> I won't tell you to change your decision
It is not particularly a decision but rather simple logic:
I still use Google's services and while I am looking for a freedom+privacy
respecting alternative it would be silly to drop them because this would
block my work. So considering that my life is still "Googled" and changing
the browser won't do much. So in this situation I may be considered a
hypocrite who discusses privacy in general.
> You must consider all known factors, and estimate the unknown based on the
past and the track record of the browser and developer.
I think I have already done that. Right now I find Chromium least worse
because of the results of the test + the ability to use uBO and uMatrix which
I consider essential extensions providing additional control over browsing,
tracking, malware etc. No other browser can give me this combination of
factors. So although certain parts of Chromium may be considered non-free
(which seems to be mainly license-wise) the overall functionality of this
combination is far better than any FF-fork. Midori and Konqueror are
incompatible with uBO and uM. lynx is an overkill. Tor is slow (and some
sites won't work with it). Let's not forget also that browsers like IceCat
and other forks which have not updated their code up to FF 57 basis still
don't have the new fixes about Meltdown for example. Chromium (even not
latest) has a flag for process isolation.
I think we should also mention without any bias that Google's experts are
very good at security. If we disregard for a moment the overall privacy and
political disaster of Google - which other company has considered removing
Intel ME from their hardware, testing deeply things to discover Spectre and
Meltdown, patching whatever is possible against that? But... yes, I know.
> but I really wish I knew of a replacement that people would be willing to
switch to
I have bookmarked (in order to look at later) https://nextcloud.com/
I also learned to download files with public access from Google Drive without
having to log in to Google Drive or use of JS. If the link is to a file, it
can easily be converted to a direct link. Here is a bash script line which
does that:
echo $1 | sed -r -e
's/(https:\/\/drive\.google\.com\/)file\/d\/([^/]+)\/view/echo
"\1uc?id=\2\&e=download"/ge'
Unfortunately with other services like WeTransfer that seems not possible.
So back to your comment: yes, long term you are absolutely right, that's why
I filed all this bug reports. But right at this moment Chromium works better.
BTW, on a side note regarding online services: It is generally possible for
one to buy an Opteron server from Technoethical and host everything on it
(website, share files, email etc). But the expenses will be much bigger and
the quality of the service may not be so good for hosting high traffic
websites. Well, perhaps one could put the server at an ISP data center and
pay for high speed Internet but that may still not be sufficient, more
servers may be needed in a cluster etc etc. So we simply don't have the
resources to create such alternatives. And for a simple user whose needs are
not so big it is an absolute overkill. That's why I was putting question #1
in the thread about freedom.
