I’d recommend Brave (brew install brave-browser) over Chrome if you care about privacy at all. It’s a Chromium based browser so has feature parity with Chrome, but it doesn’t send your personal information to the Google hivemind. Built-in ad-blocker too, and per-site noscript making it convenient to only run JS on sites you trust.
Well… I work on ads at Google, and I gave up on privacy a decade ago. So I don’t think we’re going to be thinking about this the same way, but some thoughts:
I wouldn’t use an ad blocker. Sites are offering a trade: you can see our stuff if you also see our ads. If I don’t want that trade I can go somewhere else.
I especially wouldn’t use Brave, because it removes the ads sites have chosen to display, and asks advertisers to pay the browser to display their ads instead.
I’m happy for my information to go to Google, because they do useful things with it. My location history is automatically uploaded, and being able to figure out where I was on a specific date has been useful several times. Gmail scans my emails and turns flights into reminders. Ad tracking means better ad targeting, which means my visits to pages make more money for the site owners. Google’s handling of user information is very good, and I’m frustrated that regulatory changes mean I’ll likely see many fewer helpful new features connecting the pieces of information I’ve given them. None of this hurts me, and in return I get a lot of useful free things.
JS is very well sandboxed, and I’m fine running JS even on sites I don’t trust at all. JS exploits in Chrome are rare enough to be newsworthy when they happen.
I’d recommend Brave (
brew install brave-browser) over Chrome if you care about privacy at all. It’s a Chromium based browser so has feature parity with Chrome, but it doesn’t send your personal information to the Google hivemind. Built-in ad-blocker too, and per-site noscript making it convenient to only run JS on sites you trust.Well… I work on ads at Google, and I gave up on privacy a decade ago. So I don’t think we’re going to be thinking about this the same way, but some thoughts:
I wouldn’t use an ad blocker. Sites are offering a trade: you can see our stuff if you also see our ads. If I don’t want that trade I can go somewhere else.
I especially wouldn’t use Brave, because it removes the ads sites have chosen to display, and asks advertisers to pay the browser to display their ads instead.
I’m happy for my information to go to Google, because they do useful things with it. My location history is automatically uploaded, and being able to figure out where I was on a specific date has been useful several times. Gmail scans my emails and turns flights into reminders. Ad tracking means better ad targeting, which means my visits to pages make more money for the site owners. Google’s handling of user information is very good, and I’m frustrated that regulatory changes mean I’ll likely see many fewer helpful new features connecting the pieces of information I’ve given them. None of this hurts me, and in return I get a lot of useful free things.
JS is very well sandboxed, and I’m fine running JS even on sites I don’t trust at all. JS exploits in Chrome are rare enough to be newsworthy when they happen.
(Speaking only for myself)