Vanadium (GrapheneOS Web Browser)

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For people using GrapheneOS on an 8th generation Pixel, there is another compelling reason to use Vanadium: GrapheneOS (@GrapheneOS): "Our Vanadium browser is also the first browser using MTE in production. In Vanadium, we enable Chromium's PartitionAlloc MTE implementation. PartitionAlloc's implementation isn't nearly as good as hardened_malloc, but we intend to improve PartitionAlloc's security in the future." | nitter

Chromium marks itself as compatible with MTE but then disables it as runtime, so other Chromium-based browser have MTE disabled even when the OS has it enabled.

The benefits of MTE are summarized in a comment from a different thread: Write about MTE (Android) - #6 by anon28734771

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Wanted to add that the newest Vanadium release has

add initial basic support for filtering ads based on a subresource filter APK updated separately from Vanadium

It looks like it uses these lists from my very amateur reading of the commits

https://easylist.to/easylist/easylist.txt
https://easylist.to/easylist/easyprivacy.txt

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I saw this one. It is a nice improvement. Hope they match the ad blocking level that we have with Brave and also at some point address the cookies questions rejecting all that it cans.

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I am very confident that GrapheneOS and/or Daniel Micay will do it right on Vanadium.
From thier page:

Re
“We recommend against trying to achieve browser privacy and security through piling on browser extensions and modifications. Most privacy features for browsers are privacy theater without a clear threat model and these features often reduce privacy by aiding fingerprinting and adding more state shared between sites.”

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Following the addition of content blocking to Vanadium, the GrapheneOS team has also updated the documentation for Vanadium to be much more detailed.

Very interesting read as the docs also explain their approach to Vanadium and hint at future enhancements.

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Recommend reading this updated documentation on Vanadium, which clarifies some of its security features.

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@abstract
You forgot the documentation /source😆

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You might not have noticed that I quoted the post RIGHT ABOVE myself which CONTAINS a link to the documentation. But I’m glad to at least have given someone a laugh today. :slight_smile: This is something I should do more often (no, I am NOT being sarcastic; I do not make people smile as often as I should).

Edit: it seems I did NOT quote the post above myself. It was my error.

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Yeh i use its on my grapheneos. Use it like a 3rd app.

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Wanted to see if Vanadium has been reconsidered now that it has ad blocking, albeit it’s very basic. I totally see the downside since it’s for a niche crowd that has GOS but maybe suggesting to GOS users specifically to consider it over Brave due to the ad blocking, stronger security and less bloat.

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Oh, cool. Adblocking was the only thing driving me to Brave. Looks like I’m back to Vanadium now.