Firefox is not as privacy-friendly as everyone says

I think the best alternative would be LibreWolf

Privacy @lemmy.ml

How Mozilla Ruined Firefox

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17 comments

Not by default, but then most Firefox recommendations are not made with the default settings in mind. Given that context, yes it is actually as privacy friendly as everyone says.
- What settings do I need to change?
  
  This is a pretty quick and easy setup guide to follow.

I'm not going to watch a fucking YouTube video. I'm getting more and more triggered over videos with some influencer on YouTube...
Information like this is much better suited as text, because then I don't have to watch some person blabbering on...
- I blame people's shorter attention spans for it, to a degree I'm also guilty of it. Can't read a book nowadays before my focus shifts somewhere else.
  
  I felt this too and it was scary as hell. It means my brain chemistry has changed for the worse.
  After sticking with it and forcing myself to read, it became better after a few weeks.

Maybe. On the other hand, it's much more privacy-friendly than that guy says.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=ugnOM2mzgNU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

I haven't seen the video yet, but I very much believe what we really need is something better than either Firefox or 10 different flavors of Chromium.
Something that gives way more control over how it handles cookies. Something that lets you run multiple profiles at the same time. Something that lets you seamlessly switch identities.
Maybe something that'll give you a whole different cookie store every time you change domains.
- The thing that sucks about that is the sheer amount of stuff that a modern web browser is expected to do.
  Level 0:
  Parse and correctly display the contents of simple HTML documents in a manner consistent with other browsers
  Figure out what to do if somebody gives you mangled HTML in a way consistent with other browsers, because the page will just about always try to show the user something.
  Level 1:
  Implement who knows how many CSS properties in a way consistent with other browsers
  Level 3:
  Now write a JavaScript engine to manipulate all of the above, making sure that everything works like it does elsewhere no matter how non-sensical it is, because pages rely on that stuff to function sometimes.
  Level 4:
  Don't forget to implement media codecs so you can display video, play audio, and let the user control those via JavaScript APIs, and you have to render/play that in whatever way the webpage specifies.
  Basically, writing a browser engine from scratch in a way that is in any way competitive is probably on par for scale on writing your own operating system. You might even accomplish the latter faster, depending on where you'd call your OS "complete"
  
  Unfortunately, I can't argue with much of that. In fact, if anything, you're leaving out complexities.
  There are a few browsers out there that use WebKit but none of Chromium. (Surf and Uzbl are a couple that I've used in the past.) With a little scripting, you could get them to, for instance, run two different "profiles" with different cookie stores at the same time. But they're far from full-featured.
  Maybe what we really need is to scrap the web and start fresh with something better.
  
  Level 5: Handle cookies, a local key value store, and a local database internally in a secure way.
  Level 6: If you can't watch Netflix on your browser it's probably a non-starter for some users so better figure out a way to include DRM compatibility. But if you do it, the privacy minded will get really upset, so ideally you'd figure out a way to do it in some way that can be easily turned off or removed.
  Level 7: alright, so implementing all of that was hard. But if you don't implement it in such an insanely optimized fashion that you can win arbitrary script tests that are meant to strain modern CPUs, the audience most likely to use your browser (geeks) will immediately move to something else and say your browser sucks. Get optimizing.

Librewolf
Maintaining a browser is a huge endeaver. Using some random browser that is maintained by a a lone person or maybe even a handful of developers basically guarantees that the whole thing is insecure. This is especially true when keeping functionality around that was removed in the "main" browser to improve security there. One example is the old plugin system that firefox replaced with a more secure one with less hooks into the core engine, breaking some old plugins.
Stay with mainstream browsers folks and install some plugins to improve them that way. At least you get patches asap.
- Librewolf updates all the time, probably weekly (I don't watch it that closely).

Privacy-friendly Firefox is called Tor Browser.

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