Which option can be the best to browse in Android (between these options)
- Bromite ; Firefox
- Stix
- Iceraven
- Icecast
Personally I use Iceraven.
Bromite it’s more privacy friendly. Doesn’t have any telemetry or trackers, is shipped with real mitigations against fingerprint, an adblocker, and others features, including:
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remove click-tracking and AMP from search results
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always-incognito mode
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make all favicon requests on-demand (supercookie mitigation)
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reduced referer granularity
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enable all network isolation features
You can see the full list of features here
These features are enabled by deafult so, you’re going to blend in crowd with others bromite users which is really good because it’ll way harder uniquely identify a single user.
Security wise, bromite is better. Chomium based browser come with useful security features, like site isolation, CFI and JIT hardening. Instead, Firefox lacks several security mitigations, especially on android. You can see more here. Moreover, bromite uses security enhancement patches from GrapheneOS project.
Keep in mind that security is also important as privacy. Actually, security is the first line of defense to protect your privacy.
- Firefox
Firefox comes with telemetry and trackers enabled by default. However, you can disable the telemetry , in the stable version of Firefox android about:config page is blocked so, you can’t disable all the telemetry. About the trackers I’m not really sure, I think that you can’t disable them using the browser’s settings. Firefox Is shipped with enchanted privacy protection, a tool which protect the users against cross site tracking, social media tracking, cryptominers, fingerprint and more. Ideally, you’d use the standard protection, because is the one enabled by default thus used by majority of users. In Firefox you can use add ons, but keep in mind that every add on installed make you more fingerprintable. I linked some articles regarding these problems here.
- Iceraven
Irevanven it’s a fork or Firefox with some modifications and not up to date, which is really bad, every software should be always up to date, it’s most important form of protection you have. You can see the full list of features here
Fork of Firefox are almost always not up to date, they doesn’t add useful privacy and security enchantments. Instead, they just remove telemetry and other closed source components like pocket. On Firefox , beside the stable version on android, you can disable pocket, telemetry, google safe browsing and basically everything.
I didn’t find information about stix and icecast.
If I were you, I would not be citing madaidan as a good source of information. He has always engaged in spreading FUD and promotes Windows over Linux, as example. And his Chrome shilling is highly related to his hatred for Firefox’s anti racism political stance, and how deep rooted he is into the toxic filthy GrapheneOS community. Have had a lot of one to one experience with him, his sockpuppets and his friends.
in spreading FUD and promotes Windows over Linux.
Madaidan doesn’t spread any FUD and doesn’t promote windows over linux. He wrote a purely objective technical analysis about Linux security; many security experts share this view, such as:
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Grsecurity, the Foundational security for the Linux kernel.
He also wrote:
Note that these analyses are purely objective and do not account for threat models or other user-dependent factors.
Users should choose a software according to their own user case and threat model. I personally use Fedora 34 with KDE plasma as desktop environment, I prefer Linux over Windows because of the foss ideology. However, the problems pointed out by madaidan and other security researchers still remain. You said that madaidan spread fud, but you didn’t show any evidence. Madaidan himself uses Linux (I think qubesOS + Whonix because he use Tor for everything)
And his Chrome shilling is highly related to his hatred for Firefox’s anti racism political stance
First of all, madaidan uses Firefox, he said that many times on Spite. Second of all, this is a very serious accusation, you should show proofs.
Have had a lot of one to one experience with him, his sockpuppets and his friends.
That doesn’t mean they spread FUD about software. Drama it’s really a waste of time.
Edit: typo and things that are not revelant to the discussion.
I strongly disagree. Madaidan regularly engages in spreading FUD, most popularly by conflating security with privacy and vice-versa, and I have been a participant in their NoGoolag and SpiteChat groups, both of which he banned me from because he, anuprita (clannad) and a bunch of other fellows are FUD spreaders, opportunists and vile racists.
Let me share with you one of the instances, among hundreds of others where he insults me, and would go on to ban people if they reply (of course which I never did, I always stayed humble).
picture, August 8, 2020
By your logic, if I share same views as Snowden, does that make me a Snowden rivaling security and OPSEC expert? Because you did the sane with lumping Daniel Micay, various grsecurity entities and madaidan together, making it seem like some kind of little coalition or a conflation of expertise levels.
Madaidan was shat on very hard over his Linux hardening guide, because he shows zero consideration of threat modelling, or has knowledge on the same when addressing other users or arguments on various communication platforms on most topics in the privacy and security domains.
It is common knowledge that key GrapheneOS community users engage in using sockpuppets via their strength of virtual compartmentalisation (Qubes, VMs, Tor and so on).
I do not think you have engaged with him or his friends for more than a year, like I have. You can look around the history of his engagement on reddit, unless he sanitised his comments prior to 3-4 months old. There is u/rediii123, u/cn3m and u/Additional-Ad-6738 as well.
A load of more FUD disguised as “criticism”, they directed at me when I released my smartphone 3.0 guide on r/degoogle:
picture 1
picture 2 replies
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I use GrapheneOS as my daily driver and love it. I’ve also been active in the GrapheneOS Matrix community and have never seen anything that I would consider questionable. I’ve never received money, but I guess my payment for this comment is a FOSS, deGoogled, hardened OS.
GrapheneOS it’s fine. The community it’s also fine. Please don’t believe stranger’s words, don’t believe my word either, do your own research. you too are in the grapheneOS community and you can see it’s not toxic at all.
https://tube.privacytools.io/videos/watch/2a693c25-1b44-42a5-a268-3349b278ef04
Maybe you never saw anything questionable, but that is only an anecdote, or you have loyalty towards that community.
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Kiwi Browser is also great, if you want a Chrome based option. Allows desktop extensions.
Fennec/Mull/Firefox modified are most excellent for primary usage, though.
Kiwi is super outdated isn’t it? I think I remember hearing somewhere that it doesn’t get updated often/at all nowadays.
https://github.com/kiwibrowser/src.next/releases
The dev backports security patching of Chromium releases to Kiwi. This is a disinformation usually spread by Bromite/GrapheneOS community, who want to iron grip the security community in nefarious ways. People fall for it because there is less awareness on these problems.
How is this connected to Bromite or GrapheneOS? Do you have anything to back up those claims?
A couple days of researching on r/kiwibrowser threads, and mini wars on browser threads on r/privacytoolsio should get you in the loop on arguments used against Kiwi and/or for Bromite.
Not everyone criticising Kiwi is one of the people from the group I mentioned, but a significant portion exists, and they are indeed a significant portion of what makes up arguments overall against Kiwi, even though security patch backporting happens with Kiwi.
There is a bit more to it, in that Kiwi Browser earlier was not open source, and some of the garbage arguments against it carry over from that time, and even conflated at times. It also does not help that these people take advantage of less thorough discussion and solid threads around Kiwi Browser, as not too many people use it yet. Less usage is most likely because of inertia of Chrome/Brave/Samsung Internet mobile users, and Kiwi only offers desktop extension support feature over other Blink mobile browsers.
I was never a Kiwi user until it became open source, and I only use it as secondary browser because I oppose Chromium/Blink monopoly via using Firefox, and also prefer uBlock Origin in all its glory without Manifest V3 crippling.
