Looking for Privacy-Oriented Open-Source Android Browsers
I’m looking for a privacy-focused, open-source Android browser. Here are some options I’ve found:
- IronFox
- recommended by LibreWolf
- Fennec
- no repo
- Waterfox
- Vanadium
- only available on GrapheneOS
- better security
- iceraven
- most stars
- bromite
- no longer maintained
- Bromite has a fingerprint randomization and Vanadium doesn’t. But Vanadium has better security if you use Graphene. So yeah, for privacy Bromite might be better
- cromite
- Bromite fork
- brave
Is there any other browser out there that fits this criteria? Is there an even better choice? I’m particularly interested in ones that focus on privacy.
EDIT:
- in terms of popularity, privacy and functionality I guess the best choices are iceraven and cromite
- iceraven based on firefox
- cromitebased on chromium
few questions
- What is the difference between IronFox, Fennec, Waterfox and iceraven?
Just use F-droid and search for Fennec browser there. Or my preferred way is using Obtainium and manually searching for the version on GitHub, latest right now is 139.0.4
in fdroid it gives "The upstream source code is not entirely Free " in the description. Does this mean the project is somewhat semi-Open-Source?
It’s complicated but F-Droid flags software that may have parts in it that are not entirely free, fennec is a fork of Firefox and within the source code F-Droid is finding that there is something that isn’t totally foss. I suggest using obtainium ( look for it in F-Droid) and find the GitHub version of fennec.
Sincere thanks! but it seems IceRaven is better, I guess im going to go with that
I installed iceraven on a new device a few days ago and I had to turn off mozilla data collection during the set up process.
This could mean it’s less private right? Then What is the difference between IronFox, Fennec, Waterfox and iceraven and which one is the best to use in terms of privacy?
I normally use ironfox, but honestly I don’t really have the technical knowledge to know which one is better. I use iceraven for some stuff because it let’s you use desktop firefox extensions. With ironfox I just use ublock and noscript, I don’t want any extra stuff that can leak data or assist in fingerprinting my browser.