Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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What's the recommended Android browser for privacy in 2025, that is also usable for day to day tasks?. (lemmy.world)

submitted 14 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As open source as Android is, it is very difficult to find a decent browser, let alone one that is privacy focused and also usable on daily.

Almost all web searches point to site that shows stuff like : Chrome, Edge, Opera....etc. So this doesnt help.
Play Store is full of shitty browsers. If you skip the usual DDG, Chrome, Edge, Opera...etc then you will see either:

a) browsers from random Chinese company (Via, UC Browser)

or b) browser that is coupled with other products, e.g. a video downloader with built in browser.

After the recent fiasco with Firefox and their ToS, I saw a lot of posts saying IronFox / Water Fox is better. I've never heard of these Foxes variants before.

So I tried the following on Android:

DDG: only good if you do basic search. It lacks a good adblocker. So very annoying if you are on a site with shit tons of popups.
Brave: not a fan of the in your face AI tools. Overall it works ok though
The Foxes variants: IronFox seems to be very good on privacy. It has its own DNS and most of the security is on by default. However, same as all Foxes, IronFox just doesnt play well on Android. There is a slight lag when you try to switch tabs.
TOR: This would be the safest. But the poorest in terms of usability.
Chrome w/o account or Chrome run from private space. Surprisingly, Chrome is still the one browser that runs the smoothest.....

Any input is appreciated.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Tor browser for anonymous/private regular browsing (without logging into personally-identifiable accounts)
Vanadium (GrapheneOS' Chromium-based browser, maybe it's usable on non-GrapheneOS as well?) in combination with a good crap-blocking DNS server
Brave is decent but has some bad default settings, can probably be configured to behave well (similar to regular Firefox)
Firefox + forks are generally not that great (at least on Android?) because their sandboxing capabilities (and maybe other security features) are weaker compared to those of Chromium-based browsers. See also: https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
Proprietary browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and so on all contain loads of on-by-default-spyware and should never be used