Windows & Edge, they suck, right?

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

There are enough Chromium based forks around, which rip out most of the Google stuff: Iridum, Brave, Vivaldi... there's a big bunch of those. And soon Microsoft's new thing as well.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

You can't test your way to safety, and you REALLY can't test your way to good design.

 

[Jolene Benoir]

There are enough Chromium based forks around, which rip out most of the Google stuff: Iridum, Brave, Vivaldi... there's a big bunch of those. And soon Microsoft's new thing as well.

I've become a sort of a fan of Vivaldi. It has some innovative features missing in the other major 3. Being chromium-based gives me pause, much in the same way that Pop OS and all of the other Ubuntu based linux operating systems do.

 

[Clara D.]

I visit a few sites where Firefox doesn't work right, but that may be the combination of script/ad blockers I use. If I really want to use the site, I switch to Chrome temporarily. On the whole, Firefox does what I want. For example, I never see YouTube ads.

Chrome/etc's font rendering keeps me on Firefox. That and no tab-scrolling.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I've become a sort of a fan of Vivaldi. It has some innovative features missing in the other major 3. Being chromium-based gives me pause, much in the same way that Pop OS and all of the other Ubuntu based linux operating systems do.

Yes, Vivaldi is quite a nice niche browser. You can feel the old mastermind of Opera 12 behind it pulling the strings around. Opera, while never having a big market share, was responsible for quite some now common innovations in the browser scene back then, either for inventing them or bringing at least to the masses.

 

[2tee2]

 

[Veritable Quandry]

I see a bunch of quotes, links and videos. Do you have anything to say? I can Google random shit on my own.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

And who is Edge?
I think I missed that completely.

Plays guitar for U2.

 

[Free]

Best Health thread yet.

 

[Essence Lumin]

And who is Edge?
I think I missed that completely.

His full name is Edge Og. Some time ago he decided he didn't like the letter H and changed his name.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Finally I remembered why Mozilla really sucked in 2018, the main battle of Mozilla's war on their user base: the implementation of DNS over HTTP, using Cloudflare's services by default. So if Mozilla enables this by default without any changes, all your juicy DNS queries go to one single point...

ungleich blog - Mozilla's new DNS resolution is dangerous

Affordable VM hosting in Glarus, Switzerland, operated by 100% hydropower. Devuan, debian, freebsd, ubuntu, centos. Our tech stack is fully open source.

ungleich.ch

On Firefox moving DNS to a third party | PowerDNS Blog

DNS lookups occur for every website visited. The processor of DNS requests gets a complete picture of what a household or phone is doing on the internet.

blog.powerdns.com

I guess most of you didn't realise this.

 

[Chalice Yao]

It should be mentioned that the new Edge currently in development is essentially based on Chromium, and that the Microsoft team has been in close contact with the Google engineers. Not sure yet when the full first release will come out.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

DNS over HTTP also makes it harder for carriers (from governments down to "free wifi" services) to intercept your web browsing using a DNS man-in-the-middle attack.

And if the company building your web browser wants to play sillybuggers with you, they're _already_ in the perfect place to do so. They don't need these kinds of shenanigans.

And if they go crazy and prevent you turning it off, you can always use a localhost proxy to completely bypass it, if you want to. If it actually becomes a problem there will be a zillion easy to use programs and extensions showing up.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

DNS over HTTP also makes it harder for carriers (from governments down to "free wifi" services) to intercept your web browsing using a DNS man-in-the-middle attack.

And easier in that scenario for the US government in case DoH with Cloudflare becomes the Firefox default: just write a NSL letter to Cloudflare, and grab all the juicy data there. And it adds way too much complexity on top of it anyway.

Aside that there's an alternative, DNS over TLS, which also is a proposed standard by the IETF: It leaves out all of the HTTP stuff, therefore necessity of using an HTTP library, so probably it should work faster, but needs port 853/UDP to work.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

The added overhead of HTTP over TLS (HTTPS) versus raw TLS is negligible. You can write an HTTP server as a shell script, it's so simple. I've done it. It's barely more complicated than finger if all you're implementing is GET.

It's easier to add a "get" string and a blank line to a request than to get every random firewall to open another UDP port. Yeh, wearing my network administrator hat I'd rather they do things technically correctly, but as desktop support pleading with Mordac the Preventer upstairs in corporate IT I've given up... run everything over HTTP.

As for the US government writing an NSL to cloudflare... that gets them most of the juicy stuff even without DoH, given even people like 8chan used (now that's past tense) them. And the guy who's doing router injection on your local Wifi network can't do that. Nor can your hotel or airport or hospital or employer.

On an evil scale of 0 through ActiveX on the Desktop, this barely flips the needle.

 

[Anya Ristow]

I think his point is that Edge is more secure, but I won't watch all the videos and follow all the links to be sure. If you make a clear statement I might be interested enough to follow the links, but I won't follow the links just to be sure I understand the statement.

 

[Cristiano]

The OP is pointing out that the common thinking that Windows and Edge are somehow worse than competitors is not borne out by evidence - quite the opposite. Why they just didn't say that, I'm not sure.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The OP is pointing out that the common thinking that Windows and Edge are somehow worse than competitors is not borne out by evidence - quite the opposite. Why they just didn't say that, I'm not sure.

IT'S NOT FUNNY IF YOU HAVE TO EXPLAIN THE JOKE, CRIS

 

[Veritable Quandry]

So how is U2 involved?

 

[Cristiano]

So how is U2 involved?

It has to do with the time their album was forced into everyone's Itunes library.