Firefox vs Chrome

Discussion in 'Discussions' started by Rarefied Horse Meat, Feb 10, 2012.

  1. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    If you want actual privacy, 99% of the Internet will cease to exist for you. You can use Tor/Vidalia for the next best thing, but privacy obtained through Tor is not much better than through Freenet/I2P.

    To be frank, I simply will not discuss Freenet/I2P. I have used the former, but not the latter. I found an astonishing lack of useful content, and *Other* things that are the entire reason I will never again use them, and do not discuss them.

    Some people desire privacy for legitimate reasons. Some use Freenet/I2P. 'Nuff said.

    If you install Noscript, Adblock and RequestPolicy extensions, FF is neigh unbreakable unless you allow things you should not. The difference is that the control is in your hands rather than the very limited scope of what FF has in the menus.

    Daynab is entirely right about private browsing. I never use it for anything.

    There is another option for you besides using Chrome for certain things. Use FF as your primary browser, and use Portable Firefox with all the desired privacy extensions for the things you would rather not interrupt in your normal browsing session. They can work side by side without any problems.

    That way you can keep your normal FF instance running and copy a link into your iron safe portable version. And the added benefit to the portable version is that you can copy it anywhere and if anything goes wrong, just copy it back and you are back where you were before things went wrong.

    I generally prefer portable applications myself anyway. Whenever I need to reinstall Windows for whatever reason I can copy them out and they will work just as well when I copy them back in.

    *Edit* I should clarify about Tor. When you run Tor, in most cases whatever you do cannot be tied directly to you. But if you use it only for a minute, you may not be logged as a normal Tor user. Thus the problem is that any and all requests sent via your IP are now *Your* problem. If someone searches for something incriminating through Tor and you are running it, you may be the exit point unless you configure it specifically to not allow that. This is a double edged blade that can cut you very very badly.

    You need to allow requests to be sent through your node for Tor to work, just like you need to allow your Torrent client to upload data as you download it from others. If no-one does it then the service fails.

    Tor partly eliminates the ability to pin down who sent what by adding artificial lag time to all packets. This means slower page loads and more lost packets.

    Whenever IPV6 is finally adopted universally, we will probably all have static IP addresses. That is good and bad. Good in that it makes there be no more guesswork about why this IP is. Bad in that there will be no possibility of privacy without using an anonymizer like Tor. Either way I welcome the change. I can adapt as needed.
     
    Kazeto likes this.
  2. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    And if you want absolute security, do what he said inside a virtual machine :p
     
  3. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    And run that from a hidden volume in a truecrypt container. ROFLMFAO!
    (Note the edit above too.)
     
  4. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    From a throwaway raspberryPi :D
     
    blob likes this.
  5. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

  6. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Anyone happen to know if DoD can be ported over to one of these babies? It uses less power than my LED nightlight!
    (I fully expect it could be compiled for this, but the function may be pretty bad on a single core 700MHz ARM CPU.)
     
  7. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Well there's benchmarks of it playing quake 3 albeit with somewhat low fps.
     
  8. I had forgotten about Tor. Meowr. Combined with HTTPS, properly violating your privacy suddenly requires cooperation on the part of several agencies, rather than the non-Tor non-HTTPS state of "any dude can sniff all your bits". Diagram.

    Requests passed through you that aren't actually your own traffic are fairly protected under safe harbor laws. Your ISP will initially freak out, but often they calm down when they realize there's no legal risk. They don't actually care about the morality of your actions, they just want to know their asses are covered.

    Send em this, tuck them into bed for their nap, and gently pat them on the head:
    https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-dmca-response.html

    Portable apps probably use more system resources because they have to do everything from scratch, instead of grabbing existing system... things... and stuff. Maybe I should actually research that, because that sounds like a particularly unspecific, uninformed assumption. B'yeah, sounds great for quick fixes.

    Thanks n stuff.
     
  9. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Tor is weak in some points though, mostly at both ends. For example, you can have the server through which you connect (which sees your traffic unencrypted, since the traffic is encrypted only after the first server.

    The only way to be 100% anonymous that I know of currently is to use a VPN service based offshore that keeps no logs. And even then you have to trust them that they actually DON'T keep logs despite what they say.
     
  10. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    With exception to virtualization techniques, there is no real additional overhead for portable applications.

    And commercial VPNs are notorious for being the weak link in your security. Half of them are governmental agency owned and operated. The other half are indistinguishable from the first half. I can see running Tor through a VPN as a possible workaround, but it is really no better than running Tor alone.

    In reality, if you have reason to fear our government snooping on what you do online, you should not be doing that. And if you have reason to fear any government at all snooping, you should not be using the Internet at all.

