Oh my bad then. I’m not familiar with Gboard having never used it unfortunately. I don’t think then that you can use multiple languages all at once. I can only say that AnySoftKeyboard is very customizable and as far as convenience goes, one can easily change languages with a swipe. You can also add your own exceptions and abbreviations in different languages

It does! You can download the additional languages and then configure it how you want (a very common one is to swipe on the space bar)

I stopped using Startpage because they regularly limits service access to IPs reserved for VPNs or Tor and it was immensely annoying having to prove that I’m a human each time I searched for anything.

Have you also heard of SearXNG?

I’d be also curious to know what annoyed you about DDG or Brave search.

Source? Your ass?

Very fair point. My bad, I expressed myself poorly. What I meant with ‘targeted ads’ was to show ads not on the browser itself but to people who might be more easily convinced to use Firefox. For example, there’s a huge amount of viewers on YouTube that are tech-oriented. Nobody is stopping Firefox from sponsoring creators, videos or even collaborating with them.

Targeted ads. Promotional campains to make people more aware of Firefox/why it’s better. Be more present online (instead of passively depending on the userbase). Take inputs from the community and actually doing something with them rather than saying “k” and then doing nothing. Those are just some off the top of my head.

Edit: as pointed out by a kind user, targeted ads was a poor choice of words. I explained myself better below in the comments

It’s actually impressive how bad they are when it comes to promoting themselves and market themselves as a viable alternative. One could genuinely think they do it on purpose almost

Ugh…you can dislike Brave or its disgusting CEO all you want but stop with the misinformation. The crypto stuff is entirely optional and Brave continues to be rated as one of the top browsers in terms of privacy.

I mean…yeah? Is anyone surprised or shocked when Paramount Pictures releases a new movie? It’s literally Google’s whole business idea, they sell your data.

Thank you so much for an actual reply, again. It’s so disheartening to see the level of “conversation” that goes around here sometimes. It can be such an echo chamber filled with entitled a-holes here at times (like every single time anyone dares to say anything about Firefox).

I also love Firefox and the fact it is open source. I also personally use Firefox and Arkenfox/Tor, but I’ve also tried Brave (and basically every other browser) and for the life of me cannot understand why the hate. I think we all care about privacy, so that should be the end goal. I will support anything that makes people more interested in privacy (which Brave does) and that helps in taking away from the monopolistic control of Google. You can dislike Brave CEO (as one should) but it’s not like Firefox is perfect either. Accepting money from Google, not supporting site isolation, associating your download with a token to keep telemetry on your usage, the extensive tweaks required to make it safe, or the overall delay within the community or for any improvements are all worthy criticisms to be aware of.

I already did. But I have been talking about Brave browser. You don’t have to use their search engine?

First of all, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you attack people online simply for asking questions and discussing a topic on a discussion forum, you are a really shitty person.

Second of all, all you “arguments” are all lies that I’ve read a bunch of times on multiple forums but that you clearly never bothered to read up on because if you did, you’d realize that they amount to nothing and they keep being spread by people like you. You clearly have no proof for any of that since I asked you already and provided nothing. The only accurate thing you said is that is chromium based lol. Nice to see this instance of Privacy is getting filled with the same echo chamber mentality of late-stage Reddit.

Thank you for that incredibly thorough answer. It was very interesting to read through those articles.

I’m going to be honest, but upon diving deeper into them it seemed like for each sources I could find a similar instance of a shady instance that happened with Firefox while everything related to users’ privacy was addressed as some point or another. At the end of the day, I think the lesson here is that no major browser is 100% perfect and it’s up to personal choices (and sometimes users can get a little too fandom-y).

Thank you once again for going above and beyond!:)

Not that I don’t believe you, but do you have any source for that? I’d like to read more about that claim because everywhere I search, Brave scores very high in terms of privacy

Have a look at this guide and take your pick. Brave is indeed a very safe option for android after all.

I never said you said those things, tf are you talking about? I clearly said “acting as if”. And you were acting like that. Because when you “simply state the fact that it’s a corporation driven by profit” you play into their hand and inadvertently justify their mentality of ‘profit over everything else’, including privacy and truth. And speaking of putting words into people’s mouth…I never said that I expect them to act in the best interests of anyone. I clearly said that YouTube does not provide all that content for free. It is very much paid for, by both the loss of privacy and the many ads they run. Also, I find quite interesting how for you suddenly when people go against what I assume are your stances, they become toxic. You also put words into my mouth and clearly misinterpreted my point. By the same metric, how could I not assume that you too are toxic and not interested in legitimate discussions? You just replied to my comment with names and gaslighting. You added nothing of substance to the conversation.

But the vast majority of users will and indeed does watch the ads already. You know how many times I’ve provided alternatives to people so they wouldn’t have to watch the ads, only for them to stop and go back to normal YouTube because “it’s what I knew best, I feel more comfortable with that, etc”? Or all the people who pay for YouTube premium “because it’s easier”?

Quit acting as if such a gigantic monopoly like YouTube was a family-run business on the verge of collapse. They get paid already plenty and they have all the money they can desire. You are just defending corporate greed to squeeze every single cent they can from consumers while also trying to burn down every other viable alternative which is used by a single-digit percentage of their userbase.

For free?? You know they get paid to run all those ads, right? Quit defending a corporation, it’s beneath you

For me it was a convergence of things all at the right moment: Edward Snowden just happened, I just bought a new phone (to experiment with) and I saw a comment on Reddit detailing some privacy tips/tricks which made it seem very easy to get on board

If you want to avoid this happening again, this guide here as a lot of alternatives and suggestions.

Some are fairly easy (switch to Firefox) while others might be slightly harder (like maybe convincing your friends to stop with discord and use something else instead) but if you’d like to have more privacy, it’s all well worth it :)