Dot Browser – privacy-conscious web browser

Does it support extensions?

Also, what does this mean?

  > Protect your mailbox

  > We will offer to mask your email address when you sign up for sites or services.

Thank you!

Why is Discord a red flag in your opinion?

It is indeed not very searchable, but I think there's always Github and the official website for more persistent information.

[0] https://lunar.fyi

- no native clients, you have to run the official client either in a browser or as an electron app and using either of them consume too much resources and make my laptop run much hotter than it normally does

- conversations are locked inside discord, you can't search them outside of Discord, imagine if all StackExchange websites including StackOverflow just became another Discord server and the disaster that would be for people everywhere

So yeah, if a project or community I care about uses Discord, I guess I will use it, but reluctantly and with displeasure.

But the syntax highlighting is so good on Discord, that it makes it really easy to discuss technical stuff.

I would jump on a chat alternative that:

    • is Google searchable (like Gitter)
    • has good syntax highlighting (like Discord and Slack)
    • has CLI clients (like Mattermost)
    • has a low barrier entry for non-technical users 
        • sign in with Google
        • state your issue
        • get solution in a few messages
        • forget about it if you don’t need to be part of that community

Also how are they performing ad blocking? Are they just shipping it with u-block origin or their own technology?

Not to put anyone down, but I don't think people realise how hard it is to deliver a secure and working web browser. They are basically OS scale.

Only one "purchasing" decision to make at that point.

It was trustworthy, until it wasn't.

These things don't make them inherently evil, the world isn't black and white and people doing good still need money, but it flips your idea about singularizing trust in the browser maker on it's head.

I would prefer a world where all browsers have integrated ad blocking, in which case I only have to make a decision on browser, not browser + ad blocking extension.

Firefox itself already has some features to protect your privacy. Why go through the trouble of creating a whole new browser where a combination of tweaks in settings and maybe a plugin for FF would yield similar results?

Seeking out a different browser to use takes similar, if not greater effort than just installing uBlock Origin (or a similar extension, or a few) and possibly altering some browser settings.

Plus, there's the issue of trust - how many people can vouch for a particular browser, or an extension? If a malicious piece of code would get into a niche browser or extension, how long would it take for someone to notice and bring that to the attention of the wider community? Would there even be such a community? Or maybe if they'd sell out and the product would change ownership?

The more eyes there are looking at code and how it runs, the safer it is, or at least i'd argue so. Therefore, sticking with the popular options is probably better, in general. In this case, that would probably (hopefully) be Firefox with some addons.

This guy made a brwoser based on Gecko tho, props to him.

The reason it supports the open Web is that Brave uses the Chromium engine used in Chrome, Edge, Opera, and basically everything but Firefox.

Firefox doesn't, and is the only thing stopping Google being the sole arbitrator of Web standards (and they do not have your best interests at heart.) Google is already abusing their near-monopoly; keeping Firefox market share high is helping stop it, though.

This browser is Firefox based, so it has all of those advantages.

These can range from popular extensions to smaller, more specific productivity extensions. As a specific example, there is a Zendesk extension that can help load all links you click load in a single instance rather than having multiple tabs. It uses Zendesk's built in tabbing system for tickets and is very helpful for workflow.

The problem is this is only a chrome extension, and no such thing exists for Firefox. This is one example but there are so many more, and more of those situations are happening over time.

That is a worrying trend. It means that the chrome browser has such a massive market share, that in a lot of cases worrying about Firefox compatibility isn't even a productive concern anymore. This will eventually end in life support compatibility such as developers putting up splash pages or in-page notifications for users to switch to a more compatible browser. I have already seen extremely rare instances of this, but not enough where I would consider it a concern yet, just an asshole move.

Google's massive market share is seriously worrying for Mozilla and other browser vendors.

I switched to Firefox from Chrome over 4 years ago and I was disappointed to find some of my favourite Chrome extensions weren't available. I plan to add support for those Chrome extensions in Dot Browser by implementing those APIs and making them work in Gecko/Firefox environment.

In addition to Mozilla, Apple (Safari) and Microsoft (Edge) also have significant participation in web standards. I'm really glad Firefox exists, and they definitely punch above their weight in the standardization process, but Microsoft and Apple are also serious participants.

(Disclosure: I work at Google, speaking only for myself)

But sure, yeah, let's keep the Web Platform at early 2000s standards. Let's make everyone download apps from a small set of walled garden app stores. Let's force developers to submit to those app store review processes and potentially have their content blocked for whatever opaque whims the store has today (ever changing, with little chance for appeal!). And then they can just snoop on their users through the local, natively installed app, that has all the permissions granted under the sun because users don't read installation prompts. That's so much better for privacy.

I personally spend most of my time figuring out the Chrome-specific quirks that pages rely on which are non-standard, and the Chrome devs almost never fix before conjuring up some new, ill-defined "standard" that they ship to production before others have even had a chance to figure out the last three.

It's maddening, especially when you look at Google's not-so-sterling track record just with major new "standards" like Web Components, WebRTC and Pointer/Touch events, not to mention how often they ignore Chrome's spec bugs until the web is reliant on them, and other vendors have to change their behavior and the spec to match them. Folks always seem to ignore all of the trouble Google causes, and just think "ooh, shiny new toy! Google good!"

Just imagine trying to implement all of those "standards" while Google is constantly changing them, under-documenting everything, have no reference implementation aside from the one they ship that's deeply tied to Chrome, and expect you to work on their time frame. All while not fixing bugs in the last two new APIs they pushed out, while pushing out two more at the same time. You wonder if they're doing it on purpose so no matter what the "standards" say, they just wait for the web to become reliant on their bugs, and then everyone else has to figure the whole mess out for them, like glorified janitors.

And then you look at the backlog of things you'd like to have fixed instead of figuring out the latest interop issue with some quirk that has a crbug open for three years, and the new privacy APIs and features you'd like to push and you start to feel a bit burned out. So you hop onto HN only to see yet another comment like yours, acting like we're doing nothing at all except "chasing shiny baubles". It's enough to make me wonder whether people like you actually care about the web at all or just want more half-broken new APIs to complain about.

https://brave.com/blog/

The technical requirements and research that needs to go into a web browser to ensure it's secure & private makes me skeptical that Dot Browser or any open source browser is going to be able to achieve those things without serious financial backing.

Happy to be proven wrong though

This may be worth it for the UI overhaul alone, but someone fix Mozilla‘s piling up bad decisions is also badly needed.

1. explain what is email masking on the website (I had to google it). 2. indicate whether you plant o create a driver and/or whether the browser is compatible with the already existing gecko driver

Looks like it has been completely rewritten since then?

Edit: https://medium.com/dot-blog/saying-goodbye-to-the-electron-v...