The median monthly salary in my country is $300-$500. It absolutely is a big cost for some people.

It does have some built-in blocklists, but they’re limited compared to UBO. For example, blocking the ads on a site, but not the big HTML elements they used to be in.

Unless you’re a woman and want to be treated as a human being, I guess.

When I first installed GOS, wanted to like Vanadium. Went right back into a FF fork+UBO once I saw that while its blocklists did stop ads themselves on TvTropes, it did nothing to the HTML elements that contained them so it left big ugly white boxes visible.

My bank app just has its own NFC payment system, independent from Google, and that works fine.

Yes.

I’m just frustrated that Matrix is more popular than XMPP. Yes, it’s about as easy to spin it up, and I was surprised to see it runs fine on my low-end VPS, but it’s noticeably more resource-intensive, and I’m especially worried about the ever-expanding storage. I really don’t like the “store everything forever” model, I think it should be opt-in or allowing you to set an archival period.

I also recently learned that a lot of people don’t erase tabs upon quitting the browser, which feels wild to me… Why not use bookmarks at that point?

Where I am, Telegram’s pretty much the primary social media in addition to the primary messenger. While I could avoid Whatsapp (which would’ve been harder if I were older), I still would’ve had a very hard time if I deleted Telegram.

I got the impression most people do indeed have nothing to say or think they do. So this analogy irks me, unlike the more universal “curtains on windows/doors in bathroom”.

I think you’re exaggerating. Disabling JS breaks way more sites than an exit node’s IP.

Edit: I meant that “small number” of sites is an exaggeration, not that exit node blocking is uncommon.

To be fair, if your safety depends on whether a particular company cooperates with authorities, you’d better rethink your OPSEC.

Not to mention that a device that would pass Play Integrity is precisely the device I wouldn’t ever consider doing anything private on. Which would defeat the whole point of Signal. It’s already bad enough that it’s so desktop-unfriendly while much fewer phones than computers that can run non-privacy-invasive OSes than computers…

What are the ones you’re after specifically?

Yeah, absolutely agree that the two browsers’ actions don’t even compare. But I wouldn’t be defending FF either - for example, to my understanding, the PPA did make it into an actual update, and telemetry is not even all turned off by the basic toggles in the settings, with more being in about:config (part of the reason why hardening user.js exist).

Which would be absolutely disgusting given that Signal’s official app lacks some basic functionality!

Those third-party clients have some essential, basic functionality that the official ones for some reason lack. Signal-cli allows registering from desktop without any smartphone, Molly allows an arbitrary Socks proxy instead of being limited to just Signal’s own proxy solution, tying a desktop client with a link instead of scanning a QR code (thus allowing easy registration from an Android VM), and maybe most importantly for some - Notifications not relying on Google (Molly-Socket allows it to use UnifiedPush).

It has done some hostile things, such as having quite a bit of telemetry in it before hardening, or silently adding an ad attribution system. That’s why I would rather use a fork for a primary browser. What Brave has done is still more intrusive, though.

The issue with this is that it’s a part of an overall picture - that Brave sees nothing wrong with violating users’ boundaries. Brave 100% needs forks that would disable or remove weird non-consensual things added silently in updates, like what Librewolf is to Firefox, except Brave imo pushes the boundaries even more.

alchemy