Replacements for Firefox and Thunderbird?

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 13 Jan 2021 at 19:38, Kaj Haulrich <kaj at haulrich.net> wrote:
>
> Now, since Mozilla has jumped on the thought police bandwagon to join Google, Twitter, Amazon and Facebook

[[citation needed]]

Mozilla & derivative products is the last totally open, non-proprietary browser.

*All* the other mainstream offerings use the Blink engine from Google.
They may say they've removed all the Google monitoring code, but are
you able to verify that? No? Then you are trusting them, or trusting
their competence.

Brave is awful, rewriting referral links, involved in cryptocurrencies
(which are *all* scams, without exception). Opera is Chinese,
therefore almost certainly compromised by the CCP. Vivaldi is neutral,
but still Blink. GNOME Epiphany is Blink. Even Konqueror, the origin
of KHTML, is now Webkit, AFAIK. Webkit is Apple's rewrite of KHTML,
and Webkit is the basis of Blink.

Don't get me wrong; I use Google and Chrome and find them good
products. I *pay* for Google storage.

But if you don't trust Google you are better off with Firefox,
Waterfox or Seamonkey than anything else.

> I'm looking for alternative browsers and an e-mail clients to run on my (K)Ubuntu workstation. Kmail [...] want to pull in a lot of dependencies

KMail *is* the KDE Email client. It doesn't add a hell of a lot to
basic KDE. If you trust KDE you can trust KMail.

> and Evolution both both

Evolution is the GNOME email client. Makes no point if you use KDE, IMHO.

I have tried both; I could not get KMail working reliably and I don't
like Evolution much. It works but I find it clunky and too
Outlook-like for my tastes.

>  and I will not touch Gmail (or anything Google) in any way, manner, shape or form.

There is no official Google email client for Linux, so you can relax.
(Android, yes; Linux, no.)

> Can anyone recommend a lean e-mail client and a browser that does not 'phone home'?

Lean email client? Lots.

• Claws
• Sylpheed

A bit more alternative:
• GNUstep Mail
• Balsa
• Seamonkey again
• Mailspring
• Trojitá (also KDE-native)

Browsers I've covered above. There are many but most are based on Google code.
• SRWare Iron
• ungoogled-chromium
• QupZilla/Falkon
• QuteBrowser
• Otter Browser
• IceCat/IceZilla
• Midori
• Netsurf
• Dillo

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