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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

#41

Post by pcfwik »

pull_my_finger wrote: post #37
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…

> Knowing some folks that work on "major-browser-vendor" security in the era of Mythos-found-and-exploited vulnerabilities everywhere Is this a thing now? I hadn't seen any big browser vulnerabilities recently. Did I miss something? Or are the vendors not releasing horrifying bugs they found internally with AI fuzzing?

It's never clear what's "real" vs. marketing for the LLM companies, but Mozilla at least has made a big deal publicly about the "unprecedented" number of "latent security bugs" they've found using tools like Mythos:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/privacy-security/ai-secu...

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behind-the-scenes-hardenin...

To be honest, I'm not sure how many (if any) of them have actually been exploited, but in any case, it seems like the cost to at least find a vulnerability anymore has really dropped dramatically.

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#43

Post by Batman8675309 »

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

How would you expect your AI to build you a more secure browser than Microsoft or Google could?

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#44

Post by Semaphor »

cxr wrote: post #35
gitowiec wrote: post #15

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

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…

People clearly like lying… or just maybe their experience is different than yours for a multitude of reasons. I have absolutely no clear difference.

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#46

Post by Batman8675309 »

throw93947309 wrote: post #12

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!

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

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#47

Post by solstice »

Grimeton wrote: post #16

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.

I see that you reported and described this behavior over at 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?

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#48

Post by aftbit »

wky wrote: post #18
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?

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.

Re: My practical approach to surfing the web safely

#49

Post by mitxela »

xyhhx wrote: post #39
mitxela wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Omarchy did, and still does because they aren't going to fix it.

omarchy is a clown show run by racists. there's no reason to mention it in response to qubes os

Omarchy is the other one that made the HN front page
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