I use Brave as recommendation for my friends still using Chrome, since I tell them it’s built on the same code. Most of them are so scared to leave Google’s toxic ecosystem that they think just installing LibreWolf will get them on a gov watchlist, hell they’re probably right. 🫢
I go pretty hard core while making sure it “just works”. People will mention LibreWolf, but the fingerprint resistance causes too much breakage for me. I install uBlock Origin no matter what, enable every single filter except the language lists. I install Dark Reader and set it to a timed schedule which is comfy for me.
Then I install NoScript then enable “Temporary set top level sites to trusted” and enable media under the trusted tab. This fixed majority of the breakage, but you sometimes need to tweak it. You can just not use NoScript if it’s too much of a hassle, uBlock Origin does basically everything you need anyways.
Also of course if you’re using stock Firefox, make sure to turn off analytics and telemetry in the settings, go to about:config and set pocket.enabled (or something like that, idr) to false. Then I set my default search to duckduckgo.
uBlock and the right Firefox settings is good enough in my opinion, you can go really crazy with just those two things but you’ll also break a lot of sites, I found a middle ground that I like.
Have a gander at the people behind Brave Software. They’re all cut from the same silicon wafer as everyone else in the Silicon Valley executive biome. And the (lack of) readiness of the information about who is behind Brave is another tell in itself.
That’s just browsers with default settings. Firefox doesn’t have a built in ad block, so it will always perform worse in that test. I guess FF + ublock origin + hardened settings (such as arkenfox) would perform like brave, if not better. For example, if you check android browsers, you see that Mull (a hardened fork of Firefox) performs great, even without ublock (that you can install as extension anyway).
Please forgive me, I’m going to keep asking this everywhere I can until hopefully get an answer.
I love librewolf and I want to use it, but I can’t get it to render the symbols that some websites use to make their UI work. I’ve tried downloading fonts but they’re all mapped to private use area. I think they need to be downloaded on a per website basis but librewolf seems to categorically refuse.
I really want to stop using brave and I honestly don’t want to figure out arkenfox.
Since LibreWolf is libre software, it’s likely that a user has freedom to tweak this maybe via about:config. You just need to ask this directly in the LibreWolf community.
I think I know what you’re talking about, though. Perhaps CSS @font is forbidden, because many sites use Google fonts, which allows them to track you.
If Tor Browser is acceptable, give it a try. While TB too has very strict font restrictions to avoid finger-printing (so that a remote site may not know which fonts your system already has), web fonts are allowed by default. It’s relatively harder to distinguish/track individual Tor users, since TB hides your real IP & by default cookies are per session only.
LibreWolf shows your real IP, so it’s understandable and reasonable that it wants to be more careful about fonts. Still a user should be given freedom to do whatever, at their own risk. That’s what free software is all about, after all. Just a thought…
No it isn’t. It’s just listed in alphabetical order. It’s not bias lol. People will see evil intent where just to confirm their own biases and beliefs.
Brave itself is not a Google product, but does heavily rely on an engine controlled by Google, which is unfortunate. This is a distinct difference though, there are things Google cannot force brave to do like chrome’s new found ability to send ads based on browsing history, and there are things brave can do that Google doesn’t want them to, like integrated advanced ad blocking.
Still though, Google controlling the browsing view experience for so many browsers is not great and I’m sure it won’t be long before they figure out how to do something we wouldn’t want them to that brave won’t be able to stop because of their reliance on chromium.
Brave uses Chromium code, but it is not a Google product. And I believe you are conflating security and privacy. The Chromium codebase is in fact more secure than Firefox in many areas. There is only so much hardening you can do security-wise before you are limited by its codebase. From a privacy perspective, though, you can definitely make the argument against Google. Brave, however, removes/replaces most of the Google stuff.
Firefox is for users who can configure the browser themselves—not that it requires much. Librewolf is a great little fork for people who don't want to look under the hood and mess with settings manually.
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