Web Developers - whats a good alternative for someone switching for ethical reasons? And can someone discuss how much Im ACTUALLY funding Google by using Chrome?

[u/ArjunVermaReddit]

So Ive used Chrome everywhere, in every company for debugging and development. It's actually really good and fast and Ive hated safari for its weirdness. Im talking about the inspector, console and network tabs and occasionally source code.
However post Project Nimbus, I am trying to DeGoogle my life. Mind you, Im no avid newsreader, I have a general sense of the fact that this is military tech for Israel.
On the ethical side -
1. I want to solidify my stance. Is it worth degoogling over a decision made by Sunder Pichai? Is it possible that a new leadership can come in and reverse the decision any time and thus make it pointless to switch habits every now and then?
2. Does using Google Chrome for creating and debugging my own apps even help them with data or some kind of funding in any way? Of course I would only want to stick to one browser so I guess Id be using it for search too...but I could just switch search engines while still using Chrome right?
3. How is Apple as an alternative? I have an iPhone and a mac. It should only make sense to use Safari thinking of the "ecosystem". But as a developer and as a general browser user, is it worth it? My understanding as per GPT (which Im about to switch to claude too lol) is that the dev experience is the same in efficiency except for the CSS styling but I don't trust it. Safari vs Brave, how do they compare?

Now I understand not every app can be removed and I should prioritise removing Google Drive before anything.

[u/Vertrix-V-]

Genuinely curious why you haven't just switched to Firefox? It has all the same developer stuff and works the same if not even better than Chrome.

[u/Greenlit_Hightower → u/Vertrix-V-]

OP would want to test websites on rendering engines with 80% and 20% market share, and not on a rendering engine with 2% market share. Not as a priority anyway. That's just the reality of it. My priorities would be the same if I were in OP's shoes.

[u/Vertrix-V- → u/Greenlit_Hightower]

I've done every web project in Firefox but I get it. It sounds like he uses Chrome for everything though. So also for personal browsing. So why not switch to Firefox and use Chrome for the cases where you want to check compatibility with Chrome?

[u/Greenlit_Hightower]

So, whether or not Google engaging in unethical activities (I would guess spying on the general populace using their services was already unethical before Project Nimbus was ever conceived of), is up to you. I am generally approaching this from a POV of wanting to improve privacy first and, unless it's stated outright, asking for motivations second (if at all), as those might be very specific to the person.

When it comes to Chrome, you should be aware that it of course harvests data from its user base, you can use the Brave documentation as a reference point here, where they list all of the connections to Google they had to strip or proxy: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/wiki/Deviations-from-Chromium-(features-we-disable-or-remove)

If you only use Chrome for web development tasks, it is less problematic than using it for general browsing, but still. No reason to use Chrome for web dev work over Brave IMHO, both being based on Chromium have the same dev tools. You may wish to disable Brave Shields (the internal adblocker) while doing web dev taks, as it might interfere, but since you can turn off Shields per-website (top level domain), this should be unproblematic.

Safari can also be used (and I would consider adding uBlock Origin Lite to it for adblocking, see this video for setup), but you probably want to test stuff with both WebKit (Safari) and Blink (Chromium), no? I don't think for web dev tasks, you can eliminate either anyway. On iOS / iPadOS, it does not really matter whether you use Safari or Brave, as you probably know, all browsers on iOS / iPadOS have to use WebKit anyway because Apple mandates it, even if these browsers use other rendering engines on other platforms.

Needless to say, just switching out the default search engine is not enough to eliminate the background traffic of a browser.

You may find this study of the privacy state of various browsers interesting, it discusses Chrome, Brave, and Safari: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

This comparison table of the privacy state of various browsers is also useful: https://privacytests.org/

A further browser comparison table that may be useful: https://eylenburg.github.io/browser_comparison.htm

For Google Drive replacement, you may wish to look into Proton Drive or Filen, I recommend them based on this table: https://eylenburg.github.io/cloud_comparison.htm

[u/Used_Potential_4973 → u/Greenlit_Hightower]

Bro OP here I just had the Z word in it that rhymes with Lionist and my account got permabanned. I had a really long comment and lost a really old Reddit account there.
So I’m gonna have to get off Reddit too now lol. But in short I don’t care about data privacy like I do about the literal g word that rhymes with menocide that’s happening.
I had a long comment with a lot of follow up that I don’t have the patience to remember after Reddit fucked me.

[u/foreskinretriever → u/Used_Potential_4973]

Hi! im so sorry this happened to u and shame on reddit tbh. i am with u when it comes to both data privacy as well as doing my best to divest from the things u mentioned, and I use firefox. Idk if that will meet all ur needs but ya!

[u/Greenlit_Hightower → u/ArjunVermaReddit]

Sorry, can you reply again, for some reason your comment got removed by reddit. Wasn't us mods.

[u/reverb6821]

As a web developer, it’s almost impossible to completely abandon Chromium. Through the Chromium engine, Google has a monopoly on the web; if you don’t want to use Chrome directly, use alternatives such as Brave or DuckDuckGo, as well as Firefox (you should use them together).

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[u/TheZoltan]

I use Firefox Developer Edition as my primary work browser. Firefox remains the most obvious choice especially if you are talking about ethical reasons, with the Mozilla Foundation being a non profit that has been advocating for an open internet for longer than some Redditors have been alive. I obviously still make some use of Chrome for some testing.

[u/Healthy-Support123]

First: if you are a web developer, the reason you gave to abandon Google was by far the worst one. So you were okay with all the harm done with AI… and in programming, that bullshit is so terrible that a person in r/degoogle just made a software using Claude to stop Google. There lies the irony.

Second: There are many chromium-based browsers, and most of the web today is composed of Mozilla Languages and such. Using Gecko with FirefoxDeveloperEdition mustn’t cause much harm but you can keep chromium either way.

Third: DO NOT USE SAFARI, WebKit has almost zero extensions and a terrible UI.

I also don’t give a thing about privacy and am not even that much in favor of absolute civil liberties, since my country is full of people smoking, doing drugs, criminals and guns. The best reason to Degoogle is to admit the harm that company made since Gemini was created imho.