as we all know chromium base browsers are secure than Firefox at least right now here is a comparison Firefox and Chromium | Madaidan's Insecurities
now chrome is one of them but due to larger amount of data collection and privacy concern
now what are the option
brave , ungoogled-chromium, chromuium, or fedora compiled chromium with some patches maybe from bromite brave and Ungoogled-chromium all patches are gpl so license is not an issue
I’m assuming that you mean make a chrome-a-clone browser the installation default. I’d say no. If people want to install, they are free to do so, and it’s easy enough. Chromium is already available in the Fedora repository for installation, as is another variant KDE Falkon. If others are desired, folks are free to package if they meet the Fedora packaging Guidelines. People can wax poetic about the pros/cons of each browser, but at the end of the day it’s really about buying into an ecosystem controlled by one gigantic corporation. Google isn’t developing Chromium for altruistic reasons.
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no you are wrong chrome is a clone of chromium and chromium is a opensource peoject yes google maybe the largest contributor but there are individual and microsoft and other brands.
switch to chomium will increase privacy and security of fedora users so it is important and if it is built by fedora with some patches from other projects so it can as i have said bromite and ungoogle chromium have a lots of good patch set even iridium also have such so it need some discussion.
but it is very important to switch now.
firefox is no more a good option anymore with its weaker protection weak sandboxing. chromium is the way to go.
@frankjunior Actually, the LxQt Spin ships by default with Falkon, which is Chromium-based and, from what I’ve read, you can even copy the widevine libraries by yourself and enable widevine for Netflix viewing.
Considering cloud gaming works only on Chromium browsers, I’d say it’s a pretty decent browser.
I like Firefox though, but beware that Workstation shipping with Firefox doesn’t mean all Fedora editions ship only with Firefox.
I don’t really agree with your perspective here.
First privacy and security are not the same. From a privacy perspective, Firefox offers several advantages over Chromium and that gap will only widen in the future. Despite the fact that there are many contributors towards Chromium, Google has complete control over the code base. Once Google disables webRequest blocking, many privacy-related add-ons will take a huge hit to effectiveness or simply go away.
Like Privacy, security is complicated issue and there are many factors to consider. That article is focused on certain aspects of security but each individual needs to consider their own risk model and determine what is best for them.
In the end, a browser of choice is a matter of personal preference. My opinion is Firefox is a great choice for a default browser. One of the problems with many derivative browsers such as the ones you mention, is the delay between when security patches are released for the upstream browser and when they are incorporated downstream. Depending on the browser, this can be days, weeks or even months later. I would worry more about that risk than some of the others you are highlighting.
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And beware of chromification of the internet.
(Do you remember the era of sites working only with MS internet explorer?)
Having a well versed alternative is always good. Having choices is good. So, with such a risk of a new monopoly, I prefer to use, advocate and support Firefox.
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i know privacy and security is different that is why i put a and now you are right that chromium is kind of googles control as most of the code is actually provided by them butit can be enhanced hust by applying some basic patches from ungoogledchromium team and bromite team if you lookinto bromite or brave project they are kind of awesome as it uses all feature security stuff from chromium and removes google stuff and replace with privacy respecting alternative and bromite have many patches for security enhancement which makes beomite with a better secure browser so as you have read the about link firefox lacks many stuff so fedora should switch to with maybe a self compiled patched chromium.
it is already i also use firefox but sometimes firefox lacks many stuff so having a browser from fedora can be a better option
A few things:
- I think you are underestimating how much work would need to go into what you are proposing. Even if it is mostly applying patching from other places, keeping that updated in a timely fashion on a rapidly changing codebase the size of the Chromium browser is a big deal. A browser has a huge amount of code, vastly more than most applications.
- Who, exactly, are you signing up to maintain this new Fedora browser? Are you volunteering to build and maintain this browser yourself?
- Even maintaining a derivative browser carries risk from a security perspective. Who ensures that the patches are applied in a way that doesn’t introduce new/different security problems.
- You seem to be looking at the advantages of derivative browsers without considering the new risks introduced by using them.
- Once webrequest blocking is removed from Chromium, all the chromium-based browsers are going to be limited in what they can do from a privacy perspective. Basically, users will need to rely much more heavily on the internal tools the browsers provide which means if your new Fedora browser wants to provide privacy enhancing features the team will need to build those too.
- What about features like sync that people would expect a browser to provide? Is Fedora also expected to provide the code and infrastructure for that?
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i was building bromite for my android with there patches and it is easy need some time to sync the chromium repo and after that just simply apply the patches i never done a linux build but as you have asked i will try to build but i am not sure that all those patches will work on the linux build also so i need to apply one by one and cherry pick so i can determine that which work and which one does not but i think i need some help from someone else.
if i could do that build successfully and i am sure as we are talking patches from other source they will update those patches as code base changes significantly.
i have looked into the patches as i was using bromite it is as trusted as brave and fedora is.
and brave patches and introduce more features but bromite patches to remove stuff like google binary and other sheddy stuff. like FLoC.
and adds some ads blocking by default and removes preloading which happens through google servers. disable jit randomized timezone and block webgl so on. i think it is a good browser we can pick some of them to make a clean browser so it can be a good replacement for firefox.
sync can be done with firefox sync but that patch is not present at the moment in bromite so i need to look for other sources
patches are open you can look
now if we talk about the updates it is okey they goes faster then chrome sometime.
it is not something hard i hope as garuda makes its own browser with own patches on firefox source with librewolf patches.
