Konform Browser and other bits and bobs.
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Joined 1 month ago
Cake day: January 18th, 2026
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1·18 days agoThere is message for those of you in sibling thread!
Find out for yourself!
https://codeberg.org/dialhome-study/browser-network-insights
Usage details for running locally under “Testing procedure” -> “Basic test environment usage”
Previously posted on this community here: https://lemmy.ca/post/59519788
I prefer my devices without any malware at all but you do you I guess.
you’re data is safe with small hackers
wat
Yes let’s make sure everyone’s on the exact same provider. What could possibly go wrong. “Just use X” bandwagonning is shortsighted and lazy.
Or factory reset and then don’t install SmartTube. Fool me once?
1·20 days agoWould be cool to hear how it goes if you do!
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
.harfiles 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
0across 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 Or is my assumption about Dillo and Netsurf out of date?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
UninstallMullvad 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.
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
1·27 days agoGrumpy ken thinks “Just use Foo” meming is promoting mindless use and I think should therefore be discouraged. Even in jest I think this affects us subconsciously to feel more comfortable with not thinking deeper for ourselves. Even if X is the right one. “Use Foo already!” is nicer~!
If I may illustrate:
Use Konform Browser1 already!
1: Disclosures: Am dev; is LibreWolf fork
Konform Browser is more recent Firefox (actually LibreWolf) fork which goes even further in debloating, removing “AI” functionality and disabling remote connections. It’s based on Firefox ESR (like GNUZilla IceCat).
If you have concerns about the telemetry and browser metadata privacy parts of AI integrations, I think Konform, IceCat, Waterfox and Mullvad Browser are a lot more relevant than Zen…
3·1 month agoStories?! In MY games?! We have AI for that at home.
do you even raytrace lol
/s
2·1 month agoI wonder if there is any difference between https://noai.duckduckgo.com/lite and https://lite.duckduckgo.com/lite 🤔
To remove room for doubt of that just pushed to change default search engine of Konform Browser to noai domain.
Ty for reminding me of this!
It’s not, though? Let me guess, it’s from some tool or page doing static analysis on the APK and reporting results? Please include a link or reference to actual source when reporting in the future.
So, Firefox contains a library that can be used for reporting telemetry to Mozilla. When you download Firefox from Mozilla, this is enabled and pointing to Mozilla servers. After reading Privacy Notice shouldn’t be a surprise.
When you install one of the fork that disables telemetry (IronFox, LibreWolf, Konform Browser at least do it this way), they will configure the build such that the endpoints are never called. Mozilla are actually reasonable enough that this is supported, documented, and reasonably straightforward for those bothering to build FF from source.
So yes, when you download IronFox it contains a library that could be used for Mozilla Telemetry. It’s just that it’s never used to do so (assuming no bugs).