> Could you please explain what freedom issues (apart from the one mentioned > by me) there are? I have always thought Chromium is FLOSS.
See Magic Banana and Supertramp's posts. > But I am not a programmer. And it seems no programmer has taken care to > remove them I wasn't suggesting that you yourself do it. I was referring to Firefox derivatives, including Abrowser, IceCat, and Tor Browser. From reading your bug report, it appears that Mozilla is unwilling to make the reasonable change you requested. However, the three browsers I listed are more likely to address the issue if brought to their attention. It sounds like you've already done this for Icecat and gotten a promising response. I suggest doing the same for Tor Browser. If the data is not sent through the Tor network or contains identifying data then it is deanonymitizing and I'm sure they would take it seriously. > yet the vendors claim it is free software respecting privacy There are two claims in there, as freedom (in the software sense) and privacy are to important but separate issues. I agree that Firefox does not adequately respect privacy, but it is free software which is why it is possible to create Firefox derivatives that improve the software with respect to privacy. You've found one issue that has not yet been fixed in Icecat, Abrowser (I just checked), or Tor Browser (more info needed to know if deanonymitizing in this case) but there is nothing stopping them from fixing the issue now. If Firefox were proprietary no one would be allowed to fix any of these issues. > Perhaps I need to find an command > line tool or get rid of RSS totally... I recently started using newsbeuter. It's very easy to configure. Run it once to generate ~/.newsbeuter/ and save a list of links to feeds as ~/.newsbeuter/urls. > ETA: FWIW this whole thing makes me question the FOSS software as a whole. It is possible for free software to include antifeatures, and it's true that community control over the software doesn't immediately eliminate all antifeatures. However, at least it is possible to audit and improve the software. With proprietary software we are truly at the developers mercy and only have their word that the software contains no malicious functionality. It's similar to how science works. It is possible for a study to be flawed or for results to be forged, but if the research is public and subject to peer review it is possible to refute falsehoods, which also incentivizes researchers to be accurate and truthful in the first place. If scientists were allowed to keep their methedology a secret so that no one could attempt to replicate their results we would simply have to trust what they say is the truth. Public information, whether it is code or any other kind of information, is not necessarily perfect, but it is far more reliable than privatized information.
