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My practical approach to surfing the web safely

molily.de

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Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#11

Post by jerlendds »

steammaho wrote: post #2

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

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

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#12

Post by throw93947309 »

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!

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#13

Post by aftbit »

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

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#14

Post by wilkystyle »

pcfwik wrote: post #7

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 tr…

I do the same exact thing, except I disable JavaScript for all sites by default in uBlock Origin.

Same experience as you, also: many sites actually work well enough without JavaScript, and the ones that do require it to display anything make me pause and ask if I truly want to give that site the privilege of running code on my computer. Majority of the time the answer is no.

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#15

Post by gitowiec »

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

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#17

Post by gitowiec »

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.

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#18

Post by wky »

aftbit wrote: post #13

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 $…

Is there an advantage over just --guest?

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#19

Post by Gander5739 »

gitowiec wrote: post #17

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.

Isn't that somewhat pointless if you don't also regularly rotate your ip address?

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#20

Post by mitxela »

turpentine wrote: post #9
pcfwik wrote: post #7

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 tr…

Qubes OS is looking less crazy lately too.

QubesOS recently had an escape-the-qube-and-escalate-to-root exploit
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