to 10 different newspapers
and having to visit 10 different news stands to pickup each one.
Email list-server groups and USENET are like having all of those
newspapers delivered to your door every morning.

On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 08:23:32 -0400, "Mayayana"
wrote:

[snip]

Microsoft have come out with the ridiculous view
that webmasters should check for support of
functions, not browsers. Easy for them to say. They
don't have to write all that spaghetti code to make
a webpage work with different versions of MS
browsers.

It is a consequence of that nonsensical Postel's Law being widely
accepted.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 12:31:39 +0100, mechanic
wrote:

On Sun, 25 Mar 2018 20:36:56 -0000 (UTC), Dominique wrote:

I'd like to know which browsers should I try.

Edge.

That was mean. ;-)

--

Char Jackson

Big Al écrivait news
Facebook knows everything
you like and shop for, and they do a good job of targeting ads

Yes and they're a little stupid. The other day I bought a room humidifier
on-line and right after, when I went to Facebook, they offered me exactly
the same humidifier. Why do they show you something you've just bought?!
:-)