this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
66 points (67.4% liked)

Privacy

32173 readers
1000 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
66
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by ekZepp to c/[email protected]
 

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

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] EyesEyesBaby 126 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.

@[email protected]

(how do you tag someone here?)

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

Yeah, the tests looked a little suspicious regarding Brave.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 111 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Stop promoting brave, it’s a scam

[–] Rooki 16 points 1 year ago

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

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Zoldyck 17 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?

[–] [email protected] 28 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 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 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 2 points 1 year ago

Fair enough!

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I assume Sync doesn't work for history and bookmarks if its not using the FF servers.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] ekZepp 7 points 1 year ago

Librewolf is a custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy

[–] [email protected] 16 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?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

tor, mullvad, or librewolf i would say

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] ignotum 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Either the watchers watch eachother, or the great kraken watches us all

https://youtu.be/Fzhkwyoe5vI

[–] AlexKalopsia 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Wish DuckDuckGo was on the list

[–] [email protected] 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)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Look under the ios or android tabs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

They have a desktop browser

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 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/

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It's one of the metrics used to build unique identifiers (amongst many many others).

load more comments
view more: next β€Ί