Or factory reset and then don't install SmartTube. Fool me once?

One thing to keep in mind as new is that "VPN" is a technical term with pretty clear meaning among the technical people but it has a very fuzzy meaning in marketing and branding. Referring here to "VPN apps" that may just be a local DNS relay (ie: it will only tunnel and filter your DNS requests; all your actual traffic still goes through your normal connection as clear as always). Oftentimes, it's what we would call a proxy. Android has not at all helped here.

In either case, yes, you can usually chain things. What if any benefits you get from that depends on both technical specifics (which protocols) and your circumstances and threat model.

For example, if we consider only Wireguard (one of the VPN protocols Mullvad offers).

No VPN/proxy: Your ISP sees everything

1 proxy: ISP sees that you are connecting to proxy but not what servers you're actually talking to. VPN provider now sees everything instead.

2 proxies: Proxy A sees your encrypted traffic to Proxy B. Proxy B sees all your traffic but doesn't know where you are.

3 proxies: Congratulations, you have manually built a shitty onion circuit (Tor works like this)

Mullvad has their own "multi-hop" feature which chains two Mullvad nodes but i have to question using that strictly for privacy reasons, considering it's by the same provider and the ports make it predictable from the ISP.

Thank you for kind words!

Ah, then the hope is that this curiosity will trigger you to dig into it yourself (for example using the provided tool or taking inspiration from it) so that it starts making sense! I know it's an unconventional format to refrain from laying out my own opinions and analysis but that's my thing today. So much "everyone knows" and vapid third-hand takes flying around these days that I think we would do well to actually verify (and pick up related knowledge in the process) rather than take forum comments and blog posts for gospel.

OK, all right, I can try. I guess I can point at one thing in the Mozilla telemetry at the very end, doesn't that look very fine-grained if you look at the URLs (addresses) listed?

We can tell that many of the actions I took were communicated to the mothership for analysis and product improvement. Is this data really anonymized (or anonymizable)? Is it a reasonable amount for a user that has not opted in? My professional and personal opinion is: It is not.

But! That's just one isolated example. And an extremely limited view. What about Zen? Chrome, Edge and Safari weren't included here at all. And it's not at all looking at what happens for a user who probably cares about this: when you go to settings and disable all the telemetry. See I just said that one thing about Mozilla Telemetry and now I'm going to have to run some new tests and write reports about them for days just to set that record straight!

Maybe I'm odd but I think it's many (100?) times easier and quicker to gain understanding of the kinds of stuff we're looking at here by getting hands-on than to communicate it verbally. And I'm concerned with this limited attention span so many people are afflicted with these days, and look at how long this comment is already, no we're done with me telling you how it is, let's wrap this one up and get on to the juicy stuff.

There's an expandable section Basic test environment usage under Testing procedure but I realize now that might be easy to miss...

Anyway, to start it: Install podman, docker-compose (v2) and MITM_BROWSER=firefox-esr podman compose up --build. That should be it.

Then the browser pops up (hopefully), you do your thing, and after you Ctrl+C in the console, it will quit and the proxy will dump the recorded .har file which contains all HTTP and websocket traffic that went through the proxy in cleartext, in JSON format. There're tools online that can help visualize I think but nothing I can recommend off the bat. Simply cating it to the terminal or opening it in a text editor can be educative. Also playing around with variations of the jq snippets and see if you can come up with questions of your own to answer. Or if anything in my numbers make you scratch your head or say "wait a minute" dig there.

In case you want to take a look at what the thing does before running it (trust me bro), these are the files involved when you run that compose up command:

• entrypoint compose.yml
• imported compose/proxy.compose.yml for mitmproxy
• The browser Containerfile (aka Dockerfile)

Available browser images

What about gwenview?

The author seems to think Mozilla should have protected our privacy by having someone act as the proxy for the request.

On the proxy part, they actually already have that and using it for some other parts:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ohttp-explained

TL;DR: Imagine an HTTPS-over-HTTPS proxy. Try to explain it like something groundbreaking without referencing existing tech. Now you have OHTTP.

