this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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You can track the bug history here:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751363
You can see here Chromium had support for this for several years prior:
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/log/PKGBUILD?h=chromium-vaapi
Android being based on Linux prob has something to do with Chromium's strong Linux support, but Mozilla has consistently prioritized Windows/Mac. Despite it still be challenging, building Chromium from source has always been a lot easier IMO than trying to create a custom build of Firefox.
Regardless, when it comes to privacy, Chromium itself is pretty stripped down and has policy-based integrations that put it on par with Firefox in terms of security. Even with Firefox, you'd have to modify quite a few policies to improve security. Tor/Mullvad Browser though do a better job in many ways and there is no equal to those privacy enhancements on Chromium that I know of, unless you're using something like GrapheneOS.
Point being, people like to complain about Chromium a lot & act like Apple fan bois for Firefox, when in reality privacy is nearly the same with both with some minor configurations.
What the heck are you talking about? Chromium is one of the hardest packages to build and it takes forever. Firefox has FAR fewer dependencies. Chromium's privacy enhancements are a joke.
You should go tell that to the maintainers of GrapheneOS, which is known as the most secure mobile OS... which uses a custom Chromium build, because of Chromium's superior sandboxing.
Chromium is not stripped down at all, just use googerteller and see. It contacts Google everywhere, on the password list, on the account list, in some settings pages, and just randomly sometimes.
It is very crazy. And also it is not fingerprint resistant at all.
I am using all flag settings, policies and GUI settings possibly existing and it still is like that. So no, it is not the same privacy-wise.
Oh really, what policies are you using? Cause my Firefox does all the same things you mention regarding calling Mozilla services for all sorts of things, including telemetry. Oh, and it isn't fingerprint resistant either... so please, share what you're doing.
For Firefox I am either using Librewolf or Arkenfox user.js
But as Librewolf has a good CI/CD system I think I will switch to that. Problem is they are not active at all, while the arkenfox guy is very active.
For Chromium I use the secureblue policies in /usr/etc/chromium/policies/managed