Why is Brave recommended and Vanadium isn’t? I’m a GrapheneOS user, and I don’t see why I should install Brave and use it over Vanadium.
I did have a PR open on this, but it seems it was missing discussion.
I guess this is a good a place as any to have a discussion about it.
Here’s their documentation on vanadium. Seems like it’s mostly focused on security atm with privacy features like content blocking, state partitioning improvements, and always incognito mode stated to be planned for the future.
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Brave has still some advantages over Vanadium like a tracker blocker and fingerprint protection that Vanadium just simply lacks.
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All of these are present now except for content filtering, which is irrelevant because DNS blocking exists.
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Vanadium has security features and improvements that Brave doesn’t have or just couldn’t have because Vanadium is a system browser.
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Oh great! Yeah I think then it might be worth recommending.
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Content filtering is being worked on, but they want to do it right and in a secure way, which is why it’s taking this long.
At first, GrapheneOS didn’t have MicroG, but then they came up with sandboxed Google Play Services, which shows that the developers would rather take their time and do it properly and securely.
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Vanadium has a per-site JIT toggle that not only boosts security by a lot but sometimes prevents some ads, trackers, and other annoyances from even loading in the first place.
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I’m definitely interested to see the Graphene OS teams take on content filtering.
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That’s cool, in my experience on Safari with lockdown mode disabling JIT doesn’t seem to block many ads though. Disabling Javascript entirely helps though.
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It purely depends on the sites. But in my testing, disabling JIT is a good middle ground between not disabling anything and disabling JavaScript.
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Two more things that I like about Vanadium are seamless, secure, and private updates via the GrapheneOS Apps repository and how clean the browser is; it’s even cleaner than Chromium itself, and when you compare that with Brave’s built-in VPN, wallet, BAT, other crypto stuff, Brave News, and all the other things, it really feels clean and refreshing.
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That’s definitely a big deal, the mental stress of having so much crap everywhere is real.
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This was pretty cool too, but it was too powerful without having control over exceptions. It will be back soon with the ability to make exceptions.
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Internet without adblocking is unusable to me, having said that I had been using Vanadium with adblocking DoH server.
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DNS blocking isn’t nearly as powerful as what Brave or Firefox with uBlock Origin can do
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When you use something like NextDNS, AdGuard Home, or Pi-Hole with JIT disabled and you still get ads, then you’re visiting some really crappy sites.
Most people who complain about DNS filtering are using their VPN’s DNS servers, which have weak block lists, to avoid any breakage for all of their users.
Totally do agree there, but I only ever do very light usage there.
Sure, but blocking ads is just one part of the puzzle. Since I use uBlock Origin with medium mode, I know that websites usually load a lot of unnecessary stuff that the website doesn’t need in order to function, so it is great to know that those are all blocked by default.
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