Based on experience I’ve always found the Fedora community very helpful and knowledgeable, I wouldn’t exactly say humming with with activity on the discussion forums but maybe the best quality to quantity ratio and not much drama.

Oh fair enough, I’ll re-examine some of that information. I don’t think I’m completely wrong. Advice on not installing extensions to avoid adding to the fingerprint comes from the official Mullvad FAQ. The philosophy of making all users look the same to blend in is something inherited from Tor Browser.

Mullvad also uses resist fingerprinting, yes canvas is unique every attempt. The EFF cover your tracks test doesn’t penalise you for it, if you’re coming up as unique there it’s not because of that (some tests out there do though and Mullvad fails them). Having a randomised canvas itself may count as one data point I guess.

Mullvad Browser:

Your browser has a non-unique fingerprint

Within our dataset of several hundred thousand visitors tested in the past 45 days, only one in 1041.72 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

For comparison if I test in Firefox (configured as I was previously using) I get:

Your browser has a unique fingerprint

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 304,204 tested in the past 45 days.

“Strong” protection means that your browser is configured to protect against tracking, both come back as strong here, but as far as I can tell that doesn’t take into account tracking through fingerprinting. You’re right, you don’t want a unique fingerprint.

When you customise and add extensions to your browser, you add to its fingerprint so even privacy extensions can be counterproductive. The way Mullvad Browser works is that because it comes ready configured for privacy with various privacy extensions (including UBo) installed by default you don’t have to make changes. While this doesn’t give you a “common” fingerprint exactly (hence “only one in 1041.72 browsers”), it makes you look like all the other Mullvad Browsers so there’s safety in numbers. There are a few more nuances to it than that but that’s basically the idea, and it’s a balancing act, you could be less unique than that but you would need to make other compromises.

The catch is that you shouldn’t try to configure Mullvad Browser yourself since that negates the benefit; you have to be able to live with the browser as it is out of the box which may mean sacrificing some of your favourite extensions.

I would say don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, if you have a problem with Mozilla as an organisation it doesn’t negate the valid concerns about the monopoly, it would effectively hand control of web standards over to Google defeating the entire ethos of the open web. The Firefox browser engine is independent even if you don’t believe the organisation behind it is, that can be verified because of open source, there’s no need to be defeatist yet.

Daily driving Mullvad Browser now, it’s Firefox based and has strong anti-fingerprinting and privacy defaults - it does break some sites though and is missing some QoL features but that’s the price you pay.

I deleted my comment fir a reason 🤨

Comment deletion doesn’t always federate straight away, I can still see it.

Answer me this, what chromium browser today is good??

I don’t use Chromium browsers because they’re at the verge of becoming a monopoly, it’s important to use alternatives for the foreseeable future to sustain what’s left of diversity.

It depends on your point of view, of the ones I’ve seen I’d guess Vivaldi has the best user features but it’s closed source so there’s double reason to not use it. It’s what I’d use if I didn’t care about any of this. But if you want my genuine browser recommendation from a Privacy perspective (since this is the privacy community) I suggest Mullvad Browser, it’s Firefox based and has strong anti-fingerprinting and privacy defaults - it does break some sites though and is missing some QoL features but that’s the price you pay.

Oh yes, it would be even worse if we only had one browser engine. We need more browser engines is the point, not more tweaked Chromium browsers.

Can’t tell if you’re joking but the problem is serious lack of competition for Chromium browsers. Every Chromium browser brings nothing meaningfully new but just strengthens Google’s monopoly.

As the person who made the (currently highest upvoted) comment about not needing a new Chromium browser, could you enlighten me on what I should know about “today’s industry”?

Don’t see the point, the world doesn’t need another Chromium browser.

The article could have literally been a beginner’s guide to installing an operating system instead. But for some reason in the last 20 years or so there’s been a complete allergy to teaching anyone even the most elementary computer skills and it’s holding society back. I’m not sure it is worth being spied on by ad agencies for what it’s worth, especially if you’re not going to learn to become any more than a passive consumer.

This is often the pushback I get when making this point but I would argue that especially non tech-savvy users are vulnerable. The alternative is asking a trusted friend to do a clean install, which should be the advice of this article, that or a guide on how to do it. It’s irresponsible to publish an article aimed at a naive user who has received a computer full of bloatware and tell them to “just remove all the bloatware”.

Why would you say that. It’s true that most users take a blase attitude to security these days, and it’s normalised by articles like this. It’s just basic good practice, whether buying a new or used PC, to do a clean install because even if you think you’ve removed the bloatware, you can’t really trust there’s no secret malware. Especially these days when so many companies want to spy on users it really isn’t just paranoia.

Never a good idea to use a computer with the preinstalled operating system.