Safari is proprietary, Apple-owned, iOS-only, is Chromium-based, and Apple isn’t the most privacy-friendly company that we heard of. I don’t get why it is recommended on PrivacyGuides. Only recommending Brave, even though there are so many downfalls with Brave, would have been sufficient.
For instance, if a user only wants to browse secure privacy-friendly websites, like privacy frontends or PrivacyGuides, any open source privacy-friendly browser is much more suitable than Safari, because nothing guarantees that Safari isn’t spying on you.
Firefox, Waterfox, Ironfox are much, very much more private from what I understood. I heard that there were security vulnerabilities with mobile Firefox, what are they? How much of a threat are they?
Cromite isn’t recommended because it doesn’t support content-blocking anymore, or isn’t it?
Safari is based on WebKit… it’s also five years older than chromium. All iOS browsers are based on WebKit currently so it makes no sense to recommend something other than safari as App Store extensions only support safari.
Block all the connections to Apple through your DNS provider of choice.
Safari is recommended only on iOS devices, where all browsers have to use the WebKit engine. It integrates well with iOS, lets you install extensions, uses iCloud Private Relay if you have iCloud+, and more. In my experience, it’s the most stable, most site-compatible iOS browser. It’s not currently recommended by the site on macOS, though.
Firefox is not recommended on Android for reasons discussed in the forum and other places, like GrapheneOS:
Avoid Gecko-based browsers like Firefox as they’re currently much more vulnerable to exploitation and inherently add a huge amount of attack surface. Gecko doesn’t have a WebView implementation (GeckoView is not a WebView implementation), so it has to be used alongside the Chromium-based WebView rather than instead of Chromium, which means having the remote attack surface of two separate browser engines instead of only one. Firefox/Gecko also bypass or cripple a fair bit of the upstream and GrapheneOS hardening work for apps. Worst of all, Firefox does not have internal sandboxing on Android. This is despite the fact that Chromium semantic sandbox layer on Android is implemented via the OS isolatedProcess feature, which is a very easy to use boolean property for app service processes to provide strong isolation with only the ability to communicate with the app running them via the standard service API. Even in the desktop version, Firefox’s sandbox is still substantially weaker (especially on Linux) and lacks full support for isolating sites from each other rather than only containing content as a whole. The sandbox has been gradually improving on the desktop but it isn’t happening for their Android browser yet.
Also, people who complain about the “downfalls” Brave are in the same breath turning a blind eye to Mozilla. I don’t love everything about Brave, but “concerns” with Brave are for the most part overblown and antiquated. It’s hard to love everything about most things, though. Edit: Thread containing issues with non-hardened Firefox.
Cromite has been removed because it is inconsistently maintained, often lagging months behind important Chromium updates.
Personally, I’m interested to see what a potential Proton browser would be. Hoping for something like Brave Origin but purple.
“Also, people who complain about the “downfalls” Brave are in the same breath turning a blind eye to Mozilla.” I don’t. Firefox has a lot of downfalls as well, no browser is perfect. I know that by using hardened Brave I don’t risk anything. I once had a very negative privacy experience using the Brave search engine which made me question the company and apparently there was a lot of shady stuff going on (which is also the case with Mozilla), this is why I typed “even though there are so many downfalls with Brave”, but it didn’t mean that we should use Firefox-based browsers instead.
Ladybird and Proton browser would really be appreciated if they are secure enough and support extensions, and stuff like Arkenfox.
