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.

                    Yeah, until Vanadium has full Bookmarks management, it is definitely Cromite.

                      matchboxbananasynergy

                      Didn't notice, thx. Not really obvious tho in the website settings toggle. No info on what lists, no custom lists,etc...

                      AlanZ
                      Even Cromites bookmark feature is just too narrow to be useful.
                      (Or of any browser in its default config.)
                      The model I like best so far is Tab Stash with Firefox on Desktop.
                      I am lowkey looking for another way of making this stuff nice on mobile browsers.

                            • [deleted]

                            • Post #34

                            Today I use copilot as my default browser and tor for private stuff.

                            Grantelbart custom lists would serve to make it so people aren't using a standard set of lists, and therefore introducing a fingerprinting risk.

                            It doesn't need to be in your face in the UI. Ads are blocked by default. per-site setting for enabling or disabling ads per-site is in the same place where you control per-site JIT toggle.

                              Overheat1859 It would be reeally long in the details, but basically I operate in that way:

                              • first start brave
                              • disable all the extra functionaliry that I dont want (crypto, news, safebrowsing, telemetry...)
                              • for the homepage, as we sayd, I enable it in the options with "top sites" enabled; so now I delete every single top sites from the homepage.
                              • only after that I disable homepage and topsites in the options (start in blank page)

                              Basically it's all here, and now analizing traffic I have only connections of the updater and component updater.

                                I use Vanadium if I need to login to any website or if I need to download something. For daily browsing etc, I use Chromite.