Is any attempt being made for TF to support other browsers than chrome? Due to the polkadot extension?
Chrome is known to be one of the worst data collectors and I’m finding it hard to defend the use of it to all the ‘get away from big Tech folks’.
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this being mentioned before, but can’t find it anymore.
Good question.
Well first I would say that one can use Brave instead. It’s based on chromium and should be more secure than Chrome considering your concerns.
Brave works with the Polkadot extension.
I will update one of the FAQ’s QnA to include this information.
The link to the Polkadot Extension is the following: https://polkadot.js.org/extension/.
Polkadot.js is available for the following browsers: Chrome, Brave and Firefox. To install it on Brave, use the Chrome link.
FYI - it works in Firefox we well - the extension exists and I have been using it for a while.
Thanks. I’ll use that in my answers, but i have to say i never got it to work in Firefox, although I could install the extension, the icon refused to show up, so i couldn’t create an account. Reinstalle both a few times and then gave up
I got it to work one computer, not at all on another.
So Firefox is somewhat problematic with the polkadot.js extension.
We’d need to figure out why it works sometimes and not all the time.
Any idea Nelson? Let’s say, what was different on the one computer that it worked? If it can be answered of course.
The fact of the matter is that there are basically two relevant families of browser engines in the world today: Webkit based, including Google’s Webkit fork Blink (Safari, Edge, Chromium and derivatives), and Gecko (Firefox). I’ve got a lot of respect for Firefox, but the majority of web users and the majority of attention from web developers are on Webkit and Blink, especially Chromium based browsers, these days.
As @Mik mentioned, there are Chromium based alternatives to Chrome, including ungoogled-chromium, that will run the Polkadot extension just as well and also provide good compatibility with the Playground, without the Google spyware.
If there are issues running the Polkadot extension on Firefox, maybe someone experiencing the issue can open an ticket for the Polkadot team on their extension repo?
Ah great, learned something new here. And I also read that Brave is among those Webkit family. Any experience whether that works with polkadot extension as well? Certain communicites seem to be really flattered by Brave, which I believe stil has local severs in France on the ‘central’ web.
Brave works really well with the polkadot.js extension.
I can also confirm that Brave works well with the Polkadot extension and the Playground. Brave is also a great solution for ad free browsing on mobile 
Perhaps my previous post was a bit of an oversimplification. I’ll edit to clarify that Chromium, and thus Brave, are based on Google’s Blink, which is a fork of Webkit.