Spyware Watchdog

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/mozilla.html

This article, along with some other sites and my own digging made me leave Firefox for good. It's a good read if you value privacy and think Mozilla is the good guy in a field dominated by evil corporations. At first it might seem biased, but the author makes very good points and backs them up with tons of sources that can't be really argued - most of the article is reviewing privacy policies and terms of service agreements that are available publicly to check.

For now I stuck with Pale Moon, but I'm considering some other browsers like Ungoogled Chromium for my daily private and work use. Pale Moon feels kinda janky and old-school in a not good way. But it's fast and (with some minor tweaking: https://spyware.neocities.org/guides/palemoon.html) respects your privacy 100%.

I feel a strong need to point out the bad faith Mozilla seem to have for Firefox users and their privacy, eg Pocket, Mr Robot, DRM & binary blobs, dark pattern configs, etc.

As much as I loved the browser in the past, nobody should consider running it today, without being informed of the implications. The ffprofile.com site is something I have been waiting for, but stuff like this should not be necessary and IMO Mozilla Corp. has won. Nobody celebrates a new version of FF anymore.

Also useful resources:
https://github.com/amq/firefox-debloat
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox.html
https://browserleaks.com/
https://www.howsmyssl.com/

If you want as hardline a view on privacy in web browsing as possible, I recommend browsing through the Spyware Watchdog[1] and this article[2] from one of its main contributors. Many will find that their standards are too high for them, and may seem paranoid or such, but it is notable that both Firefox and Chrome have existing forks that even these hardliners deem clean, so for a browser to be guaranteed spyware-free is not only possible but a present reality. Brave is not private.

1: https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/index.html

2: https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/browsers.html

> Looking at it now, it seems to have an identity crisis now.

Opera was sold to a Chinese company in the mid-10s and introduced suspicious stuff like a built-in free VPN. It is basically ignored nowadays.

The original CEO started Vivaldi, which is an excellent browser in terms of features - tiling tabs [0] were a favourite of mine. Unfortunately it is closed-source and chatty [1], but I still like on devices where privacy is not a concern.

[0] https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/

[1] https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vivaldi

A bit ironic when your default search engine is Google, leading users to the dragon mouth by default.

Also when most if not all telemetry from mozilla firefox is opt out.

Including stuff like phoning home by default when you search, bookmarking something, delete anything from your history[1] and having a unique download token to track each install.[2]

[1] https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox.html
[2] https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-a-unique-identifier/

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/brave

Whatever.

The GitHub repo I posted has sane defaults for both Chromium based browsers (adapt the environment variable for the custom fork, you have it at /usr/bin/chrom file) and Mozilla under *Nix. If something "clean" as Mozilla has a good chunk to be tweaked, just imagine the amount of telemetry Brave has.

I lived the 90's and 00's in computing. I pretty surely know the spyware and adware terms. And Brave it's spyware, period.