5 ms·

My practical approach to surfing the web safely

69 points by ethanhawksley 1mo ago

steammaho 29d ago
Aren't we in an era when you literally can build your own browser with everything just you need? I have no knowledge in browsers developement. But in my field it became often easier to make your own tool\app then trying to use third party and make it work for you
- fulafel 29d ago
  There have been recent attempts. Apparently not.
- turpentine 29d ago
  We're exactly in that era of insanity that someone will use agent drivel development to cobble together a browser from existing browser sources in exchange for thousands of dollars of compute. Will it be standards conformant? No. Will it have security issues? Yes.
- jerlendds 28d ago
  I mean you might be able to if you squint hard enough but the experience of using it would be absolitely piss poor so no. Realistically speaking AI is not even nearly that good yet and buildong a browser is an absolutely huge undertaking
- mitxela 25d ago
  Are we? Build your own browser, and if you can do that, then we are.
- Batman8675309 25d ago
  How would you expect your AI to build you a more secure browser than Microsoft or Google could?
eptcyka 29d ago
My practical approach is to have a microvm for firefox and a bubblewrap “jail” for a firefox instance that runs on the host. Of course, the config options mentioned here are good too.
- larelli 29d ago
  This sounds interesting and useful. How do you set something like this up? Are there good tutorials to follow?
traceroute66 29d ago
> Main browser: A restricted Firefox Mullvad Browser[1] is an example of just that, ready to go for people in the real world who don't have the time or inclination to mess around with random extensions and `about:config` hacking. Also surprised the blog author made zero mention of the importance of keeping your OS up to date. Its all very well having a patched and hardened browser but not if you're running it on a vulnerable OS. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/browser https://mullvad.net/en/browser
pcfwik 29d ago
Knowing some folks that work on "major-browser-vendor" security in the era of Mythos-found-and-exploited vulnerabilities everywhere, the thought of running completely random untrusted Javascript on my machine has freaked me out to the point that I run NoScript on all of my machines now. I've found NoScript actually very usable, as long as you allow yourself to be fairly liberal in marking domains "trusted." I only truly routinely visit a core 10-20 domains that require Javascript, and they're from "reputable" organizations (my bank, employer, etc.) so those all get marked "trusted" quickly and I don't worry about them going forward. In the "long tail" of random things I click on from HN links, seeing a "You need to enable Javascript to view this app" message is actually a fairly good signal that I don't want to view that app (though you might be surprised how many websites are browsable comfortably---or even more comfortably!---without JS enabled). One thing I wish NoScript supported was the ability to mark a domain as a "trusted page domain" in the sense of: "HTML served from this domain can load scripts from any domain" (rather than trust being assigned to the domain serving the script itself). Perhaps it has this feature and I just haven't found it. https://noscript.net/ https://noscript.net/
- turpentine 29d ago
  Qubes OS is looking less crazy lately too.
  - mitxela 25d ago
    QubesOS recently had an escape-the-qube-and-escalate-to-root exploit
    - goodmythical 25d ago
      Didn't [insert literally any distro/operating system] have a root exploit recently?
      - mitxela 25d ago
        Omarchy did, and still does because they aren't going to fix it.
scorpioxy 29d ago
For a while, I used a firefox extension called "Temporary Containers" which would, as the name implies, create a temporary container for each site you visit. Combined with specifying some custom rules for ones you want to open in a specific container, that was a very convenient setup. But the extension at some point corrupted my firefox profile and has been unmaintained for a while so I didn't try again. I am not sure what happened and it may have been the combination of extensions that was the cause of that. Sadly, the author passed away, if I remember correctly, and it's been difficult to find maintainers for the project so I gave up on that. You can still install that extension but from the reported issues the functionality and bugs were increasing with every new firefox version. And obviously that setup only helped with the cookie aspects and not necessarily any security issues from javascript and so on.
- Baljhin 15d ago
  Try either https://github.com/kintesh/containerise https://github.com/kintesh/containerise (unmaintained), or a maintained fork of it, https://github.com/max-dw-i/container-redirect https://github.com/max-dw-i/container-redirect -- both have a settings-setup that mimics exactly a temporary container for every site (i.e. those that are not explicitly defined in custom rules).
throw93947309 25d ago
I would disable javascript JIT, pdf renderer, graphical acceleration, svg... And use chromium based browser (I preffer Brave Origin). Using firefox for "secure browsing" does not make much sense in 2026! Mozilla has different priorities! Firefox development is under financed for several years now, and Firefox has weaker security model!
- Batman8675309 25d ago
  Just run your browser in a secured VM and you won't have to basically kill the experience to be able to use it.
aftbit 25d ago
