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What is a good browser suitable for every-day use that respects user privacy and freedom?
What is a good browser suitable for every-day use that respects user privacy and freedom?
This browser should:
- Respect user privacy. Ideally no telemetry, or at least opt-in telemetry. Does not comply with website tracking if possible without breaking the site.
- Respect user freedom. Good support for ad-blocking, element hiding, request blocking. Does not force the user into running harmful features unless they are strictly necessary.
- Practical. Should be able to actually run normal sites, like popular e-stores, banks, government services, job sites and so on.
These criteria almost imply open source. For example, it is very difficult to verify lack of telemetry without the source code. In principle, the license of the source code is not important. But in practice, it will be hard for a closed source browser to convincingly meet these.
Please post one answer per browser.
4 answers
Firefox family browsers.
These have good compatibility because Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari are the browsers most commonly tested by web developers. With more obscure browsers, many commercial website operators like to blame the user for breakage and refuse to fix issues unless you switch to one of their "approved" browsers. Firefox is common enough that they cannot get away with refusing to support it.
Firefox itself is not particularly privacy friendly by default. Arguably, this is a consequence of significant turnover in the Mozilla foundation, as many important figures have left years ago. Companies with a questionable record like Google are also major funders of Mozilla and possibly exercise malicious influence.
However, Firefox still exposes many useful configuration options that can greatly enhance privacy and user control if changed from their defaults. These are all in about:config, and although official docs are not great, the online community is usually helpful at understanding them. It is possible to set these using user.js so you can simply synchronize that file across all your computers to have unified settings without having to use Firefox Sync. A few others (like default extensions and search engines) can be configured with policies, which are also quite powerful.
It's worth noting that configuration has become slightly restricted over the years. For example, there used to be straightforward keys for disabling the auto update, which were then removed. The more obscure methods, like blanking the update URL, were also eventually removed. However, even so, Firefox still has much more configurability than other major browsers.
There are many extensions for Firefox, including very useful ones like uBlock Origin, decentraleyes, cookie autodelete, vimium, redirector, downthemall. Originally, Firefox had a lot of theming and extension capabilities, but these have been restricted in recent years (with the switch to WebExtensions), which has led to some extensions becoming abandonware and it became more difficult to create your own extensions.
Many "improved" variants of Firefox exist, which come with some settings improved over the defaults. These come and go, so it is wise to not become too dependent on them. Librewolf is a notable one. Librewolf has many useful customizations that enhance privacy and security. However, it also has many useless changes that are security theater and sometimes harm usability with no real benefit, like disabling the password manager and making it harder to re-enable it. The salient changes of Librewolf are available as open source. Librewolf also lags behind new Firefox versions, but this is not useful for avoiding undesirable updates from Firefox because Librewolf still catches up eventually.
I would say the best option is to review the changes in Librewolf, and then decide how many of them matter to you. If most matter, install Librewolf and disable ones you don't want. If most or half don't matter, simply replicate them in Firefox Developer Edition yourself. Librewolf is overzealous in certain things like DRM and it can break websites that rely on that, Librewolf devs' attitude is that "you shouldn't use those sites anyway".
Other notable variants:
- Tor Browser is based on Firefox. It is not practical to use Firefox for Tor these days, because they've diverged considerably and it creates a fingerprinting risk, but the good news is that many privacy improvements were introduced by Tor devs and added back to the Firefox codebase.
- Waterfox originally created because Firefox was not 64 bit and had poor performance. This has since changed. Waterfox also has some privacy enhancements, but these can be replicated in Firefox more easily.
- Icecat is a completely free fork. It is in the user's interest to remove many "non-free" elements from Firefox, but some of them are necessary to use popular sites, so I wouldn't say this browser is practical for every day use. Its privacy enhancements beyond that can be replicated by configuring Firefox. It comes with an extension that attempts to block harmful Javascript, but this can be installed on Firefox as well.
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qutebrowser
Qutebrowser is a small, independent project that is not a fork of any major browser. It is notable in being designed for keyboard-only navigation, inspired by the Vimium extension, which is in turn inspired by the Vi text editor.
The keyboard navigation is a very useful feature for ergonomics. It helps with wrist pain if you have a good ergonomic keyboard. Since everything is done through key presses or the command console, its UI is much more minimal than Firefox, Chrome, etc. It is also more lightweight and responsive.