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/mozcachedohttp/docs/index.html

https://www.fastly.com/blog/firefox-fastly-take-another-step-toward-security-upgrade

It makes me scratch my head a bit why I've never see it enabled for DNS-over-HTTP in default stock Firefox config despite it being supported for years - the endpoints are just not configured. You have to know about it and configure the barely documented URL in about:config for that. Unlike for newtabpage and the FF shopping feature where OHTTP is used by default. Infra costs?

good point for the offlineimap cronjob, I’ll take note of that.

I might as well go as far as suggesting to start there with your current mail provider if the local/offline-first flow is something that could work for you (and assuming it's not something you already do, in which case carry on). Once you've adapted to a local-first mail reading flow with any client that's separate from the "app" or webmail tethered to your mail service, then rest of migrations should be smoother and hopefully feel less daunting. Doesn't mean you have to keep doing it that way only forever but establishing the infra and habit once for a while can help with both resilience and confidence in everything that follows.

If you're roaming between devices and places enough that local-first feels untenable then the "syncbox" could be a little SBC or whatever; it could be the machine you also use read and write mail from but doesn't have to be.

NP and good luck!

No experience with Migadu but yeah, I think 1 account = 1 login is the intended meaning in their FAQ.

At $19/year couldn't just gifting a separate micro sub to your SO might be a option if you adminning her email feels weird to either of you?

Am I missing something else?

You don't mention how you'll be accessing your emails so maybe this is something you already solved for: Regularly syncing down all mail locally means you won't have to rely on the mail provider as a single-point-of-failure for keeping your emails safe, secure, private and available. This could consist of anything from a simple offlineimap cronjob to a full-blown "offline" separate mail server.

Maybe. But be careful about putting in that PIN or connecting it to your network when you get home, in case you get it back after...

Appreciate the links!

And the option "Always show scrollbars" enabled because I have not found the preference to do it through the configuration file.

The labeling makes it less obvious but that maps to widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled=false so also part of Konform upcoming update :) In general I find the quickest way to identify the mapping of a UI configuration and the about:config key is to:

• launch a clean profile
• open about:config
• click Show only modified preferences
• open about:preferences
• change the thing
• tab back. what's new?

BTW, widget.non-native-theme.enabled is a no-op since the direct GTK integration was removed a while back: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1726283#c4

In case you want to try this for yourself, adding container and running test for Waterfox should be about same as for Floorp that I wrote about here. Then you can really see what's going on and reason about the difference when you see the URLs and stuff.

BTW the purpose of the report section here isn't "look at my numbers and take my word for it" but "here's some examples of things we can look at with this". Please keep in mind both the Limitations section and that it's intended as showing one way to easily and independently compare browsers yourself. Just reproducing the examples shown and then scrolling through the .har files JSON is a great start. Of course, me and I assume others would be very happy if you want to share anything that comes out of that so that we can bring people up together. I'm sure there's a lot more useful insights to derive even with a small and scoped testing protocol like the one in article and wouldn't mind input of any nuggets other people come up with :)

Thanks! Adding Floorp should be straightforward if you feel like tackling it yourself as it's "just another FF fork". Adding a new browser consists of adding a new Containerfile for it. I guess Floorp might be most similar to Mozilla firefox out of the existing ones. PRs much appreciated for new browsers as well as any interesting queries to get more insight into data I can run on existing dumps and add to Report section.

They have official PPA: https://ppa.floorp.app/

For Brave got it running but didn't yet figure out why it crashes as soon as I try to proceed with the onboarding. Judging by the probably unrelated error noise in the console, it might be trying something weird with a graphics driver or hardware sensor and not gracefully handling not having access to whatever it is 🤷 But didn't even ldd or strace it properly yet so maybe just a missing library.

There's a lot that could be done but had to wrap up and publish somewhere.

I don't think the data supports that. I'm curious what makes you single it out. Mullvad is in the top-tier but it is not alone (or clearly #1 - like the post gets into - it gets nuanced and I think any attempt at general objective "top 5 ranking" will be reductive to the point of being misleading or plain wrong. So I'm not trying that here). Read again? :)

For example of nuance displayed in results:

### Number of requests
119 firefox
81 firefox-esr
0 konform
7 librewolf
30 mullvad-browser
62 zen-browser