    Ever wonder why every other year there are a hundred new major commercial VPNs out there? Half of them had to close so they could prosecute those who used it for whatever they did. It is a tricky subject better left in the dust.

    For general privacy, Tor and HTTPS works wonders. (General like you do not want others seeing you search for "Erectile Dysfunction" and other things that may or may not effect you, but you do not want associated with you. Not general like "Illicit Downloads" or "How to make WMDs" or something.)

    The trickiest part of picking a VPN is finding where the actual owner and place of business is located and where the rules they follow are based upon. They may well have in/out ports in dozens of countries, but they do not obey all the laws of each. They almost always use one main branch of laws and try as best they can to obey the laws of each location as well. Some countries require them to do things they would never announce to you though. And that is the weak point.
     
  11. Government doesn't have the right to my information without a search warrant / probable cause, it's that simple. False positives and false alarms jail thousands of people every year. (though admittedly that's a bigger problem in the UK than the US)

    The risk of that per individual is nice and low, though. What really gets under my skin on a day-to-day basis is corporate interests analyzing our every move, for profit. For people who are already using greasemonkey, this thing here's pretty neat!

    http://www.seosmarty.com/how-to-ghost-google-searching-google-without-google-to-know-about-you/
     
  12. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Sadly, the government would disagree with you and look for a way to lock you away for voicing your opinions.

    I think committing a crime to "Protect" us is still a crime.a warrant at the drop of *Any* hat. So there is no excuse whatsoever for warrantless wiretapping. But it happens every last day.

    I am sure you know about AT&T's "Secret rooms" that contain recording machines that record every last bit of data that is transfered through ANY AT&T phone/Internet communication.

    Want to hear crazy talk? I would not be surprised if the September 11th attack in 2001 was an inside job to open the doors for monitoring us. I have no evidence of this, but it seems awfully suspicious that the "Patriot Act" was able to be pushed into effect despite being clearly unconstitutional immediately after that awful crime against Americans happened.

    It has not been derailed in any significant means since. I doubt it ever will.

    Here I am saying all this over HTTP where I know every bit is recorded. I bet this earns me a new spot on some abysmal list created by traitors against my own, beloved, America. (They are traitors because they seek to dismiss the inconvenient parts of the constitution.)

    As usual, my rant was too long and wildly off topic. I will shut up now. :)
     
  13. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Yeah let us not go into that rabbit hole. Let's talk about firefox instead!

    Firefox 11 is so nice! I don't know if it's into automatic updates now, but I grabbed it yesterday and it's faster than 10 was, noticeably. For me anyway.
     
    Rarefied Horse Meat likes this.
  14. OmniaNigrum

    OmniaNigrum Member

    Lol. I am using the old reliable 3.6.xx versions.

    I tried using the 5.x series and had issues at the time, so I abandoned it in favor of this old thing. It still works fine.

    It has been long enough. I will try the newer versions and see if they work out with all my extensions. Portable FF 11 will be my whipping browser.
     
  15. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    Since HorseMeat asked me to show him my addon etc list I might as well post it here too -
    https://imgur.com/a/JfLu2

    In order: Greasemonkey Scripts, my theme, and both pages of addons.
     
  16. Daynab

    Daynab Community Moderator Staff Member

    I am necroing this thread because Firefox13 is out today, and I am not joking, they seemed to have fixed the memory issues that have plagued the browser since 3.6. FF13 cut my memory usage to half (400mb on start and I have a ton of expansions and tabs) instead of 800ish, and most importantly, even after a few hours the memory usage has barely went up at all, so they must've fixed most of the memory leaks.

    It also feels smoother and faster.

    If you left to chrome because of memory issues or slowness, consider trying out FF13. I was as surprised as you probably are reading this.
     
  17. Loerwyn

    Loerwyn Member

    Huh. You're right. My G15 is reporting my memory usage (in general) is down from 40% to 37% with the same tabs open.
     
  18. Cerbius

    Cerbius Member

    Firefox, 5evr.

    I just prefer the interface, customization and feel of the browser.
     
  19. Giygas

    Giygas Member

    If it was between FF and Chrome, I would choose FF for customizability. I just don't see what Chrome has going for it.

    I actually use Safari, though. Not because I want to, but because it's location on my computer is programmed in to my brain and if I try to switch to Firefox I forget exists a few days later. I suppose I could just move my Safari icon away :p
     
    Daynab likes this.
  20. banjo2E

    banjo2E Member

    I'm actually using a fork of Firefox called Pale Moon right now.

    It's basically Firefox, except they took out accessibility features and parental controls and replaced them with code optimizations.

    I haven't been using it very long but I'm already noticing a definite speed increase.