One issue is that not all keys are the same as in Vimium, there are quite a few changes. Probably, it can be argued that Qutebrowser's keymap is better than Vimium, except that you're probably already used to Vimium's keymap. On the flipside, Qutebrowser's link hinter deals with many sites (eg. frames causing the wrong part to scroll) better than Vimium.
There is little telemetry and the project generally serves the interests of its technically advanced users. On the flipside, there are currently not extensive privacy enhancing features, although these are planned for development. It does include a builtin ad blocker. The keyboard-based UX also makes it easy to deal with annoyances like popup dialogs (which can consistently be dismissed with N or Esc).
Being independent, it is not compatible with either Firefox or Chrome style extensions.
It is not possible to reach the same level of privacy and tracking countermeasures in Qutebrowser as in a well-configured Firefox, but it is already in a decent state by default, and its usability can be much better than Firefox with extensions if you like keyboard navigation.
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Brave
The Brave project was started by Brendan Eich, one of the key figures in original Firefox, after he left the Mozilla foundation due to political reasons. From this, one could presume that it has greater commitment to respecting user privacy and freedom, or not.
Brave is based on the Chrome rendering engine so it behaves more similarly to that browser than Firefox, and compatible with most Chrome extensions. It attempts to provide ad blocking and tracker countermeasures as built in features, although they are not as good or configurable as extensions like uBlock.
Notably, Brave integrates support for Tor. It is probably not realistic to achieve meaningful anonymity with Brave, because it lacks the de-anonymization features of browsers like Tor Browser, so in practice you will not be hiding your identity from determined parties. However, it will deter casual tracking, censoring and blocking in that it will at least conceal your IP. Furthermore, it is not difficult and risky to use Tor to connect to sites with sensitive personal data, such as banks, so I wouldn't say using Brave in permanent Tor mode is a good idea.
Brave has an unusual monetization model where ads are hijacked by Brave's own ad service, you are paid in cryptocurrency for viewing them, and you are supposed to then somehow send these to websites you approve of so that they are still financially supported in lieu of ad revenue. This has drawn criticism because ads and tracking usually go hand in hand, although arguably it is better to be tracked by the browser than the website or ad network. However, the ad hijacking is opt-in in most versions and Brave only hides ads (with no crypto payment), it doesn't show you its own ads, unless you request it.
It is better to use Brave than Chrome. Occasionally, the privacy features will break some sites, but it is not hard to disable them in Brave's UI.
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Pale Moon
Pale moon is technically a Firefox based browser, but it has diverged considerably over the years. It was originally a fork of an old version and has retained many "good old" FF features which were replaced with arguably inferior designs by Mozilla:
- In 2014, Firefox overhauled its UI and changed to Australis (v29). Australis was less flexible and had worse usability (following mobile-like UI trends) for power users, but presumably Mozilla felt the need to do this so that it could expand into the mobile market. PM stuck with the pre-2014 classic interface.
- PM's dev team maintains their own rendering engine, Goanna, which was forked from Gecko (used by FF). I am not aware of any significant practical consequence from this for every-day web usage. Sometimes, poorly made websites designed for Gecko may not work quite right, but this seems rare.
- In 2017, Firefox declared XUL extensions "legacy" and began switching to new WebExtensions. WebExtensions are more limited, ostensibly for security, and some existing extensions were either discontinued or had features degraded as a result. PM remains compatible with old FF extensions (XUL). They also claim to expand the format, but I don't know exactly what additions they make.
I'm part of the "old guard" so I think the PM UI is excellent.
For regular browsing it seems to work quite well. There is always the push/pull problem: FF need not struggle to stay compatible with websites because web authors see it as a de facto standard and make an effort to stay compatible with FF. But they do not bother testing on (or even know about) PM, so it is up to PM to ensure compatibility with millions of websites. It's rare that PM breaks a site, but when it happens your main recourse is to ask the small PM community for help.
Back in 2017, the extensions were great, better than FF. Many did not have a WebExtension update yet, so you could use them in PM but not in FF. Even the updated ones were often better in PM (in their old XUL versions). Now that it's been 6 years, a lot of those original FF extensions are obsolete and don't work well. The PM community continues to develop some XUL extensions for PM, but they are smaller so there's not as many.
Lastly, the PM dev team is small and opinionated. Sometimes they make surprising, radical decisions. For example, in the past the main PM dev declared that ad blocking was unethical, which caused some chaos because the main PM extension delivery mechanism (where ad blockers are served) is also maintained by the same PM devs. I cannot adequately describe the culture and politics here, so I would recommend checking out the PM forums when considering switching to it, because that will be your main place for support with PM issues.
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