If I want to keep a chrome-based browser, what is a decent (in terms of privacy intrusion and adblocking) one to use?
Is Vivaldi a reasonable choice as a replacement of Brave?
If you’re fine with missing some QoL features, ungoogled-chromium is the only Chromium browser that I recommend for privacy. It’s very barebones as the name suggests.
This is just my perspective but since chrome is the most popular and heavily developed browser made by the most infamously intrusive company, that vanilla chromium base has the best compatability with FOSS modifications (plugins) and it’s generic nature make it harder to fingerprint than some more unique chromium based browsers and so it is already the best option. So I would say just use the fully ungoogled chromium. Sort of how the best Debian based Linux is Debian itself. You can get what you need in a FOSS package with the least amount of browser company fluff added (ala brave) and you can usually replace that with a wide compatability of equally FOSS plugin like ublock origin or duckduckgo privacy essentials. The only downside is too many plugins make your browser have a bit more unique of a fingerprint, but partitioning your web use between other browsers like Firefox as well seems to be the way.
I admit Vivaldi is pretty easy on the eyes and probably doesn’t add any web backdoor to your data so you can use it for some browsing too if you keep its use partitioned for only a select few sites but as far as I can tell it’s too similar to ungoogled chromium to really add anything that a FOSS plugin like ublock couldn’t do better. The key to privacy is to use stuff that is as open and publicly verifiable and auditable as possible and not added on top of chromium by a seedy commercial tech startup like brave to start with.
Which ever one you chose don’t forget you need to do a good job at vetting all the top people involved just to ensure their personal morals and social opinions align with the current trends of social media.
If I want to keep a chrome-based browser, what is a decent (in terms of privacy intrusion and adblocking) one to use? Is Vivaldi a reasonable choice as a replacement of Brave?
If you’re fine with missing some QoL features, ungoogled-chromium is the only Chromium browser that I recommend for privacy. It’s very barebones as the name suggests.
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
This is just my perspective but since chrome is the most popular and heavily developed browser made by the most infamously intrusive company, that vanilla chromium base has the best compatability with FOSS modifications (plugins) and it’s generic nature make it harder to fingerprint than some more unique chromium based browsers and so it is already the best option. So I would say just use the fully ungoogled chromium. Sort of how the best Debian based Linux is Debian itself. You can get what you need in a FOSS package with the least amount of browser company fluff added (ala brave) and you can usually replace that with a wide compatability of equally FOSS plugin like ublock origin or duckduckgo privacy essentials. The only downside is too many plugins make your browser have a bit more unique of a fingerprint, but partitioning your web use between other browsers like Firefox as well seems to be the way.
I admit Vivaldi is pretty easy on the eyes and probably doesn’t add any web backdoor to your data so you can use it for some browsing too if you keep its use partitioned for only a select few sites but as far as I can tell it’s too similar to ungoogled chromium to really add anything that a FOSS plugin like ublock couldn’t do better. The key to privacy is to use stuff that is as open and publicly verifiable and auditable as possible and not added on top of chromium by a seedy commercial tech startup like brave to start with.
Which ever one you chose don’t forget you need to do a good job at vetting all the top people involved just to ensure their personal morals and social opinions align with the current trends of social media.