Why is Vanadium better than Bromite or Brave?

poubellier

I've tried Vanadium, but it appears to be non-practical for me. I guess all its benefits are non visible and are in the code and how it deals with the internet, but to me it lacks 2 essential features (that i can have with bromite): open all links in incognito, and delete all cookies when closing tabs (or the app).
So are there any chances to add these features in Vanadium, or is using bromite a bad idea for privacy?
Thank you!

bayesian

+1 for:

Open all links in incognito
Delete all cookies when closing tabs (or the app).

MetropleX

The whole which is better argument is slightly misguided as the whole point of the OS is that it is for everyone, which in turn means, within the scope of the project enabling users to make choices that fit their own needs and use cases.

If you want to use Bromite that is your perogative but to clarify Vanadiums strengths please take some time to familiarise yourself with the documentation on the website:

https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

The second paragraph addresses the two easential features you mentioned:

Vanadium was previously primarily focused on security hardening but we plan on adding assorted privacy and usability features. In the near future, we plan to add support for always incognito mode, content filtering (ad blocking, etc.), improved state partitioning, backup/restore, native autofill and many other features.

This will obviously be taking a back seat during the process of porting GrapheneOS to Android13 so is a Soon™ item.

Part of the reason for not offering them already is as follows:

GrapheneOS cares about being able to upstream code. As part of using GPLv2 we require contributors authorize upstreaming code under the preferred upstream license, which only applies if it's accepted. Blocking the upstreams from using their code is exactly what Bromite is doing.

They were previously allowing us to use most of their code via dual licensing it. They included most of our code and lots of code we hadn't merged yet such as their content filtering implementation being based on the one done for GrapheneOS, per-site JIT toggle and much more.

We didn't find it particularly fair that a project is including our code while we would be unable to use theirs even if we were willing to include GPLv3 code because they do not grant the exception we would need for linking the WebView with non-GPLv3 compatible apps in the OS.

Vanadium will be using the same GPLv2-only licensing approach used by the Linux kernel. The overall licenses applying to GrapheneOS are unchanged.
This change is being made due to require Bromite to allow us to use their code if they keep using ours.

Source: Daniel Micay

Hulk

@poubellier @bayesian

You can now open all external links in incognito by default in Vanadium.

To do that, open Vanadium ➔ Settings ➔ Privacy & security and turn on "Open external links in incognito".

poubellier

Hulk that's very good news! Thank for letting us know here in an old post because otherwise I might would have missed the info!

Fhggyy5767

You can also put a Vanadium widget on your home screen that only opens in incognito

poubellier

Fhggyy5767 I tried so with brave but the unpractical side of it is every time you want to open your browser you open a new tab. Except when you have an icon for the browser itself and an icon for opening in incognito but that means you need to have 2 icons for the same app...

Fhggyy5767

poubellier that's exactly how mine is set up. One for incognito, one for a standard vanadium browser and one for Bromite in a group for browsers. Works like a charm

BHydden

poubellier also if you long hold the vanadium app, it has an option to open a new incognitio tab, if you really want just 1 icon for both uses.

bicycle

just wanted to ad my own feedback.
I'm using Brave instead of Vanadium because Bitwarden is not working with Vanadium, and also can't change search engine, which is Google by default (which I find kinda odd) to Brave search of Duckduckgo.

Orphee

bicycle You can change default search engine on vanadium, I did it to startpage.com
It is explained by startpage.com how to do it.

But I agree regarding Bitwarden.
Also, in my case, I still use firefox because Vanadium private mode can't be streamed with adb scrcpy tool.
Window is hidden. And I prefer to navigate with private mode on firefox than standard mode on vanadium because of screenshare issue.

MetropleX

bicycle Orphee jlleary99 can we redirect these thoughts into a Search Engine specific thread, this one is veering off topic.

jlleary99

Orphee

problem I have with startpage.com is that it uses google's algorithms so if you are ok with just getting what they decide to rank then go with that otherwise I use metager.org Solid privacy and uses 24 crawlers with open source algorithms.

bicycle

thanks, but if I understand well it is just about using startpage.com as a shortcut, not as search engine when typing in the url field.
Anyway for me Bitwarden is the major issue. Not a big deal, I use Brave instead.

Orphee

bicycle
No, you have to change startpage.com settings to GET instead of POST, then make a random search, and then you can add it in your search engine from Vanadium search engine settings options as "recent search engines"