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Comment by fallingsquirrel | Hacker News Reader

Stuff like this makes me wonder why I still cling to Firefox instead of switching to one of the actually privacy-focused Chromium forks.

I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole.

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

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I still use Firefox because I'd like there to be more than one web browser in the world, but boy oh boy they're trying as hard as they can to get me to quit.

It's also much easier to compile, and thus hack upon since it doesn't require a datacenter-scale distcc setup for all the <s>CVE-generation code</s> C++

For me, it's the support for ad-blockers that actually work, plus greasemonkey. But it's been awhile, and maybe I need to look again.

Firefox is still the most secure browser you can get once you've beaten it into submission through hundreds of about:config changes. Last I checked you couldn't even fully disable service workers or WebRTC in chrome.

Do you have a recommended list of the about:config changes to get optimal security and privacy?

Not for most people. I deal with compromised/malware infested websites so my team has a document with over 600 entries that locks down as much as possible. Arkenfox is included in that and that should cover what most people need in terms of privacy. Firefox on my work PC has things disabled that most people would probably want like SVG, Wasm, JS, auto/form fill, saved passwords, searching from the address bar, reader view, mathml, browser.fixup, remote fonts, PDF viewer, etc.

This might interest you... (if you know how to set it up):

"Firefox privacy, security and anti-tracking: a comprehensive user.js template for configuration and hardening "

https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Surely playing whackamole with Google is harder than Mozilla?

I use both Chrome and Firefox. Either it will reaffirm me that my preferred browser is indeed better, or I will find out what I have been missing out.

I might not have been running multiple browsers daily if any one browser is perfect, but currently some websites seemed optimized for Firefox while others seemed optimized for Chrome. (And a small handful of websites are actually better with Lynx).

Really? Arkenfox user too and it seems to have stabilized the last couple of years. The moles have been whacked.

I didn't mean to imply Arkenfox is unstable, it's great. I meant the Arkenfox maintainer is playing whackamole with FF. Every so often FF adds a spying feature (like this one), then Arkenfox has to react and turn it off and cut a release, then everyone has to run the updater script. My system auto updates Firefox, but not Arkenfox. So if I don't want any windows of vulnerability I'm stuck having to pay attention to updates and make sure I run the updater script at just the right time.

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