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] 108 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.

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

According to the founder of the website, Brave's developers have implemented changes specifically targetting issues on this site, and thats why they're rated so highly. I believe if you look back to older releases of the test, you'll see Brave not doing nearly as well.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Stop promoting brave, it’s a scam

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [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.

[–] [email protected] 16 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

[–] [email protected] 11 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 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)
[–] [email protected] 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

[–] [email protected] 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

@AlexKalopsia @ekZepp

It's in the mobile tab

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 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.

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[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 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.

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