What FOSS browsers, do you use on a daily basis on both your mobile and computer for privacy and security, and what measures have you taken to further harden your browser (if any).
Me, I have a low threat model so I mainly try to stay away from proprietary stuff when possible (Chrome, Edge ect) I use an eclectic mix of browsers.
I use Vivaldi (I know it's not entirely FOSS but I like the customizability of it), for my amnesiac browsers I use Firefox Focus on Android, and LibreWolf on PC, and for when I want as much anonymity as possible I use Tor with Orbot active routing traffic to Switzerland.
I used to use Brave Browser a lot because I like the user interface but I kinda got turned off by all the crypto stuff they've been peddling. And as far as I know, Bromite hasn't been updated in quite some time (please elighten me if I'm wrong about that I've been out of the loop for a while) , and I was weirded out by the developer's statement "I'll get around to it sometime."
Mull is great but very slow to search imo, when I search for something it takes a long time to load. Or it takes a long time to load a website. It could be internet speed but other browsers work just fine,and I've tested Mull on other WiFis.
I sometimes also use DuckDuckGo but the search results are so bad that I just find myself searching google to find what I want. No offensive if anyone uses those I personally just haven't found much use out if them.
So what browsers do you use for privacy and security?
Edit: Sorry for the long post and edited for clarity.
firefox on everything I use. no need for anything else. always been a fan of mozilla
ditto, FF Nightly everywhere..fuck chrome/chromium
This, except Librewolf on desktop and Mull on android to get some extra hardening.
It’ll be my main again when they bring back tab groups and enable vertical tabs. The extensions are shitty alternatives. Apparently they were way ahead of the times when they had groups in the first place before they removed them, since everyone else is adding them now.
Firefox on android and desktop. Never had any reason to use anything else.
Firefox everywhere + uBlock, no script
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.
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.
I have a similar setup on FF Nightly; anti-amp + paywall remover extensions are killer on mobile.
Firefox on desktop and Android. Plus a bunch of add-ons of course. Never switched away from it, especially not for Chrome.
on android, i have three.
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:
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.
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
Mull on GrapheneOS on my phone, and hardened Firefox (arkenfox) on my desktop/laptop.
I find that this is a pretty capable setup that can handle 95% of what I need to do, and for the other 5% of the time I can fall back to ungoogled-chromium to ensure webpage compatibility
Also switched recently from Fennec to Mull on GrapheneOS. Thank for the arkenfox hint!
Firefox with some customisations and uBlock Origin.
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.
Yea, Brave is great and I only see the crypto stuff the first time I run it, but I wish they didn’t try to make it a thing so hard.
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 :)
There is a Bromite fork called Cromite if you'd like to go on with that.
https://github.com/uazo/cromite
It has a FDroid repository if you want to keep it updated 😊
Thanks! This is great.
For the record I use Mull and Mullvad Browser (no relation).
I'm on Librewolf and Mull, but when I need a browser with JS and cookies and no Adguard... I go with Cromite now :)
Haha you aren't alone in using bromite for months without noticing it's no longer maintained.
+1 for bromite-buildtools https://github.com/uazo/bromite-buildtools
I am using the bromite-buildtools, too. The Updates are very fast (usually in 2 or 3 days) and it has integrated adblock.
On Desktop i use Librewolf with uBlock on medium mode..
Vanadium and Mull on Android, Librewolf and Mullvad Browser on Desktop.
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.
Oh! For some reason I thought Fennec was a dead project. It was just updated 6 days ago! Cool.
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.
FOSS, Free and Open Source Software.
They're both FOSS, and both based on Firefox I believe.
I use Vivaldi on my phone, and FireFox on desktop.
Same here. But Firefox isn't very privacy respecting out of the box so it needs some extra work to make it a privacy respecting browser.
Vanadium on mobile (GrafeneOS), ff and brave on computer
Same + ublock origin
Kiwi browser on Android which supports chrome plugins
I can't find information at all on Fennec F-Droid because of the blackouts, could someone tell me more about Fennec F-Droid. First of all, wasn't it a dead project? I remember it no longer being maintained. Secondly, that it tracks and reports activity in the anti features section. If this is true then should I use something else. I'm really frustrated that I can't find this info because all I find on searches is reddit links. If anyone can shed some light that would be great! I heard a lot of good things about it and IF it's safe I'd love to use it.
Thanks I'll check this out.
I think the warning is because you CAN connect to a Firefox sync account. There may be something else too, but I trust Mozilla over Vivaldi or Brave any day. No need to add the sync account if you don't want to.
The best feature of Fennec for me is ability to configure DNS over HTTPS via about:config. Allows use of adblocking (Adguard Home) without heavy plugins on the go. I'm still stumped how DoH hasn't been enabled to official Firefox Android, works great on Fennec.
Edit: DoH added -> enabled, the feature is there on Ff, just no way to configure it.
the latest version has been released a week ago, so... no?
pretty sure it's about Mozilla's telemetry, which is disabled by default in the F-droid version.
On my android phone, I'm running grapheneos, so I just use vanadium which is their hardened browser..... On my laptop, I've hardened my Firefox.... Tho might be much better options now a days
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
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 ;)
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 use LibreWolf on desktop and Firefox on mobile.
Currently using Orion on iOS. It’s made by the same people behind the Kagi search engine (which I also use now).
It’s still in alpha, so I occasionally encounter a bug, but the fact that it has built-in advert and tracking protection, as well as cool tab-suspend features sold me.
It tends to be on a newer version of WebKit then then Safari as well.
Oh, and did I mention it can use both Chrome and Firefox extensions?
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
Kiwi Next + Ublock
I use LibreWolf on my laptops, Lynx on my old laptop, and Brave on my iPhone.
On other operating systems which I don't currently use, here are my picks:
I've heard of Lynx, is that a browser or an OS like Tails or Whonix?
Lynx is a text-based browser typically used from the terminal. I prefer the Links browser myself (another text-based one) but they're both great for simple web browsing and avoiding all the distracting images and javascript nonsense. Also a great way to test how accessible a site is to the visually impaired who use screen readers.
That sounds really cool. Is there an Android version?
I don't see them natively on the play store or F-Droid, but you can install them through Termux (handy terminal environment for android). You'll probably need to install openssl first. In termux, type
pkg install openssland accept any defaults. After that's done, dopkg install lynx(or links, or w3m - I like them better than Lynx, but it's fun to try them all) and just fire it up by typinglynxonce it's finished installing. I enjoy seeing which sites work in text-only mode and which don't. The number is steadily decreasing, as you might imagine.It also runs on iOS, using iSH.
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.
Very excited for proton pass myself as well! I currently use Firefox everywhere so I’ll probably just keep using that with the app.
Yeah Firefox doesn't support PWAs so I kinda need to use Safari. It's getting support for PWAs in the next major macOS version. Fennec supports PWAs so Im not sure if I'm gonna change the browser. Just depends on proton pass being available there
Why I really want is a proper encrypted syncing 2fa app to rival authy, by the proton folks.
that too
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.
What does that mean?
Oh, I mean when I search for something it takes a long time to load. Or it takes a long time to load a website. It could be internet speed but other browsers work just fine, and I've tested Mull on other WiFis.