What Kinds of Internet Browser do you Use?

[Things]

I don't see what all this hype over Google watching you is. You really think they're going to bother monitoring the millions of people that use their browser?

Unless you're doing something suspicious in the first place, there is nothing they can use against you for any reason.

I couldn't care less if google monitored my browsing history, printed it out and mailed it to me. They offer an awesome number of services almost completely ad free.

I really don't think Google cares what kind of freaky porn you watch, to be honest

 

[nikokapo]

I believe I've said many times in big red letters that I absolutely love...

Opera

 

[spyrorocks]

Google Chrome. I used to use firefox until it started crashing every hour or so. Ive had chrome lock up and crash maybe 2 times in the past 6 months, which is acceptable for me.

I think the previous firefox versions were better, without the bloat and stuff.

Not worried one bit about google "spying". I use their awesome search and email services for free, and let them advertise to me in return. Its a good trade.

Your ISP monitors everything you load and keeps logs for usually around 2 years, same with all major instant messaging and email service providers.

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

[Mini Rant.]It's not the advertising that bugs people, it's the gradual buildup of a psych profile, by complete strangers that I'm not a fan of.

Or for example do you want years from now, to be undergoing a deep background check or something and have to explain why you were looking into/at (something bad/embarrassing fill in the blank)? We're not quite there yet... but getting there.

ISP providers do keep logs, however that information is not digested nearly as much as with companies like google. Same is true of IM logs.

Ultimately, privacy online is a myth... short of always using encryption, a vpn, and proxies, someone/thing will always be tracking you. It's only a matter of how hard or easy you want to make the trackers work.

Personally I'm a bit averse to the whole "share everything, privacy is a thing of the past" culture phenomenon.

So while it still exists(arguably), I'll use the tools available to me to maintain some modicum of privacy.

I'm just flabbergasted at the willingness of people to give up personal information to complete strangers. Not even google, which has some bit of restraint, but there are a ton of companies out there who are very willing to use any data to their gain with no regard for people's well being.

I mean would you go up to a shady guy on a corner of a street, tell him your home address, phone number, social security number, mother's maiden name, your dining habits, work schedule, and what kind of alarm system you have installed? Of course not.

So why do it online? In exchange for what? An artificial reduction in price that advertising produces?

[/rant]

 

[spyrorocks]

Yep, I'm totally happy doing it in exchange for using gmail and all their other awesome tools.

Everyone's activities online are logged and stored by many many different organizations, be it your ISP (Usually at the request of government), or advertising agency. Pretty much every word you send online to another party.

If you want to know what google has that's connected to your account, they make it easy. https://www.google.com/dashboard/b/0/?hl=en

 

[InfinitusEquitas]

There should be more of a balance when it comes to privacy though.

Right now it just doesn't exist.

Maybe it's the mentality of having lived in, and studied a regime that approached things with a "if you're not doing anything bad you have nothing to hide" attitude that's stopping me from embracing the share all culture. (Remember the first thing cops will say to you upon arrest in our freedom loving country though... Anything you say, can and will be used against you in a court of law.)

Or maybe it's the fact that you're not only dealing with google online. Google does provide me with benefits, but what about the dozens of other companies that offer nothing in return to me, and yet benefit from me?

 

[Grix]

SRWare Iron users, read this:

Is Iron a Scam? Yes



On-topic, I use Firefox myself.

 

[Tech_Junkie]

I believe I've said many times in big red letters that I absolutely love...

Opera

Holy Chuck. Welcome back.

 

[Bionic-Badger]

I use mostly Firefox, but also Chrome.

Firefox is a love-hate relationship. I love the extensions, but I also hate how the browser gets slow over time due to some weird memory bugs. It's gotten better with newer versions (3.6.x sucked), but Firefox still has problems playing videos when it's been open for a long time and I've been browsing quite a bit. The video will pause a little like it's trying to keep up. So now I have all my links and stuff launch in Chrome, so that I can watch videos and see sites without waiting for Firefox to load it up.

Firefox's extensions are the main thing that keeps me using it. My favorite extension has got to be the vertical tree-style tabs. I use TONS of tabs, in multiple browser windows (sometimes as many as 60-80), so having the tree system is really nice for keeping the progress of my browsing. Also when I quit FF, it saves my tabs, and back/forward history and all that for all the tabs which is really nice.

Chrome's extension system is awful, and you can't even incorporate something like the tree tabs system because of controls on the GUI. However, Chrome is fast and slick, so it works great for launching stuff and having different cookies/privacy settings for different things. Both browsers use Adblock Plus.

I've also tested out Internet Explorer 9, and it is pretty damn fast. Still, it doesn't have anything compelling enough for me to switch back (it used to be the other way around for me to switch to Firefox or Chrome). I used to use IE back in IE7 because it had a nice inline autocomplete system I enjoyed. After Microsoft killed that off and replace it with its sad attempt at that crappy "awesome URL bar", I had no reason to continue using IE; so I switched to FF.

 

[rhd]

SRWare Iron users, read this:

Is Iron a Scam? Yes

I read through that, and have a few thoughts:

1) Whomever wrote this has a clear bias, an axe to grind, with Iron. To "sic a patent troll" on Iron (even if he believed it wasn't a good program) shows just how much animosity he has towards it. I'm betting that this is someone that hates Iron for reasons not entirely technical.

2) I actually likely some of the things that he discards as being trivial. Like disabling fetching of Chromium tips from google, which he discards as being irrelevent. Well, I don't want my browser doing that. Or disabling GoogleURLTracker. Perhaps this is supposed to "only used to figure out what international google domain" to use. But the reality, is that you're sending google an IP address to be used in geolocating your position to choose the "best" localization to forward to. Ok, but how do I know that on Google's side they're only geolocating with country-level granularity? They could be geolocating to any degree that their database allows (which as I know from banner ads that use similar databases, is generally much more precise).

So while the author of the rant may discard a lot of Iron changes as redundant or irrelevent, it's clear that the author has both a different sense of what privacy is, AND a greater inherent trust for Google. Probably, the exact type of author that I don't want browser advice from.

3) Finally, he compared SRWare Iron version 4. Well, they were a whole lot newer back then. They also weren't as well known at that stage either. You have to start somewhere. The author wrote about version 4, and doesn't seem to have updated his text through any of the subsequent versions. Iron is at version 17 as of February!

 

[nikokapo]

Holy Chuck. Welcome back.

I never left, man. I never left