Privacy Guides

firefox on everything I use. no need for anything else. always been a fan of mozilla

I used to use bromite until yesterday when I discovered that it has been abandoned by the main dev. One of the contributions is keeping the browser patches alive in his own repo but not under the bromite branding.

So currently I'm test driving Mulch which includes vanadium and bromite patches. My backup is trusty Fennec :)

Vanadium

Librewolf on desktop, Mull (and Fennec) on android. If some important site is broken, I have some chromium based backups without any modifications, which I wipe every now and then.

For Librewolf there are a few interesting privacy addons, most importantly Font Fingerprint Defender. It scrambles the list of installed fonts on the system, so if websites analyze those in order to track you, they will detect you as a new unique user every time you visit their sites.

on android, i have three.

• the default browser is an f-droid rarity called 'privacy browser'. it is configured to allow scripting but reject practically everything else (storage, cookies). this will break lots of things, but i feel safer with this as the initial offer. it's wired to a searxng instance for search. i have a personal hosted homepage that it uses for home.
• if i am opening something myself, i use an app shortcut that opens my home page on mull. mull itself doesn't believe in home pages, so i have to use a shortcut. it uses a searxng instance for search. it's configured to discard all data on quit. if something breaks on privacy browser, i share it into mull.
• for sites in which i need a persistent login, i use duckduckgo browser, again with an app shortcut since it doesn't believe in home pages. i don't open links in ddg, instead sharing them to one of the other two. i don't search here since you can only use ddg.

on desktop (all platforms), i use brave with a lot of stuff turned off, homed normally and pointed to the same search instance. i have cookie autodelete to burn cookies as i browse. i spend a lot of time manually deleting local storage.

i don't love this flow. what i really would like is one browser that would:

• load my home page when i click its icon
• burn all cookies and local storage on exit, except from domains i designate

i haven't found an answer for that yet, would love ideas.

i have previously used and discarded, for various reasons: vivaldi, firefox, firefox focus, chromium, librewolf. i carry some of these for occasional use, either for 'let it through' or 'fuzz all the things' threat models.

Vanadium and Mull on Android, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser on Desktop.

On mobile I use bromite-buildtools maintained by Uazo on github. I've read they were involved with bromite when it was still actively maintained and have been continuing to improve it and keep it up to date with chromium upstream. I use Obtainium to keep it updated since it's not on fdroid or Izzy.

https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools

On desktop I keep it simple with FF and ublock

I use Brave and I actually really like it, but I don't recommend it to other people because the crypto shit is frankly kind of embarrassing. It takes a fundamentally good piece of software and makes it feel scammy. I wish they would figure out a better business model, but it's not like I have any ideas.

I'm comfortable just turning all of it off in the settings, but I don't feel comfortable recommending it to people who are less technical than I am because I can already tell they'll be like "You said this was supposed to be more secure why is it trying to sell me crypto"

EDIT: Still, though, ultimately whenever I have to use anyone's "regular" device without adblocking and everything I'm shocked at how annoying the internet is, so Brave is doing its job haha.

On iOS so everything is technically just safari anyway unfortunately. I use the DuckDuckGo browser as I’ve never had any issue with its search function and I like the layout of the app, and appreciate at least a slight increase in privacy and tracker protection. I am also unreasonably attached to the little fire animation that plays when you click “clear all tabs and data.” That is my largely nontechnical but honest review haha

I'm using Librewolf on desktop (Firefox fork focused on privacy and security) and Brave on mobile. Brave hardened via these settings: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/mobile-browsers/#recommended-configuration

What is a FOSS browser? I use Waterfox and Pale Moon, sometimes Firefox and scrupulously avoid Chrome and Edge.

Firefox with some customisations and uBlock Origin.

Firefox on both Fedora and Android, with adblockers and privacy enhancements (e.g. adnauseam) for the daily browsing, and Falkon to view documentation since it's lightweight

I use Firefox Beta on Android because it lets you use arbitrary extensions unlike the stable version at the moment. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but it means that in addition to uBlock Origin on mobile (the killer app of Firefox Android IMHO), I've also got Redirector set up to redirect all visits to Imgur/Reddit/sigh Twitter (if I have to) to the proxies out there like LibReddit or Rimgo so I don't have to log in or be tracked at much. (There's an extension called LibRedirector that gets recommended that automates the process better, but it's really flakey in my experience.)

Otherwise just got all the usual security settings turned up.

Regarding search engines - Brave Search cured my Google-hopping. Great results, almost zero blogspam. It does support the same bang syntax as DDG, if you want to redirect your search.

Depending on what you're searching for it also has a "Discussions" section near the top of the results page so that you don't even have to append "reddit" or "stack overflow" to your query to find normal people opinions - they only need to add Lemmy to it now ;)

Kiwi Next + Ublock

Firefox everywhere + uBlock, no script

I tend to switch mobile OSs frequently because of my curiosity for custom ROMs. Overall I mainly use FOSS Browser or iodé Browser (a fork of FF by iodé OS) and Tor on my mobile.

On my work notebook it is FF with AdBlocker (and Snowflake), rarely Edge, and Tor.

On my private notebook, which I use the least, it is FF with NoScript, Privacy Badger, and AdBlocker and Tor.

I'm using FireFox on PC and Fennec on mobile. I refuse to use Chromium-based browsers because I refuse to coöperate with Google pushing to monopolise the making of internet standards. And to be honest, I haven't had a single real issue yet from not using it.

I use Brave Search for searching because it has it's on crawler, has pretty good results, and despite it saying it's introducing adds, I haven't seen any yet. I only don't like that for images, it just opens Google or Bing with the querry forwarded, but at least they are clear about that they do that.

Browser and search engine choice is only a tiny part of browsing securely and privatly tho.

Currently using firefox but I'll probably be switching to Safari on Mac once proton pass is out. Depending on where proton pass is available on android or if it allows autofill in all apps, I might switch from fennec too.

I use Vivaldi on my phone, and FireFox on desktop.

I use LibreWolf on desktop and Firefox on mobile.

Vanadium on mobile (GrafeneOS), ff and brave on computer

LibreWolf as my main and Brave for logging in to more disposable stuff.

Brave search is my main search and using Duckduckgo if I don't find what I'm looking for.