Phoenix is a suite of configurations & advanced modifications for Mozilla Firefox, designed to put the user first - with a focus on privacy, security, freedom, & usability.
Why I think this tool should be added
@celenity
People have been talking a lot about Arkenfox, so I thought this would be worth mentioning. Phoenix has hardening that Arkenfox and even Librewolf don’t have, on top of having updates as timely as stock Firefox.
Among other things, it uses BeaconDB as a location provider, blocks cookie banners, enables Post Quantum Key Agreement, disables JIT, and proxies Google Safe Browsing while protecting metadata.
Currently, it’s only on GNU/Linux, but work is underway to make it cross-platform.
I still prefer Brave, Trivalent, or Vanadium, but once Phoenix reaches cross-platform, I see no reason why it shouldn’t be recommended over Arkenfox.
DNT is deprecated, could you toggle it off by default on Phoenix?
Also your browser guides on your github website and normal website talk about enabling DNT, could you delete those parts?
Lastly uBO Lite will be released on Firefox which has MV3 security improvements and possibly filtering improvements, would you consider switching to uBO Lite when it releases?
If it doesn’tsupportdynamic filtering, it’s not an improvement. It’s better to be able to block everything by default and enable only the scripts and content necessary for a site to run then to block according to a filter list. That’s an actual privacy improvement because simply blocking ads won’t do much on it’s own.
Can’t you just disable Javascript on sites that don’t require it? Couldn’t a privacy invasive site put the privacy invasive parts on necessary scripts for the site to function? MV3 mitigates the amount of damage a bug or malicious rule can do, so it can be a security improvement and privacy improvement by extension.
The point is disable Javascript by default and if a website doesn’t load, then enable one script at a time. This is still better than allowing all Javascript.
What we really need is an extension like what uMatrix used to be before it went unmaintained. xiMatrix is all I could find for Firefox but I haven’t tested it and barely anyone uses it. Pale Moon at least has ηMatrix but we shouldn’t be using that browser anyways.
I’m using Phoenix right now and, while some websites like Discourse-based forums appear a bit broken sometimes or have a slow performance, it works.
I think both Phoenixed Firefox (on desktop) and IronFox (on Android) should be recommended, maybe with a disclaimer that sensitive tasks should be performed on Blink (Chromium)-based browsers.