Thank you for kind words!

Ah, then the hope is that this curiosity will trigger you to dig into it yourself (for example using the provided tool or taking inspiration from it) so that it starts making sense! I know it’s an unconventional format to refrain from laying out my own opinions and analysis but that’s my thing today. So much “everyone knows” and vapid third-hand takes flying around these days that I think we would do well to actually verify (and pick up related knowledge in the process) rather than take forum comments and blog posts for gospel.

OK, all right, I can try. I guess I can point at one thing in the Mozilla telemetry at the very end, doesn’t that look very fine-grained if you look at the URLs (addresses) listed?

We can tell that many of the actions I took were communicated to the mothership for analysis and product improvement. Is this data really anonymized (or anonymizable)? Is it a reasonable amount for a user that has not opted in? My professional and personal opinion is: It is not.

But! That’s just one isolated example. And an extremely limited view. What about Zen? Chrome, Edge and Safari weren’t included here at all. And it’s not at all looking at what happens for a user who probably cares about this: when you go to settings and disable all the telemetry. See I just said that one thing about Mozilla Telemetry and now I’m going to have to run some new tests and write reports about them for days just to set that record straight!

Maybe I’m odd but I think it’s many (100?) times easier and quicker to gain understanding of the kinds of stuff we’re looking at here by getting hands-on than to communicate it verbally. And I’m concerned with this limited attention span so many people are afflicted with these days, and look at how long this comment is already, no we’re done with me tell you how it is, let’s wrap this one up and get onto the juicy stuff.

There’s an expandable section Basic test environment usage under Testing procedure but I realize now that might be easy to miss…

Anyway, to start it: Install podman, docker-compose (v2) and MITM_BROWSER=firefox-esr podman compose up --build. That should be it.

Then the browser pops up (hopefully), you do your thing, and after you Ctrl+C in the console, it will quit and the proxy will dump the recorded .har file which contains all HTTP and websocket traffic that went through the proxy in cleartext, in JSON format. There’re tools online that can help visualize I think but nothing I can recommend off the bat. Simply cating it to the terminal or opening it in a text editor can be educative. Also playing around with variations of the jq snippets and see if you can come up with questions of your own to answer. Or if anything in my numbers make you scratch your head or say “wait a minute” dig there.

In case you want to take al look at what the thing does before running it (trust me bro), these are the files involved when you run that compose up command:

• entrypoint compose.yml
• imported compose/proxy.compose.yml for mitmproxy
• The browser Containerfile (aka Dockerfile)

Available browser images

What about gwenview?

The author seems to think Mozilla should have protected our privacy by having someone act as the proxy for the request.

On the proxy part, they actually already have that and using it for some other parts:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ohttp-explained

TL;DR: Imagine an HTTPS-over-HTTPS proxy. Try to explain it like something groundbreaking without referencing existing tech. Now you have OHTTP.

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/mozcachedohttp/docs/index.html

https://www.fastly.com/blog/firefox-fastly-take-another-step-toward-security-upgrade

It makes me scratch my head a bit why I’ve never see it enabled for DNS-over-HTTP in default stock Firefox config despite it being supported for years - the endpoints are just not configured. You have to know about it and configure the barely documented URL in about:config for that. Unlike for newtabpage and the FF shopping feature where OHTTP is used by default. Infra costs?

good point for the offlineimap cronjob, I’ll take note of that.

I might as well go as far as suggesting to start there with your current mail provider if the local/offline-first flow is something that could work for you (and assuming it’s not something you already do, in which case carry on). Once you’ve adapted to a local-first mail reading flow with any client that’s separate from the “app” or webmail tethered to your mail service, then rest of migrations should be smoother and hopefully feel less daunting. Doesn’t mean you have to keep doing it that way only forever but establishing the infra and habit once for a while can help with both resilience and confidence in everything that follows.

If you’re roaming between devices and places enough that local-first feels untenable then the “syncbox” could be a little SBC or whatever; it could be the machine you also use read and write mail from but doesn’t have to be.

