Yeah something is broken here...
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Privacy
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I thought it was just me until I saw this
That line chart should be a bar chart.
I can only hope floorp and zen devs are ashamed of what have they done. all of those third party domains like discord, x and those mundane ones are totally unnecessary
Not so important how much telemetries, but where these go. A complex feature rich browser can have a lot of tech telemetries, but this is only bad if these go to sites not related to the functionality and third parties, eg. to Facebook, Amazon and others.
Yeah it’s unimportant how many requests go out.
A secure browser ought to phone home on startup (and honestly with as little overhead as requests incur nowadays, on tab open) and make sure it’s updated to the latest version, do a dns sanity check, etc.
I don’t even mind Firefox having ads in the default homepage.
Important only which requests go out and to where. If tech data go to the company of the browser, it's OK, but not if user data goes to Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Towerdata, etc., which has nothing to do with the functionality of the browser. Permissions can be restricted in the settings of the OS.
And what the requests are, I don’t care if some cdn is carrying Mozilla’s homepage requests, for example.
Thank you for posting this! I assumed some FF-based browsers, while claiming to remove telemetry, in fact still phoned home to a degree. This is good know!
Also, I was surprised by a few others on the list, like Mullvad, Kagi, and DuckDuckGo, being so straightforward -- not that making fewer connections implies better privacy, as even a single connection can transmit any kind of data, but moreso that there some browsers that are designed to operate with less complexity.
Really surprised by Zen, which is a FF derivative claiming to be all about a 'beautiful' and 'simple' web browsing experience, having a ton of connections.
beautiful and simple don't necessarily mean privacy oriented. It's marketing language
I think a big improvement to these test would be to show what actually gets send. You can do this with a certificate and a proxy.
Surprisingly Firefox is at 6 percent. I expected it to hover around the 3 percent mark.
Why? It's easily the best popular browser
For android browsers ?
What is the point of these stats, they could be uploading your entire drive with 1 connection. And some of the connections are there because they bundle ublock, why should that count?
It's informative in terms of which parties are basically notified that you started using it. why the fuck does zen load discord, x, bunnyfonts, and whatnot?
I was really enjoying Zen browser aswell
Sorry to say, but both Zen and Floorp were obvious honeypots from the beginning.
Unsolicited advice, but don't adopt the latest browser/search engine/OS that promise privacy and/or security, and you'll avoid a lot of disappointment. Most fall apart at the seams within a year or less.
If the one browser/SE/OS you currently use works, stick with it until more research on the newer stuff comes out. Then you can reassess.
Ungoogled chromium looks good to me. I wish this author tested mobile browsers as well
I uninstalled it after the whole security debacle discussion on GitHub. But the browser was quite enjoyable to use indeed.
Oo ty for this I was toying with the idea of installing it but I guess I wont now :)
I thought firefox and ungoogled chromium did same job in terms of privacy.
I see I was wrong.
well, for one firefox is not a stripped down browser but one with conveniences like push notifications, safebrowsing and other things, while ungoogled chromium is a specialized browser built for those who don't need all that. don't forget also that chrome can't be patched up on many fronts, ublock's dev gorhill has written about them here
that being said, mozilla could make a first time setup page with an option for convenience and another with a menu for selecting which services do you want. but I wouldn't hold my breath