Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
https://aussie.zone/post/1903094
Looking into privacytests.org, the main developer behind it is someone who contributes to Brave source code. He may not be officially affiliated with the company, but it would be hard to ignore any sort of bias towards Brave.
(how do you tag someone here?)
Yeah, the tests looked a little suspicious regarding Brave.
Stop promoting brave, itβs a scam
and has an a-hole ceo. It uses chromium so double spyware and dependencies
So brave.
This was garbage every time it was posted before, and it's still garbage.
Some of these test cases don't matter if you just use uBlock Origin.
So at a quick glance Librewolf is the best choice for desktop? Does it allow addons or block ads natively?
It comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, so there's that. Otherwise, it's just a hardened Firefox fork, and as such has the same catalogue of addons
Awesome. Makes me wonder if there's still a reason to use Firefox over Librewolf.
Absolutely. I would never recommend any of these offshoots over stock. You can literally set it up the same exact way if you want, but still get same day security patches and updates.
Fair enough!
Only reasons if heard is faster updates if you use base Firefox (w/ arkenfix user.js). Also the styling (brand icons and such) for librewolf are detectable. Mullvad is better than librewolf for antfingerprinting.
I switched to it a couple weeks ago from FF/arc. No issues so far, and Iβm pretty happy.
Yes it does both of those things, Librewolf is just Firefox pre-configured for privacy. You could use Librewolf or you could configure firefox yourself to be equally private, Librewolf is just taking advantage of the features built into FIrefox but left optional for users.
Do you know of any guides to configure Firefox to be as private as LibreWolf?
This website has a really extensive writeup on Firefox privacy and security hardening that I learned a couple of tricks from.
Besides that, you can search the Mozilla support forums as there are tons of threads there with questions and answers about Firefox privacy and security.
Librewolf is a custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy
I don't understand the ones where a browser doesn't have the feature so it gets a green dash versus a green check. I'd assume not having a feature should just be considered failing. What's the distinction?
tor, mullvad, or librewolf i would say
Who watches the watchers.
Wish DuckDuckGo was on the list
Its a webview browser so not good for privacy or security and relies on Android webview (a lite chrome widget)
Look under the ios or android tabs.
They have a desktop browser
Some of the items on that list are kinda weird. Why would I want to block a website from knowing my screen size?
Window sizes can vary widely and if you come from the same IP with the same exact window size (1033x832 for example) then people wanting to track you for ads etc will have a higher degree of confidence that you're the same person. It's part of "browser fingerprinting", which can also include things like the extensions you have installed: https://amiunique.org/
Tracking/advertising corporations have developed techniques called 'browser fingerprinting' where innocuous seeming things like screen size and the fonts you ahve installed on your system can be used to uniquely identify you and track you across the internet even without cookies or anything like that.
It's one of the metrics used to build unique identifiers (amongst many many others).
Why are the three Chrome derivatives missing features Chrome has? Is it a porting issue or are they just that far behind on pulling in upstream changes?
They use Chromium, not Chrome. Chrome is Google's proprietary version, while Chromium is the open source version.
Still pretty proprietary in my books
Vivaldi on why this test is misleading https://vivaldi.com/security/common-questions/#privacytests
Also this doesn't account for the test choosing bad defaults. Defaults aren't as important in vivaldi, as it's made for power users.
if it's made for power users why is it proprietary software? Vivaldi is yet another chromium browser with a fancy skin.