Nice try, NSA

Hi dmitry,

I suggest committing more often and in smaller chunks. Makes the repo a lot more accessible for outsider,s and reduces risk for stuff like this, which I assume is not supposed to be committed?

Or further favourable: Konform Browser.

Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser also worthy mentions.

TY! Would be cool with your feedback if you decide to try it out. And feel free to share around :)

The readme lists some of the motivations as well as distinguishing differences with LW specifically. Though the latter is a bit out of date by now as we’ve further diverged (gaps should be captured in by release notes, which is probably best place to read up on project RN).

What benefits are there for you? IDK, I don’t know you or your needs and priorities! There are a lot of possible different answers to that. Also I’m a dev not a salesperson or influencer 😅

Why not give it a spin and let us know about pros/cons? :)

Separately, this is still relatively early days in public life of the project and I don’t want to say “trust me bro” too much but aside from the actual differences between browsers themselves, we take the supply-chain side seriously and aim to keep a tight ship delivering new security patches from upstream on time while minimizing breakages for users. Since this is built without pinning on past achievements or identity, it will still take time (years I guess) to build track record and make this apparent.

See above comment

All info on that site is several years stale and the site itself is unmaintained (last update 2022; git repo permanently archived 2024). Many of the details are not reflecting current state of things and this page is not a good resource for comparing browsers in 2026 (except as inspiration for replicating their methodology¹).

Konform Browser is to my knowledge the only up-to-date webextension-capable browser today with literally 0 phone-home / background connections under defaults, and no telemetry or other superfluous undesired activity ever. (disclaimer: am dev. I’m certain it would be ranking as top if such a ranking was made today. Come @ me ;))

¹: Separately recently published container-based flow for doing this kind of analysis and doing similar comparison. There are some basic results and comparison included in readme but would be cool to see someone take it to the next step, drill deeper, share more exhaustive and educative results, present it in a format more digestible for non-techies (whether using this setup or something different).

What piece of software are you talking about ?

Azire in particular.

Azire what? They’re a Wireguard VPN provider with a web portal.

I guess same confusion as here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/23696262

You give the impression that you are talking about the VPNs when you are actually talking about smartphone apps…?

What isn’t free software…?

I think you should make it clear if you are talking about VPN services or client-side apps here. If they provide normal standard protocols like Wireguard and OpenVPN, they can be used without having to install any provider-specific apps.

Regardless of provider it’s generally preferred to use third-party software to connect. VPN providers that don’t even have their own apps don’t qualify as good for you either?

Demanding the whole stack be FLOSS is a bit silly in this context. None of the ones you mentioned open-source most of their backend systems either AFAIK.

I think you should do your homework better before you speak so widely and absolutely dismissively with such claim of authority. It is not helpful.

Food for thought: By consistently following a strategy optimizing and picking the optimal product/service based on cost/benefit, you will end up on the same one as everyone else doing the same thing. From a practical perspective this leads to winner-takes-all and centralization. Whoever is the underdog today becomes the Google or Cloudflare of tomorrow and we’re back at square one. From a philosophical perspective, did you really make a choice? Or did “the market” (of which you are also part) decide on your behalf? A healthy market needs at least thousands of mail providers, not 5 or 10.

Obviously same thing goes for basing your pick on brand perception, picking the most popular or recommended one, but without the benefit of knowing you’ll actually get the better service.

Can free will exist among economically rational participants in a market? There can be some power in knowing you chose whatever you did based on factors other than cost-performance or popularity. Sometimes the optimal choice can be suboptimal.

And why not self-hosting your inbox? Hard to beat from privacy standpoint. It really doesn’t have to be as hard as they say. Even if you don’t go full homelab right away: Some providers are accommodating and make it easy to gradually or partially self-host by offering open standard protocols. Others make it really tricky and steer you hard into their app ecosystem. So how straightforward it is to use your own local third-party mail client is a good consideration even if you don’t intend to self-host anything else anytime soon.

Centralization and monoculture is a mistake.

In case it swings your judgement either way, Njalla is run by one of the three Piratebay founders.

One thing to keep in mind as new is that “VPN” is a technical term with pretty clear meaning among the technical people but it has a very fuzzy meaning in marketing and branding. Referring here to “VPN apps” that may just be a local DNS relay (ie: it will only tunnel and filter your DNS requests; all your actual traffic still goes through your normal connection as clear as always). Oftentimes, it’s what we would call a proxy. Android has not at all helped here.

In either case, yes, you can usually chain things. What if any benefits you get from that depends on both technical specifics (which protocols) and your circumstances and threat model.

For example, if we consider only Wireguard (one of the VPN protocols Mullvad offers).

No VPN/proxy: Your ISP sees everything

1 proxy: ISP sees that you are connecting to proxy but not what servers you’re actually talking to. VPN provider now sees everything instead.

2 proxies: Proxy A sees your encrypted traffic to Proxy B. Proxy B sees all your traffic but doesn’t know where you are.

3 proxies: Congratulations, you have manually built a shitty onion circuit (Tor works like this)

Mullvad has their own “multi-hop” feature which chains two Mullvad nodes but i have to question using that strictly for privacy reasons, considering it’s by the same provider and the ports make it predictable from the ISP.

Grumpy ken thinks “Just use Foo” meming is promoting mindless use and I think should therefore be discouraged. Even in jest I think this affects us subconsciously to feel more comfortable with not thinking deeper for ourselves. Even if X is the right one. “Use Foo already!” is nicer~!

If I may illustrate:

Use Konform Browser¹ already!

¹: Disclosures: Am dev; is LibreWolf fork

Konform Browser is more recent Firefox (actually LibreWolf) fork which goes even further in debloating, removing “AI” functionality and disabling remote connections. It’s based on Firefox ESR (like GNUZilla IceCat).

fedi thread

If you have concerns about the telemetry and browser metadata privacy parts of AI integrations, I think Konform, IceCat, Waterfox and Mullvad Browser are a lot more relevant than Zen…