It’s an entirely new standard, so no, it won’t just be a firmware patch.

Removing the notifications permission doesn’t prevent them from being sent. Source

Hard for me to understand how blocking valid email providers like Proton, Tutanota, and Skiff, would actually mitigate any abuse. All it’s going to do is hurt the websites with this filter and prevent privacy-minded folks from signing up. Unfortunate to see, hopefully they get some common sense and don’t block these for no reason.

If you don’t have it on your Sony TV, I’d recommend installing another launcher like FLauncher which effectively does the same thing and gets rid of the garbage.

You can easily change launchers on the Shield, unlike the Fire TV for instance, which actively blocks it, to get rid of the advertising and garbage.

You can easily change launchers on the NVIDIA Shield and Chromecasts. Fire TV’s are really the only devices that actively prevent changing launchers and try to force you to deal with their advertising.

Personally my recommendation is generally the Shield, or maybe an Apple TV depending on your use case. Expensive but well worth it imo, you really do get what you pay for.

If you need cheaper, then I’d probably go the Chromecast. Lesser of the two evils between like the Fire TV imo.

They said Chrome specifically, not Chromium as a whole.

different distros

Isn’t that a benefit of Linux, having all kinds of different distros and different options available? There isn’t a “one size fits all”. Just find the one you like and go from there.

broken repositories

How often does this actually happen? I can’t think of a time I encountered broken repositories within the last few years of using Linux as a daily driver, I feel like you’re exaggerating this. I think the repository system in general is amazing and installing software on Linux is so much better than Windows in about every way really.

software that doesn’t work on Linux

This is a fair point, it depends on your use case. If anything you need is only tied to Windows, then yeah you don’t have many options unfortunately. But I think for average people its probably fine since basically everything is on Linux nowadays, I guess biggest exceptions are like Microsoft Office and Adobe’s suite.

proprietary drivers

I assume you mean NVIDIA? You can just get a distro that includes them already installed and ready to go like Nobara, or just use one that makes them easier to set-up like Pop OS, if you’re uncomfortable installing them on a regular distro. (Though it really isn’t that difficult).

Overall Linux isn’t for everyone, but I do think it’s improving more and more and about at a point now where average users could probably get away with using it instead of Windows in a lot of cases. But it does depend on your use case for sure at the end of the day. Hopefully I’m not out of touch here though lol.

Yeah, Chromecasts are much better than Fire TV’s, due to the more control you have over them and how easy it is change the launcher vs. Amazon actively preventing it. Basically same price and budget as well. Plus Google running a newer version of Android in general vs. Amazon’s, etc. Chromecasts are probably lesser of the two evils imo.

Pretty much unfortunately. The good thing is its trivially easy to change launchers on the NVIDIA Shield or Google TV devices, plus you can even go a step forward and debloat them entirely with ADB. Amazon’s really the only manufacturer I’d say that forces home screen ads with no choice around it, since they actively prevent changing launchers and such. But Apple is probably the only one out of the box with no advertising.

If you have the money, I’d go for an NVIDIA Shield, or maybe an Apple TV. Well worth the money.

Otherwise, for budget, you could get a Chromecast, which gives you more control over it and has generally less garbage than the Fire TVs do for instance, since you can easily change its launcher and debloat with ADB.

You can easily change launchers on the Shield and remove all of Google’s nonsense through ADB as well though, unlike Amazon who locks down the OS very tight. Plus like another commenter said, you can just flat out install LineageOS and you’re good.

Activating Reader Mode on Firefox appears to bypass it, lol.

Don’t forget Yattee!

Why not get the flatpak?

Security concerns. There’s a lot of debate over it, but from the research I’ve done, I believe the Flatpak of Firefox is less secure, since it seems to remove part of Firefox’s internal sandboxing, and relies heavily on Flatpak’s sandboxing.

Basically makes it easier to compromise your data within the browser (like cookies, site data, passwords, etc), but maybe harder to get to the rest of your OS.

I just prefer using the rpm of Firefox with Firejail, as that keeps Firefox’s built-in sandboxing intact, while adding an extra layer similar to Flatpak to restrict it further. Best of both worlds.

Its great and has a lot of potential, I like a lot of what it does. I just wish they had packaging easily available for Fedora/RHEL through a COPR or the like. Also would’ve preferred if they used a stable release vs. the ESR of Firefox as the base, but I can understand why.

with hardening out of the box

Floorp definitely isn’t hardened out of the box in my testing. Only thing it does is seems to disable Firefox’s telemetry, which is nice, but more hardening is certainly needed through other projects like Arkenfox (which work here on Floorp too). Also looks like Floorp makes it easier to toggle some privacy settings that you’d usually have to tweak the about:config for, and comes pre-installed with uBlock Origin, which is great.

I think overall my only concern with Floorp will be how well and quickly the developer can keep up with updates. The track record for now looks good, but only time will tell. Besides that, this is a good and very promising project, will definitely keep an eye on it.

What shell would you recommend? 🤔

Not sure I follow, there are plenty of Firefox-based browsers:

Tor, Mullvad, LibreWolf, Floorp, Pulse, Mull, Waterfox, Mercury, Ghostery, IceCat, Iceraven, etc.

Well said. May be worth reading through this GitHub issue and this Bugzilla issue as well. Its worth noting its also directly integrated into the browser as well in about:addons.

I’m personally not a fan of Firefox/Mozilla integrating and using Google Analytics, even under these circumstances, and think it does deserve criticism, but it is what it is I guess. I do hope they switch to a better alternative in the future.

In the meantime, setting the following about:config options should take care of and fully strip out Google Analytics and extension recommendations from about:addons:

“extensions.getAddons.showPane” to false

“extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled” to false

“browser.discovery.enabled” to false

“browser.discovery.sites” to be empty

Not Chromium, Extremely customizable and configurable, and add-on support on mobile, to name a few reasons.