Honestly the lack of ad blockers in Vanadium pushes me towards Firefox even though the devs say that Firefox is far less secure. So many web sites are just hard to use on mobile without an ad blocker so I’m curious what the rest of you are doing.
Hardened Firefox-based browser like Mull or Klar.
Mull
Mostly Mull. A little Firefox and a little Vanadium
I use Fennec and Brave.
This!
I like Mull the best. It’s pretty much just Firefox+arkenfox for mobile
Except for gecko mobile not having per-site process issolation (Fission) I get it though, its has good anti fingerprinting, isnt chromium, and has compatibility with Firefox addons (you can get around the mobile only requirement by importing a custom collection, which iirc requires Dev mode)
The amount of Firefox fanboys who will get mad at you for mentioning Android Firefox missing per-site process isolation. I’ve basically made the choice to not mention it anymore because I always get harassed whenever I do lol…
Firefox on desktop is awesome, Mobile should be avoided.
fission is functional with no noticeable issues on Firefox mobile as of like ~ff115/116. it just has to be manually enabled in
about:config.Its considered a highly experimental feature, so enabling it could result in unknown issues or even security issues.
Also Firefox still lacks isolatedProcess https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1565196
I’d imagine Firefox would enable Fission by default if it was actually ready.
Fennec, Firefox from the f-droid-store
The most insecure Android stack
Edit: Because people will just blindly down vote this, here is some references to help you make more informed choices
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/05/introducing-firefox-new-site-isolation-security-architecture/
I disagreed particularly with:
Furthermore, F-Droid doesn’t enforce a minimum target SDK
While yes, this may be a bad thing for some, certain apps, like termux (terminal emulator, even lets you make a linux chroot, some ppl play games using wine in it) only work properly on sdk’s older than a certain version, since newer versions can be somewhat locked down.
I don’t want to say that that article is “google good, f droid bad”, but that’s what a lot of what it’s points are. It completely neglects to mention the downsides of google’s various security models, especially for a foss community like this one. App bundles, for instance, are secure yes. But they are also an advanced form of drm (at least when made by google), must be compiled server side for each device, and other things that make them not work for the foss community.
And criticizing f Droid because it has multiple repos? That criticism is completely incompatible with the common FLOSS ideas that things should be less centralized.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the points it brings up are valid, but they are biased, only focusing on on one side.
And I also don’t feel the need to be alarmed by these points. What does it matter that google signs everything (in a supposedly better way) when “everything” includes malware?
As usual, no app or product can replace human discernment. Security is a process, not a product.
