I think I’ve been using the ‘original’ Firefox web browser since 2004 on my notebook and also on Android from the day it was released. Over the years, there has been criticism around anti-privacy features that came and went, most of them probably well founded. Nevertheless, I stuck to Firefox on my smartphone until recently but decided to switch after seeing just how often Firefox ‘calls home’.
By default, Firefox seems to call home quite a bit for various purposes. This can be deactivated, but it is the default. When I recently had a look with Wireshark, I noticed that Firefox even called home when I only unlocked the screen. And yes, to say it again, this is the default and can be deactivated. But at this point, I have to admit I was a bit shocked. From my point of view, I really don’t want to tell Mozilla every time I unlock my mobile device.
So I finally decided to look elsewhere and had a look at Fennec, which is available in the F-Droid Android store. Fennec is a fork of Firefox, minus the privacy invading components. After moving over to Fennec, I could no longer detect Mozilla telemetry. Very nice and it works well on my GrapheneOS based Pixel 8.
And while I’m already at it, I thought I’d also give the security hardened Vanadium browser of GrapheneOS a closer look. Vanadium is based on Chromium, so I was not fond of it at first. But the makers of GrapheneOS list many security and privacy enhancements they have made over the original Chromium, so I gave it a try. And indeed it works very well, too.
However, Vandium has one major issues for me: While it already contains an ad-blocker that works very well, it has the nasty habit of auto-playing videos (without sound) embedded in web pages. I really hate this, and there seems to be no way of switching this off. I found discussions about this on the web that date back several years, so I’m not the only one who doesn’t like this. But the topic doesn’t seem to have a high priority. On Firefox and Fennec in combination with UBlock-Origin, however, videos on web pages I frequently visit do not automatically start playing.
Ah well, there always has to be something, right? So I’m a bit tied between the security aspects of Vanadium and the auto-play free experience of Fennec. No clear winner yet.