NP and good luck!

No experience with Migadu but yeah, I think 1 account = 1 login is the intended meaning in their FAQ.

At $19/year couldn’t just gifting a separate micro sub to your SO might be a option if you adminning her email feels weird to either of you?

Am I missing something else?

You don’t mention how you’ll be accessing your emails so maybe this is something you already solved for: Regularly syncing down all mail locally means you won’t have to rely on the mail provider as a single-point-of-failure for keeping your emails safe, secure, private and available. This could consist of anything from a simple offlineimap cronjob to a full-blown “offline” separate mail server.

Maybe. But be careful about putting in that PIN or connecting it to your network when you get home, in case you get it back after…

In case you want to try this for yourself, adding container and running test for Waterfox should be about same as for Floorp that I wrote about here. Then you can really see what’s going on and reason about the difference when you see the URLs and stuff.

BTW the purpose of the report section here isn’t “look at my numbers and take my word for it” but “here’s some examples of things we can look at with this”. Please keep in mind both the Limitations section and that it’s intended as showing one way to easily and independently compare browsers yourself. Just reproducing the examples shown and then scrolling through the .har files JSON is a great start. Of course, me and I assume others would be very happy if you want to share anything that comes out of that so that we can bring people up together. I’m sure there’s a lot more useful insights to derive even with a small and scoped testing protocol like the one in article and wouldn’t mind input of any nuggets other people come up with :)

What are you curious about with Dillo And Netsurf? Isn’t it safe to assume at this point they will both be 0 across the board for all the queries in the report?

I think we need a different testing protocol for them to be interesting to include. AFAIK they don’t have add-ons that could be interesting to test either? Do you have any suggestion for step(s) you think could be added to the test in order to make those meaningful to include? Or is my assumption about Dillo and Netsurf out of date?

Oh, thanks for reminding me of Trivalent, I realize now I’ve come across it before but totally slipped my mind. If/when testing for chromium in place I think this can be interesting to sample next.

Assuming you mean the Mullvad extension (which is installed by default in MB) and not the Mullvad VPN app (which also exists but never came close to these machines) :)

That will indeed likely make a difference on Mullvad Browser numbers. However for now I’m not changing the “keep addons at stock defaults” invariant or the test matrix might get really out of hand… Should we disable uBlock Origin in LibreWolf? How about uBO or NoSccript in Mullvad then? Konform Browser loads uBO but only if its apt package is installed; should we do that? What happens when we try to explicitly opt out of everything under Preferences in Firefox? I guess the last one is something to actually consider but for now not touching the addons.

(Would be super cool if anyone else tries this out and reports back though! The compose should hopefully be straight forward and easy to get started with if you are on Linux and have podman available. The report mentions it TL;DR we had to work around the oBO install in LW not properly utilizing the proxy (?) like this and I think same approach could be used to Uninstall Mullvad extension from Mullvad Browser and prevent it from even loading)

Disclaimer: Am konform dev so shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s working well for ourselves I guess. Eager to hear to what extent it’s overfitted for our usage or really as great as I think it is ;)

BTW if you, dear reader, think queries in report of results are cherry-picked in a way that favors it (I don’t think they are but hey, fair), I’m also eagerly accepting input and especially PRs for queries (still have the raw dumps so I can add this quickly) or steps to test procedure (this means I have to rerun all of them so might take longer to update) that could illustrate different tradeoffs and show a more complete picture. Bring it on <3

Daily-driving it now. I think it’s great. If you’re somewhat familiar with the landscape otherwise I think readme explains how it’s different and why. If you don’t mind losing out on some "safety"¹ and latest upstream features² for the sake of a more stable and predictable base, not having reliance on proprietary integrations or even internet, and really removing all non-essential network integrations, then definitely worth a try!

¹: A surprising amount of people think (or at least write online) that a browser that doesn’t block user requests completely aligned with the Google SafeBrowsing blocklists is unsafe and that doing those syncs is an essential feature. If you think this is the only safe default option in 2026 I’m sorry but please consider uBlock Origin. See how opinions on who to trust can affect what “most secure” means. Konform Browser removes many assumptions of trust. But not all; Everyone still comes with an assumed PKI after all and there exists a default for DNS.