I have a handy little script called `chrome-new` which I use whenever I want to browse one of those few sites that struggles with Firefox. It just starts a clean Chromium with a throw-away profile, then deletes it when I close the browser. #!/bin/sh TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d /dev/shm/chrome-XXXXX) chromium --user-data-dir=$TMPDIR --no-first-run --no-default-browser-check --disable-features=DefaultBrowserPrompt "$@" rm -rf $TMPDIR
- wky 25d ago
  Is there an advantage over just --guest?
  - aftbit 24d ago
    Not sure - I have never used that flag! I like the idea of managing the profile dir myself, because then I know nothing will leak. For example, HSTS state persists across incognito, allowing fingerprinting. I don't know if --guest handles that differently (probably?) but this way, I can be sure.
gitowiec 25d ago
I don't understand why author complains about Firefox performance. I use it everyday on laptop and mobile and I don't see the difference to the Chrome or Brave when I visit all my regular sites and all other I find on HN. She has to play HTML 5 games or something to observe such difference
- deleted 25d ago
  [deleted]
- cxr 25d ago
  I don't understand this common response. I'm a former Mozillian and a lifelong Firefox user (continuously since Firefox has existed, at least). I know Firefox is slower. I can feel it and have felt it on every system I've ever owned, and am constantly reminded once every few months or weeks or so when I open up Chrome to check something and am confronted with how much snappier it is—even without an ad blocker, which I don't have installed because I don't actually use Chrome. I know all this and I use Firefox anyway because I don't care. What I don't do is go online and comment about how there's no difference when there is clearly a difference. Pretending things are otherwise comes across as some form of denial or delusion.
  - Semaphor 25d ago
    People clearly like lying… or just maybe their experience is different than yours for a multitude of reasons. I have absolutely no clear difference.
  - gitowiec 12d ago
    I just don't see the difference, as I said, visiting my regular sites is what I do on the Internet 95% of the time.
Grimeton 25d ago
If you use Firefox sync, then your sync identity is leaked across all containers. This makes you identifiable across containers and subverts the whole idea. So don't use sync.
- solstice 25d ago
  I see that you reported and described this behavior over at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2061493 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2061493 Interesting. From the response at bugzilla it seems that the feature is built on top of "FF accounts" (which I'll have to look into) and that the browser communicates directly with the Firefox sync servers. Meaning that only Mozilla would know your sync identity across containers. Did I get that right? Whether that's a privacy concern is something that I'll have to think about. What's your take?
gitowiec 25d ago
For Firefox I recommend Cookie AutoDelete 3.8.2 addon. It is possible to configure it to erase all storage (cookies, indexeddb, localSorage and others) after chosen time (default 15s) after changing/leaving domain. It has many other useful options. Another good addon is ClearURLs 1.27.3 which clears suspicious parameters of query strings on everything what's loaded by page. It sometimes break sites.
- Gander5739 25d ago
  Isn't that somewhat pointless if you don't also regularly rotate your ip address?
- Baljhin 15d ago
  Cookie-AutoDelete is effectively dead, for both Firefox and Chrome, as seen from the many Issues on its repo, e.g. https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issues/1658 https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issue... -- and hasn't been updated since 2022. There's a supposed spinoff @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-clear-site-data/reviews/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-clear-site-dat..., but apparently it's not ready for widescale use (and it's not open-source).
mitxela 25d ago
I just use Tor Browser by default a lot of the time.
deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
Terr_ 25d ago
I remember this, looks like this submission got second-chance'd. (Times shown on comments may be inaccurate, known-issue.)
____tom____ 25d ago
Just run your browser in a non-persistent VM.
- kulahan 25d ago
  I just run a VM with linux running WINE so I can browse securely on Safari, and all of this is on an rPi I actually vampire tapped into the coax network of the local town hall. Still feels unsafe.
- Batman8675309 25d ago
  What are the easiest ways of doing so though? I'm running Windows Sandbox on Windows, and MacOS has Bromure. What's the easiest for Linux? KVM?
kogasa240p 25d ago
Librewolf (sometimes Palemoon) + Ublock origin to disable Javascript. Many websites work a lot faster as well.
- Batman8675309 25d ago
  Pale Moon? That doesn't even have sandboxing? Why?
Cider9986 25d ago
I use Vanadium on mobile and Brave on desktop–I think those are the best options. Brave is also a valid choice on Mobile because of the better adblocking. https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing
- xyhhx 25d ago
  trivalent is your best bet on desktop if you're on a fedora-based distro: https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent
  - deleted 11d ago
    [deleted]
xyhhx 25d ago
> I’m using Firefox because it still has better built-in security and privacy controls than other browsers. isn't firefox like far less secure than chromium? its sandbox pales in comparison, for one thing. configuring trivalent on fedora-based distros is a good way to get the security benefits of chromium without all the adtech slop. anybody using firefox should consider the patches by celenity at https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix

