Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Website: https://astian.org/midori-browser-desktop/download-midori-browser-desktop
Price: Freemium
Blurb: “A fast and secure lightweight browser available for your desktop computer. In addition, it fully respects your privacy and protects your information.“
I like Midori, so it was quite a surprise for me to find they had a new version and sponsor. I went to the link above and got myself a copy. Only, I could not get it downloaded at first. You get a pop-up with some licence garbage, and nothing happens. Clicking all over in the block almost had me give up when I clicked a slightly darker square and it downloaded. (It is a lot harder to see depending on screen brightness).
It is this small grey box.
When it comes to things being sponsored by large companies, I know it is a business decision. The business of a company is to make money. How do they make money off a free product? Yes, that’s right, by selling you. This faffing with the download window had me taking a gander at the privacy policy. It’s not that I expected anything different. Even if they say they do not do X, they do, they all lie. We can look at all the no-log VPN companies who have all been caught selling your logs or even saving them for the three letter government agencies. Speaking of the devil, there is another in the news today.
From the Privacy policy: • Information We Collect: • We will collect and process the following personal information about you: • Name • Email • Mobile • Social Media Profile • Payment Info • If the Service or our company is merged or acquired with another company, your information will be one of the assets that is transferred to the new owner.
OK, so we now know it is a big information mining operation and we should not add any of the above information into it, let’s proceed.
I tried both the .deb-file and the AppImage. The operation seems identical in both cases. I did not have a USB authentication token to test on the AppImage, so I don’t know if it will work, but I suspect not, as all the other browsers in a sandboxed environment do not support it either. There are no tool tips if you hover over a tab, so there is no way of quickly seeing what is in that tab, other than clicking on it.
From what I gather, it is based on Electron, which means a Chrome base. To test, I went to the Chrome web store, downloaded some add-ons, and installed them. They all worked perfectly. This just seems like a long way around to use Chrome. Or maybe, it is to add all their spying … erm telemetry options on top of that of Google. As you can tell, my trust in this product is a fat zero. This is amplified by all the “privacy” quotes on the home page that mean about as much as a politician’s promises.
I have been running it for a while now and it seems to run on par with Chromium and/or Brave in memory usage and speed, but slower than Slimjet. The thing that differentiates it, is the integration. It looks more like a Gnome product. This makes it aesthetically pleasing, which is a big (and its only) plus, but the immediate minus to that is that right-clicking an address is blocked, meaning I have to resort to highlighting it and use CTRL+C to copy it. It supposedly has its own builtin ad-blocking, but I found this to be laughable, even with Steven Black’s host file, it was about as useful as wet single-ply toilet paper. Since there is no way to turn off spell-checking, I do not recommend entering any passwords into the browser either.
For dumb normies, this is probably OK, but if you are a Linux user, this is not. A company who wants my email, my mobile, and my social media, is probably up to no good. I say probably, as it is 99% assured, but there is that 1%…. Oh who am I kidding?
The takeaway here is; Midori-ng is not Midori. It is another hoovering application trying to cash in on the information-selling business. Admittedly, it is a multi-billion dollar industry, and Astian are just trying to get their slice of the pie. I would have trusted them more if they were upfront about it and not faking all the privacy notices on their home page. For the love of Mike, do not install the Android application! I went to the source code page and it was empty, making me believe this is not open source either (https://osdn.net/projects/midori-ng/scm). To be fair, I read that it was, on another website and I see such claims on their official website.
In the end, it is just Chrome with fewer settings, more hidden junk, and some better Linux integration, thanks to Electron.
As it stands now, my recommendation is to avoid it.
Do you disagree with anything? misc@fullcirclemagazine.org