The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

dot wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 2:04 am Mozilla never gave a damn, if any FF update broke the addons, time and again.

This is just false.

Firefox's old add-on system gave add-ons pretty much direct access to Firefox internals. Changing just about anything had high potential to break add-ons because there was always some add-on that relied on a particular implementation detail. And Mozilla did spend effort to avoid changes which would break add-ons.

In the end Mozilla adopted WebExtensions, providing a stable API for add-on developers to develop with. WebExtensions are much less powerful than traditional extensions, but don't tie Mozilla's hands. This was soon followed by "Firefox Quantum", a bunch of performance improvements Mozilla can finally make when they can change Firefox internals freely without breaking extensions. Quantum is much faster than old Firefox versions, showing how much old add-ons were holding them back. (However, I agree that the power of old extensions was very nice, allowing many fantastic add-ons such as Tab Mix Plus. Losing them is still a bitter pill to swallow.)

SYSTEM wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 2:47 am

dot wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 2:04 am Mozilla never gave a damn, if any FF update broke the addons, time and again.

This is just false.

Rest assured that many (especially former contributors) see it entirely different. There have been websites around for years, from former contributors/programmers, where they vent their anger at that firm and assert they want nothing to do with that corporation anymore. Be that as it may, I would never "donate" or "support" a big firm like that. I might occasionally donate to a single programmer, if I use his program for longer, but supporting a huge "corporation" (especially in the IT world) sounds just too ridiculous to me.

dot wrote: ↑Mon Dec 30, 2019 3:25 am Rest assured that many (especially former contributors) see it entirely different. There have been websites around for years, from former contributors/programmers, where they vent their anger at that firm and assert they want nothing to do with that corporation anymore. Be that as it may, I would never "donate" or "support" a big firm like that.

To be clear, I'm supporting Mozilla not because they're going to fix the Internet, but because the alternatives are terrible. While I was not part of the Firefox Add-On community, I did read about frustrations with that group. I also clearly remember Microsoft's my-way-or-the-highway attitude with most of their tech. I just think this is comparing apples and oranges:

• MS Office macros have been breaking between Microsoft Office versions for it's entire history. The frustration by VBA folks seems to have evaporated from seething anger into a collective shrug. Most companies just disable all Macros on the Enterprise to avoid having to repeatedly re-engineer ancient Macro code.
• Was there a Edge / IE add-on community? I can count the number of times I've installed or heard of someone installing an IE plugin on one hand.
• Windows' backwards compatibility is better than many other operating systems, but they aren't moving as fast as Internet services, and security issues are very different for them.
• None of the products mentioned above are open source (unlike Firefox).

This might be old news, but Startpage is now (partially?) owned by an advertising company, System1: Probably a good idea to use something else or put Startpage as a backup option and not as your primary search engine. Searx is still my default, but I've started using DuckDuckGo more recently as my secondary option.

Some other search engine options can be found on the same site:

There's a thread over at ycombinator talking about the superiority of the Yandex fuzzy image search tool (https://yandex.com/images/ ) when basing your search on another (similar) image.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23976172

I've also long preferred Bing's image search https://yandex.com/images/ over Google.

DuckDuckGo has a pretty good image search. Can filter by size and color.

Good to know. Thanks.

DuckDuckGo is highly under-rated. Probably the best most under-rated search engine out-there.

Perhaps. But DuckDuckGo (like some other hyped alternatives used to do) still connects to Amazon which is about as omnipresent on the Internet, or even more so by now, than Google. It's the reason why I don't use this SE and other SEs that behave (or when they behaved) like that. Personally, I'm sticking to the ultra-fast "eTools" SE (mentioned here somewhere) which is rather perfect for my needs.

Another vote for https://www.etools.ch/ search engine.

Akin to banking systems, watches and chocolates "Made in Switzerland"
Etools is a fine exemple of a mature CH product honed with meticulous attention to details

• How does it work?
• Extensive privacy safeguards
• Multiple user preferences
• Parallel queries among 15 search engines
• Commendable search speed (currently 1.34secs to query 15 engines)

Etools will also obligingly format your search results into a neat pdf file, when ticking the As PDF option from the Results Tool sidebar (see hereunder)

For those looking for a Google alternatives along with privacy analysis (and a lot of other alternatives to other Google services), a website I used and will come back to: https://degoogle.jmoore.dev/#web-based-products

The page is just a huge list of non-google/pro privacy tools, but the site is primarily mobile-focused and not focused on a lot of tools we highlight, but still interesting.

Yandex works for me

freakazoid wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 3:12 pm This might be old news, but Startpage is now (partially?) owned by an advertising company, System1:

Code: Select all

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-group/

Probably a good idea to use something else or put Startpage as a backup option and not as your primary search engine.cda hd można oglądać wiele filmów i seriali. Searx is still my default, but I've started using DuckDuckGo more recently as my secondary option.

Some other search engine options can be found on the same site:

Code: Select all

https://restoreprivacy.com/private-search-engine/

Could you quote a this option from restoreprivacy? I cant find them

Smoczysk0 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 24, 2022 2:10 am Could you quote a this option from restoreprivacy? I cant find them

Not sure why you cannot visit the restoreprivacy.com site. Try using a proxy, VPN or Tor Browser.

Wayback Machine has a copy of the articles as well:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20211208114 ... one-group/
• https://web.archive.org/web/20220319230 ... ch-engine/

freakazoid wrote: ↑Tue Mar 29, 2022 12:33 pm Not sure why you cannot visit the restoreprivacy.com site

Yeah no idea what the issue is there. Maybe if the author could access the site, they could find out how to unblock websites