69 points by ethanhawksley 1mo ago

Aren't we in an era when you literally can build your own browser with everything just you need? I have no knowledge in browsers developement. But in my field it became often easier to make your own tool\app then trying to use third party and make it work for you

fulafel 29d ago
There have been recent attempts. Apparently not.
turpentine 29d ago
We're exactly in that era of insanity that someone will use agent drivel development to cobble together a browser from existing browser sources in exchange for thousands of dollars of compute. Will it be standards conformant? No. Will it have security issues? Yes.
jerlendds 28d ago
I mean you might be able to if you squint hard enough but the experience of using it would be absolitely piss poor so no. Realistically speaking AI is not even nearly that good yet and buildong a browser is an absolutely huge undertaking
mitxela 25d ago
Are we? Build your own browser, and if you can do that, then we are.
Batman8675309 25d ago
How would you expect your AI to build you a more secure browser than Microsoft or Google could?

eptcyka 29d ago

My practical approach is to have a microvm for firefox and a bubblewrap “jail” for a firefox instance that runs on the host. Of course, the config options mentioned here are good too.

larelli 29d ago
This sounds interesting and useful. How do you set something like this up? Are there good tutorials to follow?

traceroute66 29d ago

> Main browser: A restricted Firefox Mullvad Browser[1] is an example of just that, ready to go for people in the real world who don't have the time or inclination to mess around with random extensions and `about:config` hacking. Also surprised the blog author made zero mention of the importance of keeping your OS up to date. Its all very well having a patched and hardened browser but not if you're running it on a vulnerable OS. [1] https://mullvad.net/en/browser https://mullvad.net/en/browser

pcfwik 29d ago

Knowing some folks that work on "major-browser-vendor" security in the era of Mythos-found-and-exploited vulnerabilities everywhere, the thought of running completely random untrusted Javascript on my machine has freaked me out to the point that I run NoScript on all of my machines now. I've found NoScript actually very usable, as long as you allow yourself to be fairly liberal in marking domains "trusted." I only truly routinely visit a core 10-20 domains that require Javascript, and they're from "reputable" organizations (my bank, employer, etc.) so those all get marked "trusted" quickly and I don't worry about them going forward. In the "long tail" of random things I click on from HN links, seeing a "You need to enable Javascript to view this app" message is actually a fairly good signal that I don't want to view that app (though you might be surprised how many websites are browsable comfortably---or even more comfortably!---without JS enabled). One thing I wish NoScript supported was the ability to mark a domain as a "trusted page domain" in the sense of: "HTML served from this domain can load scripts from any domain" (rather than trust being assigned to the domain serving the script itself). Perhaps it has this feature and I just haven't found it. https://noscript.net/ https://noscript.net/

turpentine 29d ago
Qubes OS is looking less crazy lately too.
- mitxela 25d ago
  QubesOS recently had an escape-the-qube-and-escalate-to-root exploit
  - goodmythical 25d ago
    Didn't [insert literally any distro/operating system] have a root exploit recently?
    - mitxela 25d ago
      Omarchy did, and still does because they aren't going to fix it.

scorpioxy 29d ago

For a while, I used a firefox extension called "Temporary Containers" which would, as the name implies, create a temporary container for each site you visit. Combined with specifying some custom rules for ones you want to open in a specific container, that was a very convenient setup. But the extension at some point corrupted my firefox profile and has been unmaintained for a while so I didn't try again. I am not sure what happened and it may have been the combination of extensions that was the cause of that. Sadly, the author passed away, if I remember correctly, and it's been difficult to find maintainers for the project so I gave up on that. You can still install that extension but from the reported issues the functionality and bugs were increasing with every new firefox version. And obviously that setup only helped with the cookie aspects and not necessarily any security issues from javascript and so on.

Baljhin 15d ago
Try either https://github.com/kintesh/containerise https://github.com/kintesh/containerise (unmaintained), or a maintained fork of it, https://github.com/max-dw-i/container-redirect https://github.com/max-dw-i/container-redirect -- both have a settings-setup that mimics exactly a temporary container for every site (i.e. those that are not explicitly defined in custom rules).

throw93947309 25d ago

I would disable javascript JIT, pdf renderer, graphical acceleration, svg... And use chromium based browser (I preffer Brave Origin). Using firefox for "secure browsing" does not make much sense in 2026! Mozilla has different priorities! Firefox development is under financed for several years now, and Firefox has weaker security model!

