Delete Safari and change mobile browser criteria

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IMO This should be reconsidered. I believe that we should recommend Brave for iOS & reconsider our position on Safari. Allow me to explain.

I’ll first establish why I disagree with the reasoning PG currently provides:

According to PG:

We recommend Safari alongside a tracker-blocker like AdGuard on iOS, because all iOS browsers are forced to be based on Safari anyways. This reduces the number of parties you’re required to trust.

@patron ‘s comments above seem to echo this sentiment.

I find this logic highly flawed, particularly for one reason: We’re also recommending people install AdGuard on top of Safari anyways. Content blockers like AdGuard require deep & extensive access to the browser to do their job (See correction below). You are of course increasing the number of parties you trust there, there’s no way around that. You are putting trust in AdGuard. I personally have no issue trusting AdGuard here, but that’s irrelevant: let’s not ignore the fact that we are fundamentally increasing our attack surface & the parties we trust by installing their app & enabling their Safari extension.

Edit: See @BionicBison’s replies below, looks like this amount of access is only required for some advanced blocking? I think we might want to clarify & potentially recommend against this setting if we stick to current criteria.

With that being said, I still believe that we are increasing the parties we trust, because even without this advanced blocking enabled, we still have to trust AdGuard & filter maintainers not to implement any malicious filtering rules. Now back to my original points:

With that out of the way, I’ll now establish why I’m recommending Brave in particular and what benefits it brings over Safari.

Brave:

  • Is Open Source

  • Has stronger & more effective content blocking than AdGuard + Safari (Easy example of this off the top of my head is speedtest.net - On Safari, I see a banner asking to install the app even with AdGuard (& Annoyances filters enabled), meanwhile on Brave I don’t.)

  • Brave’s content blocking on iOS also has support for removing URL tracking parameters - Apple appears to have added some form of this functionality to Safari fairly recently, but their list can’t be expanded and likely isn’t as effective as using a filter like AdGuard’s URL Tracking Protection (& potentially Actually Legitimate URL Shortener Tool if that’s now supported as well, need to test…)

  • Supports adding custom filter lists & other basic functionality that AdGuard’s extension either lacks or locks behind a paywall

  • Supports toggling JavaScript per-site

  • Automatically redirects AMP pages

  • Supports Global Privacy Control

  • Allows adding custom search engines… (It is literally only possible to use 1/4 of the search engines we recommend on Safari without buying some kind of extension, which also even further increases attack surface & trust in another party…)

  • Etc…

These features provide clear & meaningful improvements to user privacy, and I hope this outlines why I disagree with the notion that the benefit of using another browser over Safari on iOS is “minimal”.

I don’t think Safari is particularly a bad choice when it comes to a browser like this, but I feel like it’s silly to ignore the clear benefits that other browsers like Brave can provide.

I’m curious to hear what the community thinks about this.

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