> Actually, I was more talking about the forks then firefox itself.
I have provided factual tests for the forks too.
> Okay, Well it just seemed suspicious that you attacked firefox forks too.
Because essentially, if you attack firefox forks even, you basically have
nowhere to move to...
The forks inherit the codebase from FF. For IceCat in particular I have
investigated more thoroughly than for any other by looking at the actual code
repository. You can find my comments here:
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/web-browser?page=4#comment-127390
> Unless lynx is your fix,
lynx is not a fix but an overkill. I don't have a fix. There are only
workarounds (particular settings) which I have shared in the web browsers
thread. Or you could follow Abdullah's strategy (with caveats too).
> Okay, well I thought wrong I guess, its just kind of strange that someone
would attack both firefox and chromium
I don't know why you use the word attack. I am not exercising violence on
anyone. Rather: sharing findings and disagreements.
> as if they were both on the same level...
They are not. I have explained in full detail everything I have found.
Additionally Magic Banana shared some findings about licensing and specific
obfuscated code. So license and privacy wise - they are both imperfect by
default. The difference in favor of Chromium (configuration wise) is that it
is easier to achieve the zero packet privacy level. This is confirmed by the
short tcpdump test but not by any extensive, in-depth or lengthy
investigation which would reveal if any of the browsers communicates with the
companies in a disguised way (which I doubt but don't exclude completely as a
possibility). Also Chromium devs don't close the bug report about it and
admit it should not communicate without need. That must not be extrapolated
and associated easily to the general mischief which both corporations are
involved in on a different level. This is just browser test and nothing else.
> When firefox is actually somewhat better on its own... With tweaking and
without...
You have probably read too many articles which say that Mozilla is your
friend.
> Okay, does RMS plan to have the problems fixed? I would guess he would if
it is a problem otherwise, he would find a better fix that is more
substantial than the one the developer has.
He has not shared any plans with me. All he said was 1 sentence: "I asked the
developer to tell me what's going on." and when later I asked him to take a
look at the bug reports at Mozilla and share with everyone that Mozilla
doesn't really care about privacy but is only throwing dust in our eyes all
he said was "I will look. Thanks."
The update which the developer made came yesterday but it is about Abrowser -
a program which seems impossible to use/test outside Trisquel (i.e. on my
opensuse system) so I can't say anything about it:
https://listas.trisquel.info/pipermail/trisquel-devel/2018-February/001147.html
Also regarding my concerns about telemetry I asked him directly:
----
Q: Do you have any plans to actually remove the telemetry code or will we
rely long term on just having the snake asleep by disabling it through prefs?
A: I see no issue with this at this point. Previously (before WebExtensions)
any extension could enable that or make changes to any other preference, but
that is all sandboxed away now.
----
As you see - just mitigations, not a fix at the core of things and no plans
for one. Of course that is much better than default FF settings but still far
from a completely clean and trustworthy program which many independent
developers have checked.
> Although, tcpdump I know little of, first I heard of it was a month or two
ago which probably was you. right?
man tcpdump