Batman8675309 25d ago
Just run your browser in a secured VM and you won't have to basically kill the experience to be able to use it.

aftbit 25d ago

I have a handy little script called `chrome-new` which I use whenever I want to browse one of those few sites that struggles with Firefox. It just starts a clean Chromium with a throw-away profile, then deletes it when I close the browser. #!/bin/sh TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d /dev/shm/chrome-XXXXX) chromium --user-data-dir=$TMPDIR --no-first-run --no-default-browser-check --disable-features=DefaultBrowserPrompt "$@" rm -rf $TMPDIR

wky 25d ago
Is there an advantage over just --guest?
- aftbit 24d ago
  Not sure - I have never used that flag! I like the idea of managing the profile dir myself, because then I know nothing will leak. For example, HSTS state persists across incognito, allowing fingerprinting. I don't know if --guest handles that differently (probably?) but this way, I can be sure.

gitowiec 25d ago

I don't understand why author complains about Firefox performance. I use it everyday on laptop and mobile and I don't see the difference to the Chrome or Brave when I visit all my regular sites and all other I find on HN. She has to play HTML 5 games or something to observe such difference

deleted 25d ago
[deleted]
cxr 25d ago
I don't understand this common response. I'm a former Mozillian and a lifelong Firefox user (continuously since Firefox has existed, at least). I know Firefox is slower. I can feel it and have felt it on every system I've ever owned, and am constantly reminded once every few months or weeks or so when I open up Chrome to check something and am confronted with how much snappier it is—even without an ad blocker, which I don't have installed because I don't actually use Chrome. I know all this and I use Firefox anyway because I don't care. What I don't do is go online and comment about how there's no difference when there is clearly a difference. Pretending things are otherwise comes across as some form of denial or delusion.
- Semaphor 25d ago
  People clearly like lying… or just maybe their experience is different than yours for a multitude of reasons. I have absolutely no clear difference.
- gitowiec 12d ago
  I just don't see the difference, as I said, visiting my regular sites is what I do on the Internet 95% of the time.

Grimeton 25d ago

If you use Firefox sync, then your sync identity is leaked across all containers. This makes you identifiable across containers and subverts the whole idea. So don't use sync.

solstice 25d ago
I see that you reported and described this behavior over at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2061493 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2061493 Interesting. From the response at bugzilla it seems that the feature is built on top of "FF accounts" (which I'll have to look into) and that the browser communicates directly with the Firefox sync servers. Meaning that only Mozilla would know your sync identity across containers. Did I get that right? Whether that's a privacy concern is something that I'll have to think about. What's your take?

gitowiec 25d ago

For Firefox I recommend Cookie AutoDelete 3.8.2 addon. It is possible to configure it to erase all storage (cookies, indexeddb, localSorage and others) after chosen time (default 15s) after changing/leaving domain. It has many other useful options. Another good addon is ClearURLs 1.27.3 which clears suspicious parameters of query strings on everything what's loaded by page. It sometimes break sites.

Gander5739 25d ago
Isn't that somewhat pointless if you don't also regularly rotate your ip address?
Baljhin 15d ago
Cookie-AutoDelete is effectively dead, for both Firefox and Chrome, as seen from the many Issues on its repo, e.g. https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issues/1658 https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issue... -- and hasn't been updated since 2022. There's a supposed spinoff @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-clear-site-data/reviews/ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-clear-site-dat..., but apparently it's not ready for widescale use (and it's not open-source).

mitxela 25d ago

I just use Tor Browser by default a lot of the time.

deleted 25d ago

[deleted]

Terr_ 25d ago

I remember this, looks like this submission got second-chance'd. (Times shown on comments may be inaccurate, known-issue.)

____tom____ 25d ago

Just run your browser in a non-persistent VM.

kulahan 25d ago
I just run a VM with linux running WINE so I can browse securely on Safari, and all of this is on an rPi I actually vampire tapped into the coax network of the local town hall. Still feels unsafe.
Batman8675309 25d ago
What are the easiest ways of doing so though? I'm running Windows Sandbox on Windows, and MacOS has Bromure. What's the easiest for Linux? KVM?

kogasa240p 25d ago

Librewolf (sometimes Palemoon) + Ublock origin to disable Javascript. Many websites work a lot faster as well.

Batman8675309 25d ago
Pale Moon? That doesn't even have sandboxing? Why?

Cider9986 25d ago

I use Vanadium on mobile and Brave on desktop–I think those are the best options. Brave is also a valid choice on Mobile because of the better adblocking. https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

xyhhx 25d ago
trivalent is your best bet on desktop if you're on a fedora-based distro: https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent
- deleted 11d ago
  [deleted]

xyhhx 25d ago

> I’m using Firefox because it still has better built-in security and privacy controls than other browsers. isn't firefox like far less secure than chromium? its sandbox pales in comparison, for one thing. configuring trivalent on fedora-based distros is a good way to get the security benefits of chromium without all the adtech slop. anybody using firefox should consider the patches by celenity at https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix