• [deleted]

  • Edited

panopticon
I'm nearly always in an incognito mode in Vanadium.

An elegant solution that makes it easier to achieve it, is to use a widget. One of four widgets offered has a direct incognito button. With a single click, you get a tab that saves no history.

That, and the fact "add to a home screen' items likewise are configured to open via an incognito tab, is why I can't remember last time I had to access Vanadium via its app button. (Nor do i remember when I had to empty its history.)

    6 months later

    [deleted] Nova Launcher users can add a 1x1 custom shortcut to Vanadium in incognito mode to the home screen. Don't think this is possible in the stock launcher though I haven't tried.

    Edit: This can be done in the stock launcher as well. Long-press the vanadium app, long press the "launch incognito tab" in the pop-up and drag it to the home screen. Now you have a 1x1 shortcut to Vanadium in incognito mode.

    Brave has been pinging gstatic, Amazon, eBay, ESPN and a bunch more concerning connections upon opening the app. You can check this your self with a custom DNS like Next DNS and observing the logs. Even if you turn off and delete top sites in brave, it will continue to occasionally make connections to these service when you first open the app. I am using Cromite and Vanadium. I am hoping Vanadium will add some additional anti fingerprinting measures soon. I would like to drop Cromite, but Cromite works better in some ways.

      Both.
      Vanadium for important things whose logins I don't want leaked and who not spew filth at me like ads.

      Cromite for opening random sites that are not terribly important because it has an ok-ish adblocker.

      Use a thing that catches intents to open links as default browser, so you always see the URL and can choose which browser opens it.

      I don't trust Brave. From analyzing their incentives I do not believe they will be longterm invested in user choice or not fucking trust up.

      Fingerprinting is a lost cause. Any of the big browsers in comfy config will be fingerprintable. If you really mean it use Torbrowser in most restrictive mode.

        [deleted]

        Here is a screenshot of the logs.
        https://wormhole.app/LAkp9#TWLG8TZb9AiB81DAS4euQQ

        I have no bookmarks. Have top sites removed and these logs still show. It's an issue that my IP address is being sent to websites such as Instagram for just opening the brave browser with all history and cookies cleared. I would like to drop cromite for brave and would like to drop brave for only Vanadium but each have their issues.

          I am using Next DNS through the browser settings. I have noticed when using Next DNS through network system settings less logs are shown I'm not sure why.

          Overheat1859 Brave has been pinging gstatic, Amazon, eBay, ESPN and a bunch more concerning connections upon opening the app. You can check this your self with a custom DNS like Next DNS and observing the logs.

          brave on android is just buggy in that sense. Most of the pings are prefetch of the "top sites" on the homepage.
          It preloads some "top sites" out of the box (instagram, espn, and others...).
          Now here's the bug: If you "disable", the homepage from the options, starting brave from a blank page for example, what happens is that the links on the (not)disabled homepage are still being prefetched.

          To stop the pings at startup you need to:

          • re-enable all the homepage options until your browser will boot on the infamous homepage full of "top sites".
          • remove, site-per-site all the top sites. Long click on them and remove.
          • pings disappeared (most of them; you will still note safe-browsing google and autupdate-components pings for example).

          This type of bugs are syntomous of how much they care about privacy, but at least they are not proposely harmful and, with a bit of configs, brave can be set as a pretty decent browser.

          Also, my unpopular personal raccomendation is to reconsider firefox-based browser.

            Volen It's on by default. Just update to the newest Vanadium release.

            Can be disabled per-site by tapping the cogwheel-thingy in the address bar > Permissions.

            ponymontana Thanks for the info, I already have top sites removed but enabling the setting it seems like it works for now but I still ping gstatic. Do you need to keep the bottom toolbar enabled to prevent the bug from occurring or could I turn it off afterwards? I would hope Firefox could one day get at the same security level as chromium for android.

              Wow Vanadiums adblock is nice! It lacks the custom element selector and lists (for example *.mov *.zip) but it passed even the extreme adblock test and was not even detected to be an adblocker

              Overheat1859 I think there are other settings that can be changed to stop the pings. I struggled a lot, but after I played a lot with settings I have stopped all the pings other than brave autoupdate at startup.

                Note that Brave is made for random Android systems, they use their own Chromium engine and are not at all hardened like GrapheneOS+Vanadium, as Vanadium "can have bugs only fixed in GrapheneOS" and Brave cant, as well as rely on advanced hardware features that no other phone or even OS implements like MTE.

                How does Vanadium do in terms of browser fingerprinting? Brave seems to be leaps ahead.

                  Overheat1859 Vanadium's approach to anti-fingerprinting is discussed on these parts of the site:

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

                  Numerous fingerprinting tests are not reliable as they rely on a pool of results of the userbase of the website, many of which use very different setups in comparison to the average person. Some browsers also do fingerprinting protections differently i.e. Brave randomizes data while Tor tries to keep it the same as possible.

                  Likewise, the only other browser the project recommends is Brave. It preserves mobile Chromium's security posture while adding additional state partitioning, anti-fingerprinting improvements and the most advanced content filtering engine. Vanadium has greater security enhancements like MTE support in production but needs to catch up in some areas. The new filtering for Vanadium is a part of the improvements.