it felt, like, complete, but im genuinely shocked it got as many seasons as it did, not being dog shit. feels like that or ‘stranger things’ was the last thing to slip through.

but I can only take ‘stranger things’ on others’ word; never got into it myself.

But neutered Chrome (aka repurposed + degoogled Chromium) isn’t the same as Google Chrome. I 100% understand what you’re saying, but I wouldn’t file this under “privacy” (at least not without some asterisks).

I don’t know about every Chromium-based browser, but I can tell you that I went back to Firefox and regret nothing (I was on Brave). Firefox has gotten a lot better lately, especially on desktop. For example, they added a native auto-PiP option, which is super helpful for those of us who watch YouTube/videos while flipping through tons of tabs.

I’m using Vivaldi, and ublock origin seems to be still working for me.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/03/mozilla-rewrites-firefoxs-terms-of-use-after-user-backlash/

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/03/mozilla-rewrites-firefoxs-terms-of-use-after-user-backlash/

Thanks for Waterfox. Looks awesome. :)

I do not but now wish I did

you know murderers get rehabilitated and released all the time

I absolutely do boycott based on moral grounds. I’ve been boycotting Walmart for >10 years because of unfair competition actions (killing off small businesses), poor treatment of workers, and being a massive force for reducing worker treatment in other companies by forcing prices down. Likewise for Nestle and what they’ve done in Africa, I’m trying to eliminate Amazon for their warehouse policies, and I’ve been reducing or eliminating purchases from other companies as well along similar lines.

I draw the line at actual actions by companies though, and I don’t really care what c-suite types do on their own time and with their own money. If I boycotted companies based on what their execs believe, I wouldn’t be able to buy anything.

you would feel dehumanized as well,

Oh absolutely, but I would funnel that anger at the people who supported and passed it, not at the companies those people work for or the products those companies produce.

designed by people who see no problems with…

Do you have a source for those beliefs, or are you just assuming that someone vaguely supporting Trump has that perspective?

I honestly don’t care what the devs believe, as long as they don’t intentionally put in vulnerabilities.

this is not the software I want to entrust literally all data of all my finances and important personal details on.

Same, which is why I use and recommend Firefox and derivatives.

My point is that if your requirement is a chromium-hard based browser, you can do a lot worse than Brave.

It absolutely is a competitor. Yes, it uses the same engine, but it blocks their ads. And at the end of the day, serving ads is what Google wants to do.

But again, Firefox (and forks) is my main browser, and it’s what I recommend to everyone. But Brave is on my list of acceptable Chromium browsers, assuming you need a Chromium browser (I do for web dev at my day job).

It’s not strange, people love jumping to extreme conclusions if there’s even a whiff of something they don’t like. Name calling is unfortunately very common.

I’d prefer more fact based discussions, but here we are.

The crazy thing is, I very much dislike Trump, but I get labeled as a supporter if I dare say anything positive about him or anyone who supports him, or in this case, not vehemently oppose everything a Trump supporter touches. I find that ridiculous, but here we are.

Anyway, hopefully someone finds what I write useful.

not the current concept of marriage altogether.

I never claimed it was. I merely gave an example of how opposition to something doesn’t necessarily indicate opposition to the people it’s intending to help.

For the record, I support same-sex marriage, on the grounds that my preferred policy (which would open up marriage to more than just same-sex couples) is unlikely to get traction anytime soon, so something is better than nothing. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

However, I have friends who oppose same-sex marriage and don’t hate gay people (in fact, they’re good friends with LGBT people). The world isn’t black and white, so we shouldn’t assume someone is a Nazi just because they believe a couple of the same things Nazis do. That’s a logical fallacy, and it does way more harm than good.

That’s what marriage already is for the most part in many parts of the world

Exactly, and I’m arguing that those benefits shouldn’t be bundled. I’ve known couples that want to share custody but not finances, or maybe visitation rights but not power of attorney. Relationships are complicated, and I think the institution of marriage is outdated. We spend tons of time and money on divorces and prenuptial agreements, and I think that could be dramatically simplified if we separated out the specific agreements and let people pick which they want.

Marriage should be a religious/personal thing, not a legal one. Whether you want to consider yourself married shouldn’t depend on a piece of paper in much the same way that your chosen gender shouldn’t.

Josef Mengele

That’s quite the logical leap.

it’s just another ERC-20 Token and not a new Monero

I don’t know, and honestly it doesn’t matter.

My preferred form of record keeping is GNU Taler. You’d load a wallet to pay for articles or whatever and the browser vendor would use a very cheap form of accounting to keep track of purchases, and lump payments to websites together with payments from other users. Taler is nice in that it protects the privacy of the purchaser, has cryptographic protections without the complexity of P2P verification (and none of the ecological impact), and is pretty easy to understand. The vendor could even audit transactions if they want without violating the privacy of the user.

But honestly, I don’t care what mechanism they use, whether crypto or some form of centralized wallet. I just want to be able to pay to remove ads without needing a million accounts.

