this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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That's not it. Mozilla has ruined firefox. They have added spyware and made google the default engine. Most of their profits go to shady places, etc
Uh, yeah; gonna need a source on this. You're allowed to not like that they made Google the default search engine, but this statement is straight up-misinformation.
I presume they're talking about pocket integration
I can't rember my source so take this with a grain of salt but your browser still connects to telemetry.mozilla.org even when telemetry is turned off and you need to use something like arkenfox or install a fork like librewolf to fully disable. I discovered this after going through a rabbithole when pihole said it blocked telemetry.mozilla.org even when I disabled telemetry
I have found this support page on the matter
They also have no rule against spyware (or at least proprietary software) on addons.mozilla.org
Googles been the default engine since the Netscape Websuite days. I don't always love what Mozilla does with their browser, but they do an excellent job of balancing "the web should be easy to use," "the web should be humane," and "the web should be what you want it to be."
If you want to say Mozilla sucks, that's fine, go ahead, just be ready for that any other browser Dev group is either worse or dependent on being downstream of Firefox to do what they do
They need money somehow, making Google the default search engine is a source of income.
You can always make startpage or ddg your default search engine anyways, both on android and desktop
Takes a couple of seconds to change the default engine, turn off the gnarlier of the telemetry, and disable the sponsored stuff in the new tab page. Infinitely better than any other mainstream browser
Not really a high bar
Duckduckgo proxies bing search results (ober the api, they aren't chad scrapers) and is therefore is under the foot of microsoft. This has forced them to whitelist ms trackers in their privacy tools but I haven't heard anything bad about the search engine.
Startpage scrapes google results so isn't under anyones foot. It has had some controversy due to being bought by an ad company but they haven't seemed to do anything bad yet
In all, startpage is better than duckduckgo
Are you referring to the time when the DuckDuckGo browser was blocking all known trackers except Microsoft trackers? After that information was made public and users complained, DuckDuckGo was able to renegotiate its agreement with Microsoft so that it can block their trackers.
Furthermore, DuckDuckGo now publish their blocklist on GitHub.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/05/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-scripts
It’s worth clarifying that this issue affected the DuckDuckGo browser, not the search engine itself.
So if you were refusing to use DuckDuckGo browser on the basis that they allow Microsoft tracking, then that issue has been resolved now. But if you were saying that this incident has made you lose trust in DDG and that’s why you refuse to use it… well, that’s fair enough. It’s your choice, but I personally would trust DDG more than StartPage, just because StartPage is owned by an ad company.
Which search engine do you recommend?
I don't know
Maybe brave search?
I don't think brave is privacy friendly at all
Could you please explain why you don’t think Brave is privacy friendly?
I think Brave Search has a really good privacy policy.
It’s also worth noting that Brave has its own search index… as opposed to DuckDuckGo which uses Bing, and StartPage which uses Google.
Although admittedly this does mean that the search results from Brave Search isn’t the best at the moment. Hopefully this will improve with time.
It keeps Google from anti-competitive lawsuits. So it’s mutually beneficial, although the first thing you should do is change your search engine to a more private one.
If you are paying people to compete with you, you need some anticompetitive lawsuits.
you’re not wrong.
Most of their money goes to shady places anyway. The money is unnecessery