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0 pointsGuB-425y ago0 comments

I also hate the privacy argument. Anyone can write super-private software, it just needs to do nothing.

Anyone can do better than Google when it comes to privacy, especially if you define "privacy" as "don't do what Google is doing". It is almost a tautology: we first define Google as the opposite of privacy and then market yourself as private by not being Google. In order to drive the point, you add some kind of blocking feature and, yay, private!

In order to be relevant, you need to do more than that. Firefox used to be a great browser not because it was private, but because it was a great browser. It had great support for the latest web technologies, tabbed browsing before IE, it was fast, etc... And because of that it managed to make a dent in IE market share. But now, what does it have that Chrome doesn't besides not being from Google? Firefox even lost most of its identity by discontinuing XUL (for good reasons, I know) and updating its UI to look more like Chrome. I use both browsers on a day-to-day basis and Chrome tends to work better on average, though Firefox seems to be slowly catching up. I don't know what the situation is with Servo but it might be what Firefox needs.

Another example would be DuckDuckGo. Again, it caught the "privacy" virus. Please, no, "private" just means you are a proxy for inferior Bing results in this case. The worst part is that DDG has more to offer than "privacy", like instant answers and bangs. Why not market these instead?

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6 comments · 2 top-level

supernovae5y ago· 4 in thread

Bing results are quite good.

But i still didn't buy DDG's privacy stuff

liability5y ago

The best way to privately search the web is to not use a general purpose search engine in the first place if you can at all help it.

Instead of using DDG's !wiki or googling "wiki [topic]" you can configure a search keyword to send you to Wikipedia's search results page, cutting out the middleman. I have this done for a dozen or so sites I use frequently and this has cut my general purpose search engine usage down significantly.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

This is the sort of privacy enhancing feature that Firefox should streamline and advertise. I wonder if they don't make it known to users because it might influence how much money Google is willing to give them for being the default general purpose search engine..

minerjoe5y ago

The best solution I know for Wikipedia is to just host your own copy of it. Never need to send any queries out to the web. It's only around 100G with images. I use a simple url filter to change all wikipedia links to point at my local copy. Works like a charm. And fast. https://www.kiwix.org/en/

def_true_false5y ago

The UI for this feature barely even exists in Firefox -- you have to make a bookmark, and then edit it to replace the query with %s and add a keyword. There is also the half baked "one-click search engines" thing, but the button to "find more" just redirects to the extension store.

The Chrome UI is somewhat better and it also automatically creates these when you use a search somewhere, with a keyword equivalent to the site's domain.

I don't know why Mozilla doesn't just copy this old Opera UI: https://i.postimg.cc/1XCg1HG8/opera-search-edit.png

stjohnswarts5y ago

Can you show us where DDG has failed and continues to fail on the privacy front? It seems pretty decent to me.

Shorel5y ago

> Firefox even lost most of its identity by discontinuing XUL (for good reasons, I know) and updating its UI to look more like Chrome.

Firefox lost most of its identity by updating its UI to look more like Old Opera. And it has been copying Opera since it was called Phoenix.

This is also the reason I use Firefox. It is the browser that more closely resembles Old Opera.

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