It’s also kind of useless for Brave to have implemented Tor in the first place

I disagree. There’s value in having a second rendering engine in case a website doesn’t work on Tor Browser. It’s unlikely to have similar protections (e.g. finger printing resistance), but it could work in a pinch for a site you need to access that doesn’t work on Gecko for whatever reason.

That said, you could probably achieve that by pointing the browser at a running Tor service (e.g. Orbot on Android). You’d need to be extra careful about things like DNS (which Brave got wrong), but it’s an option. Having it bundled is nice though.

Is it me or the people defending brave are homophobes too.

Believing that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be a government-supported institution isn’t the same as believing LGBT people are “invalid” or “wrong” or whatever.

How is it not?

It seems incredibly obvious to me. For example, here are some things I believe:

• gambling is bad - yet I support legalization of gambling; why? Personal freedom comes first.
• prostitution is bad - yet I support legalization of prostitution; why? Sex work will happen, so it’s better for it to be properly regulated than happen on the black market
• drug use is bad - yet I support legalization of recreational drugs; why? Illegal drugs laced w/ fentanyl are a big problem, and most drug users would be better off w/ a regulated service.

Personal beliefs about what government policy should be can be very different than personal beliefs about what is “good” and “bad.”

To be clear, I support same-sex marriage because it’s on the table and my preferred alternative has almost no shot of being considered. So I support it as a harm-reduction policy, not because I actually believe the government should actually regulate marriage.

I mean, legally, that’s what marriage is.

Marriage is a basket of contracts (power of attorney, joint custody, financial obligations, etc), and it’s limited to two people, which is odd. The original intent seems to be to encourage procreation, but it’s hardly enforced at all, nor is that particularly important in most countries (except maybe Japan).

We should treat marriage similarly to corporations. If you want to call your civil partnership “marriage,” more power to you. If you want to call it being BF/GF, life partners, or whatever else, more power to you. The government should only care that you meet the requirements for whatever the benefit is.

You don’t have to do either of those things just because you’re married. Marriage just gives you the option.

In many (most?) states, it is enforced unless you specifically opt-out (e.g. a pre-nup). Laws certainly vary by state, but generally speaking, if you’re legally married, anything you earn in the marriage is considered joint assets, even if you keep them in separate accounts. In some areas, things you bring into the marriage are also jointly owned, unless they are never interacted with.

That’s why divorces are so messy, the couple could have agreed to keep things separate at the start, but without any evidence of that, it’s up to the courts to decide what’s fair. And pretty frequently, they’ll lean on the side of 50/50 for all assets, regardless of when it was acquired or what the understanding was.

And what would they bring to this partnership?

Integration into the browser product, users, and marketing.

I’ve been wanting Firefox to do something like this so get more visibility w/ online services. I’d love to be able to load up an account balance and click “view article” and the website owner sucks a few pennies from that balance or whatever. But my only options are:

• find a workaround w/ my ad-blocker - reader mode, archive, etc
• make yet another account and maybe pay for a monthly subscription (why do that when I only want the one article?)
• not read the article

Axate provides more than that, but so few online services work w/ it. A browser could bring them a ton of visibility.

But companies also should not be creating tools that propose to give you those protections when they’re not smart enough to. Just leave it to the professionals.

Agreed. But like I said, users request features, bugs happen, etc. At the end of the day, the responsibility is on the user to pick the right product for their needs. Brave isn’t that product for at-risk individuals until it has been vetted by actual security experts.

As long as he keeps his mouth shut about them and doesn’t financially support them, he’s doing worlds better than Mr. Eich.

Eich did the first half of that, his only “sin” was that someone found out about his donation. That’s it. My understanding is that nobody was aware of it until someone dug into the donation records.

Sam Walton

Oh yeah, I absolutely respect the man, I just don’t respect his business choices. There needs to be a balance between cutting costs to bring prices down for customers and providing for your employees.

if a CEO deeply ingrains himself in the political process, I can probably take a pass on his products

But why? He doesn’t need your money anymore, and if everyone stopped buying his products and Tesla went bankrupt, he’d still be ridiculously rich.

I get that it’s sending a message, but what does that accomplish? Maybe the board boots him as CEO, but he’ll retain his ownership stake.

I don’t see it. That’s why I focus on company culture, which often survives a change in management. If the culture is busted, I go out of my way go avoid their products.

Starbucks

Starbucks has actually been fantastic, at least in the past, with even part-time employees getting great benefits and pay being very competitive. I don’t know how things are with the CEO changes (Chipotle guy now, right?), so maybe that’s no longer the case.

That said, I don’t go there because I don’t like their products.

Chromium with uBlock Origin

Does that still work?

I mostly just need something to test on, since I’m a full stack web dev, and I don’t like having ads everywhere when I need to prettify some JSON or something. Also a fallback on the few pages Firefox doesn’t work on, once in a blue moon.

That’s really it.