• timestatic@feddit.orgEnglish
    6·
    20 hours ago

    Startpage got bought by System1 in 2019. System1 is an American advertising company. I personally use Qwant for privacy reasons - They’re also in the process of building their own search index together with Ecosia.

  • lb_o@lemmy.world
    121·
    1 day ago

    How is Telegram US based? It is a Pavel Durov’s offshore company from some Virgin islands. Not European, but not US either.

    • Marty_Man_X@lemmy.world
      61·
      1 day ago

      In this case, I think the creator just avoids Telegram, for good reason:

      It’s not E2EE encrypted by default.

      The list is not named appropriately “US etc” but it’s not a bad list either

    • Comment105@lemm.ee
      34·
      1 day ago

      These lists are almost always stupid.

      The worst part is that usually the maker hasn’t used half of the things they recommend… If they had, they wouldn’t have recommended them.

      I’m guessing they tend to make these lists because of a personal connection to one or two companies they put in their list. Just as bit of free marketing.

  • VisionScout@lemmy.wtf
    301·
    2 days ago

    OP writes “instead of their american counterparts”, and then puts signal.

    Firefox as well any opensource doesn’t have a country. You can build it and use it. Avoid any centralized service.

    The 4 freedoms of software are:

    Freedom 0: The Freedom to Run

    You can use the software for any purpose, without restrictions.

Freedom 1: The Freedom to Study and Modify

    You have access to the source code, allowing you to study how the software works and make changes to suit your needs.

Freedom 2: The Freedom to Distribute Copies

    You can share copies of the software with others, whether for free or at a cost.

Freedom 3: The Freedom to Improve and Share Improvements

    You can modify the software and share your changes with the community, helping others benefit from your improvements.

    as long as these freedoms are observed it doesn’t matter the country of origin.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
      251·
      2 days ago

      We need a more diverse browser engine market to keep the web open.

      We definitely do, but it’s a tall order considering making a fully functional and daily usable browser engine is one of the most difficult programming projects to under take

      At least we got Ladybird with its brand new from scratch engine coming up though! (In 2028…)

      • bettertecheu@lemmy.world
        27·
        2 days ago

        It’s absolutely not a simple thing, but if we let the web turn into Chrome-only then Ladybird doesn’t stand a chance. For now, more market share for Firefox and Firefox-based browsers is the only argument against making websites only work in Chrome.

        • taladar@sh.itjust.works
          7·
          2 days ago

          Especially if Chrome is bought by OpenAI or some of the other players who want to enshittify it even faster and have shown interest.

      • univers3man@lemmy.world
        35·
        2 days ago

        I can’t get behind a browser built from scratch with C, not Rust, considering how integral browsers are to security these days. Plus there’s the whole controversy around their pronouns and politics in coding stances.

        • realconor@feddit.ukEnglish
          21·
          18 hours ago

          what’s wrong with C? if it’s causing issues that it’s written in C, it’s the developers whom are being entrusted with projects that are out of their depth in a project they shouldn’t be responsible for at fault rather than the time-tested language

          • univers3man@lemmy.world
            22·
            18 hours ago

            It’s not that C is bad, but that it’s a bad language in this use case. Rust doesn’t let developers shoot themselves in the foot as easily as C, not to say that it can’t be done.

            The comment regarding developers being responsible is true, but they could make their job much easier and thus more accessible to others by using Rust and not being required to learn all the tricks to make C safer in such a critical piece of software.

            This isn’t a paid product/gig, so it’s not necessarily attracting top C developers either.

            C is great for specific user cases such as code that needs to be exceedingly performant, needs to access low-level devices, or is used on embedded applications.

            On a project that doesn’t have these requirements, I believe it is more important to be understandable and has a lower skill floor.

            • realconor@feddit.ukEnglish
              1·
              2 hours ago

              while i can see the position of wishing to go with the language that offers more fundamental forms of safety built into it, a browser is something that i feel must be performant in today’s age of pitifully optimised web pages, to have a browser for these which inefficiently handles the processing of this i feel would be a major issue. of course, the fault here isn’t of the browser developers but of the people making the pages, but they don’t seem to show any signs of changing so for now we must deal with javascript-laden purgatory which can only really be alleviated slightly by having a browser handle it well.

              secondly is that i feel the sheer quantity of C developers as opposed to the numbers of rust developers at present would suggest that the contributor pool for a C based project would be greater, though of course this is subject to change, and if it were to change so greatly then i could see it taking a path similar to linux wherein rust becomes interspersed into the project.

              at present, i see no other exclusively rust browser being worked on that is in any reasonable state, though it would be good to have one for the sake of having varied options of course, if memory serves me right, the ladybird team got the gmail web client running on their browser, so things are coming along well by technical terms. in my view, this project is one deserving of support primarily due to simply not being affiliated with either chromium or firefox’s codebases, one new player in the browser market is another success for end user choice, and should a rust-based browser come along itself, then that’d make two new players both all the welcome.

  • exposable_preview@slrpnk.net
    25·
    2 days ago

    Some of these products would not exist without their American counterpart, which directly fuel their existance.

    Librewolf is just a hardened version of Firefox. It would not exist without the Firefox team continuing to develop Firefox and to fix its security issues.

    Ecosia primarely uses Bing and Startpage uses Google for search results. Both would not exist without the search engines backing them.

    I’m not saying these are bad products and I don’t mean to criticiseze. I’m actually a librewolf user myself. I just think it is important to point out that the European label might be deceiving in this instance and might mislead people into thinking they are using something different than they actually are.

    It might also not be so important. Perhaps focusing our energy on good open source projects and NGO-backed initiatives is desirable regardless of their origin?

    idk food for thought

    • timestatic@feddit.orgEnglish
      5·
      20 hours ago

      Ecosia is actively developing their own search index together with Qwant. They are rolling out French and German results this year actually. AFAIK only like Mojeek and like Swisscow have their own search index (as well as Brave which is US based). But their current search results aren’t really that great which is why I will stick to Qwant.

      I also don’t fully trust Brave because of their whole crypto involvement but their search engine is pretty good from experience and definitely much better in terms of privacy than google.

  • agavaa@lemmy.world
    502·
    2 days ago

    Not sure it’s a good idea to recommend Arch Linux to newbies migrating from Windows; maybe prioritize Mint or similar?

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
        12·
        2 days ago

        I don’t personally have issues with nonprofits or FOSS as exceptions to my own personal boycott of US companies, but if anyone is looking for an alternative to Signal, SimpleX is probably the closest analog.

        It’s decentralized and funded globally. It’s based in the UK.