I’m excited for the Librem 5, but I’m worried about the browser. IMO, the best thing you can do to protect yourself online is to have many trusted browser plugins to prevent tracking, fingerprinting, and ads (eg uBlock, Referer Control, Canvas Blocker, etc). I have seen several topics here about how Firefox mobile will not work, which I can understand.
Has anyone managed to get Brave or another Chromium-based browser working on the emulator?
https://mglapps.frama.io/
Lists 5 in the browser category.
Maybe not day one, but Brave looks like it could do what you want.
Would love to have Gab’s Dissenter browser.
Please don’t feed google with chromium derivate. Firefox make it happen
I second FF. Fighting for internet freedom.
Yeah, I keep thinking of this/
Btw., why isn’t Opera ever mentioned?
It’s closed source and belong to a chinese company
There was another topic about Firefox/Waterfox here; the consensus seems like it would be possible to get the desktop version running, but there would clearly be UI issues: Firefox for librem5
Opera is now Chromium-based (as is Microsoft Edge).
It belongs to a Chinese company?! I didn’t know that.
I think you should take a look at Epiphany (aka GNOME Web), I don’t use it and I don’t use GNOME either but that’s a pretty cool browser, even if I would really much prefer Firefox it still has a built-in adblocker and it’s still much better than anything that’s based on chromium.
I don’t really mind any browser as long as it’s not Chrome; and that it has either a built-in adblocker, or i’m able to add-on one. Really nice features would be session containers, noscript and umatrix.
That’s kind of why I want extensions.
Chrome has a “built-in adblocker” which doesn’t actually block any ads or tracking that’s approved by Google. uBlock (±Origin) is configurable and frequently updated/vetted filter lists for privacy and ads, which can be modified based on your tolerance for these things. They are updated with new threats frequently. I doubt Epiphany will have this same level of privacy filtering, simply because it has fewer people working on it.
Reefer control helps prevent tracking – and call me paranoid, but if I follow a YouTube link from some unapproved site, I don’t want to end up on some list at Google. YouTube should see the referer as “http://www.youtube.com”; there’s no reason for them to know where I came from.
Epiphany is also not nearly as well-tested as other browsers and will inevitably have incompatibilities, bugs, or exploits. We should strive to reuse good, existing components instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with (almost certainly inferior) ones. While I don’t love the idea of selling my soul to Mozilla, Google, and Apple, building a web browser that’s compatible with the modern web - and an ecosystem of extensions around it - is a huge task that simply can’t be tackled by a small number of people (not to mention that it’s Sisyphean in nature as new web standards, exploits, and privacy threats arrive). I’d much prefer Waterfox or Brave, which have compatibility with existing ecosystems.
While I agree with you, the point of the open source community is freedom of choice.
As an example, look up how many actively updated music players/managers there are for Linux. I agree if all those people worked together on a single project it would be one kickass player but that’s not the purpose of the open source community. Find a niche that needs to be filled and so your best.