You are making a distinction without a difference. Google completely controls the Chromium project, they own it. Yes, others can make contributions, but Google decides which contributions make it into the project.
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maybe you are right but firefox lacks many things whatever. but if i could built one with patches i will share on fedora repo.
100% NO! Google plans to eliminate the ability to block ads before the browser loads them, which is what most ad-blocking extensions use
Here are some examples of what happens when you have one for profit corporation in total control of a brower. One would think people would have learned from Microsoft and IE. Google is just hiding behind a cloak of Open Source, but the danger of having a for-profit corporation in complete control is the same.
The latest: Chromium Ends JPEG XL Before It Even Lived
And of course as @baaash mentioned, there is Manifest V3: Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules • The Register
And this: Fedora preemptively turns off Chromium usage of private Google Sync APIs | ZDNET
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Keep in mind that this is written by a self-identified security researcher. If you’ve read their other articles, they proposed to use a systemd-free distro if you want a secure system, since systemd contains “a lot of unnecessary attack surface”. They also spread misinformation about Flatpak by referencing code they don’t understand (when the documentation literally says otherwise). Also, this article is heavily biased towards Chromium. Chromium’s security isn’t perfect, yet they don’t seem to criticize any of it, meanwhile they talk about all sorts of issues with Firefox. Personally, I take this “researcher” with a grain of salt. (Admittedly I skimmed through the article, so please correct me if I’m wrong.)
That being said, I don’t think there’s an end all be all press on which one is more secure. Browsers and the web are extremely complicated and security researchers can’t really agree with which one is more secure. Some security researchers say Chromium is better on that front, whereas others say Firefox. And even then, it’s important to know their background, as, for example, a security researcher who researches security within an OS won’t automatically translate their knowledge in browsers/web.
Firefox is heavily contributed by Red Hat (which is known to be well versed in security), and the Tor Project (which also have established knowledge and experience and is funded by the government). Chromium has Google (again, well versed in security), so it’s genuinely difficult to know which one is secure.
In the end, use whatever you trust more. I completely disagree with shipping a Chromium based browser since it is maintained and dictated by a companies that are known to abuse their power (Google for Blink/Chromium, Apple for WebKit). Mozilla, despite making a lot of controversial changes they’ve done, is far less exploitative than Google.
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No, no, no, and no.
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That’s just the eb and flow of browsers going back and forth. I don’t think Fedora should make a major change like that based on one sites analysis.
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Part of Fedora marketing strategy is to make the OS welcoming enough for new users. They shouldn’t have to mess around with installing additional packages to get something to work with the browser that may already just work in FF. But most of all:
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If someone is smart enough to say “I’m going to use Fedora as my daily driver” then they’re smart enough to choose and install the browser of their choice.
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yes some of them are really seems like bashing firefox and telling chromium is better. i know it is true for android devices as it still lacks per site isolation and so on in that case chromium in android is more secure but in that case if we ignore this.
but i find some tests please don’t look into chrome it is a spyware just compare with other chromium base https://privacytests.org/
I agree. Google is on pace to dominate the web unless there are other options like Firefox.
Fedora should stick with Firefox as the default browser, and if users want to use a Chromium-based browser they can install it.
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yes we should stick to firefox because blink is the dominant and browser monopoly will make it worse but still firefox lacks in some security that brave have so i think what we can do it is my proposal can we lookinto if that can be done we add google chrome browser repo in 3rd party repos knowing that it is the worse browser that human ever had so why not add brave repo so instead of chrome we can get a safe privacy friendly and chromium browser if we want else chrome is already there in flathub. not need to be included as rpm.
In the Fedora user survey results, Firefox is still the most popular browser from respondents and what’s popular for Fedora users in particular should have far more weight than what is considered to be more popular by various web user agent scrapers. The barrier to installing Chrome, Chromium, Brave, etc., is very low. Considering that the majority of users currently prefer Firefox (based on the user survey data) and Firefox’s more steady open-source community commitment, I strongly suggest we stick with Firefox as default for Workstation (while letting spins continue to have freedom to pick something else as Konqueror historically was for KDE, etc.).
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okey then lets do a poll.
about including 3rd party
chrome rpm repo or
brave rpm repo
i am asking for 3rd party repo of brave instead of chrome which is a privacy nightmare i hope you got my point.
as you have said firefox is major but we still include chrome rpm repo while enabling 3rdparty repos. if there is a scope of replaceing 3rd party chrome repo with brave as it is fully opensource and secure privacy friendly.