²: Since it’s ESR base it means new feature updates from Mozilla ~yearly instead of ~monthly. Still receiving security updates on the rapid schedule. No AI features out of the box.

There can still be winners, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s just that we have to engage a bit deeper than a quick scroll and a oneliner to figure it out¹ than that.

they’re all doing differently privacy impacting things, but there are no “winners”.

The difference matters. Looking into the raw URLs and bodies involved is enlightening. Apart from that, which other queries can we run with jq (or other tools) can we add to the post to add more useful dimensions?

¹: The answer might be different for each of us and depend on what we’re doing at the moment. Different situations might call for different browsers.

At least in most cases, the data is being leaked back to the developer and not third parties.

What is this based on? Why not see if that assumption is true¹? There’s quite a big difference in nature and quality here between them. This doesn’t really come through in the data aggregation put on display in the post but I hope more people will try to run this on their own. Zen and Mozilla are the only ones with significant (and it is significant) telemetry of their own at all between these while LibreWolf and Konform have 0 data going to the devs, for one.

The whole idea here is to be able to achieve more nuanced and accurate understanding so more educated decisions can be made and enlightening conversation be had. Not just keep rehashing the same memes we based on vibes and hearsay.

Was hoping more for answering questions or getting new input than shooting down uninformed takes 😅

¹: Well, staying inside the system we can’t prove that no sharing with third-parties is going on if we only see one domain involved. But that is not the case everywhere here. We can easily see when separate servers operated by multiple parties are involved by looking at the URLs and looking up the domain names. And then we can go look at what’s being sent to where.

Thanks! Adding Floorp should be straightforward if you feel like tackling it yourself as it’s “just another FF fork”. Adding a new browser consists of adding a new Containerfile for it. I guess Floorp might be most similar to Mozilla firefox out of the existing ones. PRs much appreciated for new browsers as well as any interesting queries to get more insight into data I can run on existing dumps and add to Report section.

They have official PPA: https://ppa.floorp.app/

For Brave got it running but didn’t yet figure out why it crashes as soon as I try to proceed with the onboarding. Judging by the probably unrelated error noise in the console, it might be trying something weird with a graphics driver or hardware sensor and not gracefully handling not having access to whatever it is 🤷 But didn’t even ldd or strace it properly yet so maybe just a missing library.

There’s a lot that could be done but had to wrap up and publish somewhere.

I don’t think the data supports that. I’m curious what makes you single it out. Mullvad is in the top-tier but it is not alone (or clearly #1 - like the post gets into - it gets nuanced and I think any attempt at general objective “top 5 ranking” will be reductive to the point of being misleading or plain wrong. So I’m not trying that here). Read again? :)

For example of nuance displayed in results:

### Number of requests
119 firefox
81 firefox-esr
0 konform
7 librewolf
30 mullvad-browser
62 zen-browser

Do you suddenly need to stop hitting your wife?

Removed by mod

If you are on Linux I think you will find interest in Konform Browser, which started as a fork of LibreWolf addressing some of your pains. Am dev so please allow me to shill for a bit.

Specifically to your comment:

ResistFingerprinting is IMHO way overkill and breaks nice things like automatic dark modes just for preserving privacy in the 0.001% of cases where browser fingerprinting matters

Konform can respect user theming preferences and dark mode even under Private Mode / RFP.

Firefox Sync,

While Konform still keeps it off by default, it allows configuring endpoints for a self-hosted or third-party Sync server from the Preferences without having to dive into about:config.

Besides that, it goes even further than LW in disabling built-in remote connections, snoopware, and AI integrations.

I hope you might consider it <3

fedi thread

Update: Pre-built packages for Debian/Ubuntu (.deb), Fedora/SUSE (.rpm) and others (tarball) are now built and published by Codeberg CI for each release:

https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source/releases