I feel like there is no web browser with a sane default configuration that I can recommend to other people. All browsers are preconfigured in a way that harms the privacy of their users or include services that no one wants such as Pocket and BAT.
Here are my problems with some popular browsers.
-
Mozilla Firefox: Pocket integration, no ad-blocking without extensions.
-
Brave: Everything related to crypto. Also its start page is horrible.
-
Chromium: No ad-blocking without extensions and soon Manifest v3 will cripple all content blockers.
Now, these suboptimal defaults wouldn’t be such a big problem if the configuration files were easy to backup and restore and respected the XDG base directory specification.
This list looks like:
Firefox: comes with different candy than I like but will get me the candy I want if I ask
Brave: has candy, but stares at me uncomfortably and asks me to lick everything slowly
Chromium: comes with candy I don’t like and I’m pretty sure is going to kill me
Just when I was getting used to car analogies, here’s candy analogies
Brave is based on Chromium, so the candy doesn’t have so nice taste.
Ad blocking shouldn’t be tied to the browser, anyway. ublock is superb, imagine if firefox devs should have to develop it along with the browser (that nowadays is a herculean task).
Anyway, extensions give user freedom to chose how they use their browser.
Pocket take 2 seconds to disable.
That is why forks like librewolf exist.
Just use Librewolf. It’s a fork of Firefox, with Pocket disabled, Ublock Origin preinstalled, and privacy settings enabled by default.
Librewolf or one of the other Firefox forks
To be fair, I don’t think my browser came in a box since it was for sale on store shelves and called Netscape Navigator.
On Android F-Droid app store there are some off-shoots of Firefox that are real good. Fennec comes with a bunch of the most popupar extensions already installed and none of that Pocket nonsense.
Why do people dislike pocket so much? I barely even know what it is, used it once to see what it was about and then forgot about it completely, it’s not exactly obstructive
data collection.
How does pocket collect data more than the browser itsself could though?
No browser will ever tick ALL your boxes. You pick one and make it work.
True.
I wish someone can fork Brave on desktop and mobile and take out all the other stuff. And if someone could fork firefox for desktop and mobile and make it a hardened browser out of the box.
Firefox has librewolf for desktop.
But not for mobile, especially Android. I would like librewolf to maintain a hardened Android app with their own F-Droid repo.
What’s wrong with pocket integration?Nobody forces you to use it. Apart from that it stores user data e2e encrypted, mozilla has no access to your data (as opposed to chromes sync functionality). Imho, a browser should not block some content by default. But ad-blocking must be easy to enable/install. All of that’s the case in FF so I see no reason not to recommend it.
Yeah, Pocket does nothing unless you press the button.
And as for telemetry that’s publicly available on telemetry.mozilla.org if anyone wants to see what’s being sent. It’s very useful for Mozilla to see what and how features are used.
Mozilla is our last tiny hope for freedom really, in this Chrome/Blink world…
