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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[–] [email protected] 106 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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 2 years ago

Yeah, the tests looked a little suspicious regarding Brave.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Stop promoting brave, it’s a scam

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years 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] 16 points 2 years 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 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Fair enough!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years 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 2 years ago

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

[–] Zoidsberg 2 points 2 years ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years 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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Librewolf is a custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

tor, mullvad, or librewolf i would say

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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

https://youtu.be/Fzhkwyoe5vI

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Wish DuckDuckGo was on the list

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years 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 2 years ago (1 children)

Look under the ios or android tabs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

They have a desktop browser

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

@AlexKalopsia @ekZepp

It's in the mobile tab

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years 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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

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

Still pretty proprietary in my books

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years 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?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years 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 2 years 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

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

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