Looking for Privacy-Oriented Open-Source Android Browsers
I’m looking for a privacy-focused, open-source Android browser. Here are some options I’ve found:
- IronFox
- recommended by LibreWolf
- Fennec
- no repo
- Waterfox
- Vanadium
- only available on GrapheneOS
- better security
- iceraven
- most stars
- bromite
- no longer maintained
- Bromite has a fingerprint randomization and Vanadium doesn’t. But Vanadium has better security if you use Graphene. So yeah, for privacy Bromite might be better
- cromite
- Bromite fork
- brave
Is there any other browser out there that fits this criteria? Is there an even better choice? I’m particularly interested in ones that focus on privacy.
EDIT:
- in terms of popularity, privacy and functionality I guess the best choices are iceraven and cromite
- iceraven based on firefox
- cromitebased on chromium
few questions
- What is the difference between IronFox, Fennec, Waterfox and iceraven?
See also:
Firefox-based
Chromium-based
WebView-based
I know Brave is controversial but they were the only ones (edit: not sure about Vanadium, I’m curious if they were vulnerable) disallowing JS to access localhost thus blocking Meta and Yandex’s recently discovered spying.
Sounds like such a no brainer to not allow random websites to communicate with the localhost and very easily circumvent all sandboxing you spent thousands of hours building. Looking at you Android (Google) and all the browser vendors (also Google?, huh).
actually I’m a bit curious about how an Open Source project could be “controversial”. If Brave does something behind our backs wouldn’t we be able to know it since all the source code is out there? If it has some features we don’t like can’t we simply modify the source code?
It’s backed by Peter Thiel who is a war mongering Nazi billionaire.
Infuriating as it is, I still have the same question mentioned above
It has cryptocurrency integration and it did some shady ad-referral stealing. But yes, it’s fully open source.
Based on this information, I’m really surprised that no one has forked a Brave branch to remove the undesired feature.
There are several alternatives. Keeping up with security patches is a full time job. It’s quite reasonable in this particular case.
Huh, I didn’t know that. I wonder if any of the rest have implemented that since…
Isn’t webview-based still essentially chromium-based?
Sorta. It’s the same engine, but it is generally less private and less secure than actual Chromium.
DivestOS used to have some handy tables, before they shut down the website.
Thanks a lot!