It’s only a suspicion; however, he did close the PR to add vanadium to PG in June of this year.
I disagree with his reasoning for Vanadium in his browser list even for 2024. Content filtering should not be a criteria for browsers based on GOS usage link:
”Enumerating badness via content filtering is not a viable approach to achieving decent privacy, just as AntiVirus isn’t a viable way to achieving decent security.”
Unless I’m misunderstanding something and “content filtering !== content blocking”?
He also highly rated Mull and further mentioned it under Vanadium, but GOS is pretty firmly against Firefox-based mobile browsers due to their lack of sandboxing.
You are of course welcome to raise your concerns, but I’m not sure they really align with the way recommendations are made at Privacy Guides and they are somewhat countered by the fact that tools like GrapheneOS are recommended.
There hasn’t been a lot of interest in this topic for a while, so it’s not surprising it hasn’t gone anywhere, but hopefully, the engagement now will give it the final push it needs.
Personally, I think Vanadium should be listed like Safari (iOS), i.e. Vanadium (GrapheneOS). It is very clearly the best option on GrapheneOS and shouldn’t be treated any differently from the other single OS browser.
I also believe that Vanadium should be added to the list, even though it has certain disadvantages compared to Brave, it has advantages regarding security.
As for fingerprinting, I don’t think it matters when we’re talking about mobile browsers (none of them are sufficient to evade tracking). If someone needs anonymity or something close to it, they should go to desktop and use Mullvad/Tor, as you’ve recommended to me many times.
However, it doesn’t allow synchronization with other devices or the ability to delete browsing data on exit, although there’s always the option of using incognito mode.
Lastly, I think that if Vanadium is added, the possibility of recommending Trivalent should be discussed.
I really think we should recommend this, all it needs now is two votes from the team. With new incoming traffic bumping this to the top of the forum, hopefully it will change some minds.
I have heard that the GOS team was thinking about forking Brave’s adblock engine.
They do have easylist implemented.
Well yeah, but it’s not as capable.
Source?
It’s quite difficult to take a guide that recommends Chrome on Android seriously 
Maybe I should write a guide too, and suggest that you use GMail and Facebook Messenger for good measure.
If you actually read through the guide you will understand why the writer promotes chrome as the best option. While I’m still skeptical of using chrome for my browser needs, the argurments presented against the use of the other listed options are compelling.
I don’t have one from GOS itself, but I’ve seen it brought up a few times on their forum including here.
It’s a hardening guide, so it obviously puts security above everything else.
Random Googlephobia is not going to change the fact that Google Chrome is a perfectly valid choice if security is your top priority and you are not using GrapheneOS.
Maybe, to a degree. But a perfectly secured surveillance tool is still a surveillance tool. At some point, privacy issues become security issues, and we’ve seen that exact situation firsthand recently with the Microsoft VPN drama. Balance is needed. Swing the pendulum too far in either direction and you compromise the other, which, ironically, in turn compromises the exact thing you were trying to prioritize in the first place.
We need an “it depends on your threat model” copypasta.
Ironically, the guide posted earlier says this:
Blockquote
The point with this section is to say, anti-fingerprinting takes a lot of consideration to actually be useful. Most of the time, the protections are transparent and do very little, and often times prioritizing them results in a loss of tangible security and privacy. This is not about “threat modelling”, it is about what is actually helping you vs what you think is helping you. Your “threat model” is not an excuse to use a less secure product for a protection you don’t need or are using incorrectly
What’s currently stopping the Privacy Guides team from recommending a secure browser like Vanadium?
For being exclusive to GOS I guess?
Cross-Platform Availability: We typically prefer recommendations to be cross-platform to avoid vendor lock-in.
Vanadium doesn’t lock users into anything anyway.
It’s the best browser for people using GrapheneOS, and not recommending it, or at least mentioning it on the page, is confusing and might lead people to believe that Brave or IronFox are somehow better.