k-meleon makes me take off my tin foil hat a little bit

“Wearing a tin foil hat” is a joke term assigned to those people believe are being paranoid for no reason. However I do have good reason when it comes to web browsers.

Okay so here’s the deal when it comes to IE, Firefox and Chrome.

IE uses something called a SmartScreen Filter. This checks every single web site you visit against a huge database somewhere on the internet. Every time it’s used, your browsing habits are being recorded.

Firefox and Chrome use Google Safe Browsing. It does the exact same shit IE does. Different database, same creepy nature.

Chrome has the extra added “goodies” of putting in not one but two unique IDs. One is for installation and the other for user metrics. What are they used for? Oh, I dunno, tracking how many times you click your back button maybe? How much more fucking creepy can you GET? I swear, if you use Chrome, you just love giving all your info to Google, right down to where you click navigation buttons. And you thought it was just “anonymous” recording of web sites you visit. Ha! Wrong. They’re tracking everywhere you click in the browser too. So much for “Incognito” mode, eh?

And of course there’s no way to remove those creepy IDs unless you force them out.

IE is so hooked into Windows that it’s extremely difficult to un-creep it. Not impossible, but it will take time and a lot of it.

Firefox is chock full of Google “goodness”. A quick run to about:config and a search for google will show that. For a computer savvy user it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to un-creep that thing.

As for Chrome, you have to go through every single fucking option to tell it, “STOP PHONING HOME PLEASE THANKS OKAY GOOD I’M GLAD WE HAD THAT CHAT”, and then you have to force out the IDs. But this won’t help out much since the next time the browser updates, ta-daaaa those fucking IDs are back.

To Chrome, I just say fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou. Just.. don’t use it.

So what does one do when one wants to run a completely un-creeped browser? Answer: K-Meleon. It uses the Firefox Gecko engine and has absolutely zero Google phone-home bullshit in it. And yes, Flash runs just fine in it too.

The tradeoff is that it’s more difficult to use than Firefox is – but – it will support most FF plugins and, God bless this, it actually knows how to release memory properly, which is something FF does not do and never has done right.

I actually really like K-Meleon. You can configure the crap out of it and basically make it work any way you like. Toolbars can go anywhere, everything’s lightning quick, you can add custom macro scripts easily (yes!), mouse gestures, etc.

Is K-Meleon a geek’s browser? Yes. But a darn good one. And it does the one thing that kept me a Firefox user all these years, custom quick searches.

So oh yeah, if I can get along with K-Meleon (which looks very likely), I’ll switch. I just have to see if there’s any bookmark sync for it. There’s a few ways to go about doing that, so I’ll have to check my options.

Copyright ©1975-2010 menga - Today is Monday, March 15 2010; the time when you loaded this web page was 8:07am UTC. This blog is authored from Tampa Florida - a place where all the cool people are :-) If this web site has not been updated in the past 30 days, you can safely assume I'm sick, dead or finally got a life interesting enough to get away from the computer. On a final note, remember to save your shit.