Like I said much earlier in this thread, I don't have any particular preferences one way or the other. I'm willing to try out anything, and the last year or so I've been building so many different 'portable' browser packages for the Puppy community that I'm usually just using whatever the current 'project' entails.

However; I have to agree with many of the other opinions recently expressed. For years, I was a die-hard Firefox user, but switched to Chrome in Autumn 2008; at that time, Firefox had a lot of 'issues', including serious memory leaks and a disturbing tendency to crash at the slightest excuse, several times a day. There was a lot of publicity about Chrome's beta test programme at the time, so I signed-up to try it out, more out of frustration than anything else. It was lightweight; sizzlingly fast, and rock-solid compared to FF. I pretty much fell for it, there & then, and used it exclusively for many years.

But with the introduction of Quantum, Mozilla have (with the exception of the WebAPI extensions debacle) thoroughly redeemed themselves. I'm as happy to use it these days as I am Chrome.....and in truth, I don't use Chrome as often as I did, since there's so many other very good Chromium-based 'clones' out there nowadays. Much of the shine on Chrome's crown has begun to tarnish...

Just one example of Quantum's improvement is the way in which WideVine is handled. If you want it, you tick the 'DRM' checkbox in Menu->Preferences; it's downloaded, and installed straightaway. If you decide you no longer want it on your system, just clear the checkbox, & it's immediately deleted & removed.

Widevine may have been Big Brother's 'baby' for many years, but Mozilla's implementation of it is much, much smoother & slicker.....and Quantum itself is far more stable than FF has been for a long time. Kudos to the team.


Mike.

And maybe that's why Chromium edged out Chrome this year, at least for users here. No spyware or reporting in to that company. (Just a guess.)

Well, ...... isn't Chromium Google's development model (project) for Chrome?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromi...web_browser%29

Fair enough

Chromium is still phoning home.
Yes, it's FOSS, but apparently people consider that normal nowadays.
FWIW, Firefox is also phoning home by default. Big difference: In FF, you can change that via user.js. - in Chromium, you need to change the source.

I use Firefox heavily, and when I want to something else I use Vivaldi.

@ cwizardone:-

Kudos for understanding that.

So many people think that Chrome is the source of everything, because it's so popular. The fact remains; Chromium is where all the bleeding-edge development work takes place.....the Chromium Project is, after all, essentially Google's browser R & D department. Google sponsor it (read, FUND it!) But the Chromium Project was in existence for 8-9 months before the first alphas & beta started becoming available to folks like me who signed up for the Chrome test program back in 2008.

Curiously, Chromium is always compiled with the expectation that users will be running the very newest of everything; if you're not, it won't run. Google, however, wait until there's a stable release every 6 weeks or so. They take the source code, then re-compile it against an older glibc & dependencies, for by so doing they make it available to a far greater number of users, since not everyone is running the very newest of everything.

And that's why it's so popular.

The Chromium source-code is the wellspring whence issue 'clones' like Slimjet, SRWare's Iron browser, Vivaldi, Yandex, the Chinese Maxthon.....etc, etc. They all 'shop' at the same store.....and the Project's semi-autonomous 'build-bots' are constantly churning out build after build of Chromium, 24/7, many of which never see the light of day due to one set of bugs or another.

It's not the world's most popular browser for nothing; there's an awful lot of effort goes into ensuring it remains so.


Mike.

You say all that like you think it's a good thing.
I say:
Chromium is Google.
Obviously one of the world's largest data mining companies has a significant interest in ensuring that their main data mining tool remains popular and functional.
Not only (optional) Google account integration but also various calls to Google servers are part of Chromium's source.
But apparently many people think that "Open Source" trumps everything, even "Global Corporate Data Mining".
And here's the thing I never understand: all clones except the one I linked in my last post (*) leave the calls to Google servers in the code, even those that call themselves "privacy blah"!

Oh and btw, Chrom/e/ium remains running in the background even when you close all windows.

(*) to my knowledge - prove me wrong!

Absolutely. Nobody in their right mind would deny that; of course Chromium is Google - the Chromium Project was set up, by them, to develop the code for Chrome in the first place. They just came to realise that by 'open-sourcing' the code for it they would 'fudge' the whole intrusiveness issue in the eyes (and minds) of the average user....

As for running in the background.....you disable that under 'Advanced' settings, re-boot the browser, and re-boot your system for good measure. That'll stop it. I've done a fair bit of research into the beast in the 12 years I've been using it, and there's a lot more relevant info available than you might think. I learnt the disabling trick years ago.

-------------------------------------------------------

I've been a user of the Google-sphere for years. The Chromium-based browsers do what I want, and everything integrates wonderfully, to make my life easier. I lead an unimaginably boring, hum-drum existence, and couldn't care less what Big Brother knows about me. There's no skeletons in my closet, nor juicy bits of meat to pick off them even if there were any. Everything I do online is with my on-line, 'Google-recognised' persona; even my financial stuff, which isn't hard to do if you know how (the residential details remain the same, so the banks are happy). My accounts have no overdrafts permitted, and there's so little in them it's not worth anybody's time bothering with 'em.

Even identity theft would have so little impact on my life I doubt I'd even notice.

I'm so unlike most Linux geeks it's untrue. Many seem obsessed with privacy & security to the point of paranoia, spending days and weeks tailoring huge hosts files, hours & days carefully tweaking everything they possibly can to give no-one the slightest chance of getting so much as a sniff of their true identity. And yet many still come to grief, despite all the precautions.

In the nearly 6 years I've been using Puppy, running in RAM and removing the boot medium once up-and-running, only saving stuff off-line and unplugging the medium between items, and not bothering with a save-file/folder so that every session is like a 'LiveSession', disappearing into cyber-space at power-off, I've never had so much as a hint of trouble. Works for me.

In the words of the old proverb, "Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks."


Mike.

^ Oh, the Nothing to hide argument! With a long tradition of supporting totalitarian regimes throughout history.

Or: