this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Privacy

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Open-source tests of web browser privacy.

[EDIT] - Check the comments for more information and links πŸ”½ πŸ”½ πŸ”½

[Edit Edit] - Brave Browser caught adding its own referral codes to some cryptocurrency trading sites - More in the comments πŸ”½ πŸ”½ πŸ”½

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[–] EyesEyesBaby@lemmy.world 101 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

@voytrekk@lemmy.world

(how do you tag someone here?)

[–] Norgur@kbin.social 36 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the tests looked a little suspicious regarding Brave.

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[–] Khalic@kbin.social 76 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Stop promoting brave, it’s a scam

[–] Rooki@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago

and has an a-hole ceo. It uses chromium so double spyware and dependencies

[–] jasondj@ttrpg.network 1 points 1 year ago
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[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 21 points 1 year ago

This was garbage every time it was posted before, and it's still garbage.

[–] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 18 points 1 year ago

Some of these test cases don't matter if you just use uBlock Origin.

[–] Zoldyck@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So at a quick glance Librewolf is the best choice for desktop? Does it allow addons or block ads natively?

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] Zoldyck@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Awesome. Makes me wonder if there's still a reason to use Firefox over Librewolf.

[–] JokeDeity@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Zoldyck@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Fair enough!

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] nick@midwest.social 5 points 1 year ago

I switched to it a couple weeks ago from FF/arc. No issues so far, and I’m pretty happy.

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[–] xe3@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] lemmyingly@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you know of any guides to configure Firefox to be as private as LibreWolf?

[–] TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] ekZepp@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Librewolf is a custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy

[–] Bipta@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] darcy@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago

tor, mullvad, or librewolf i would say

[–] darkbit@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Who watches the watchers.

[–] AlexKalopsia@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Wish DuckDuckGo was on the list

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago

Its a webview browser so not good for privacy or security and relies on Android webview (a lite chrome widget)

[–] Lemongrab@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Look under the ios or android tabs.

They have a desktop browser

[–] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Some of the items on that list are kinda weird. Why would I want to block a website from knowing my screen size?

[–] dan1101@lemm.ee 14 points 1 year ago

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/

[–] xe3@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

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).

[–] flumph@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Asudox@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They use Chromium, not Chrome. Chrome is Google's proprietary version, while Chromium is the open source version.

Still pretty proprietary in my books

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] bh64@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

if it's made for power users why is it proprietary software? Vivaldi is yet another chromium browser with a fancy skin.