Find out for yourself!

https://codeberg.org/dialhome-study/browser-network-insights

Usage details for running locally under “Testing procedure” -> “Basic test environment usage”

Previously posted on this community here: https://lemmy.ca/post/59519788

I prefer my devices without any malware at all but you do you I guess.

you’re data is safe with small hackers

wat

Yes let’s make sure everyone’s on the exact same provider. What could possibly go wrong. “Just use X” bandwagonning is shortsighted and lazy.

Or factory reset and then don’t install SmartTube. Fool me once?

Would be cool to hear how it goes if you do!

Dev here! Thanks for your interest!

Aw. On Artix, it wants to pull in wayland. No thanks.

Hm, I guess you’re just running text mode browser on that machine…? On Arch the wayland package is pulled in as transitive dependency of the gtk3 package. I don’t believe it will actually be loaded at runtime. However, I think that gtk3 might not be a hard dependency at all anymore (it used to be for Firefox in the past so this might be a leftover that konform inherited).

If you’re comfortable with makepkg I could suggest trying the konform-browser-bin AUR package and simply remove gtk3 as dependency from the PKGBUILD, run makepkg -si and fingers crossed that might work. More details in konform-browser/Arch repo, where contributions are also welcome. If you go the source route, see the note about profiling without wayland.

EDIT: OK I took a look and unless Artix is repackaging some core packages, I don’t see a way to make it work on Arch at least: xorg-server depends on libglvnd depends on mesa depends on wayland. Among others. Are you actually able to run an X server at all without having the wayland package installed? Or is thsi for headless use without any graphical environment…? Curious about the use-case! You can also try the binary tarball or just tar -xfing the arch package and invoke the konform binary directly.

Aw. https://gpo.zugaina.org/Search?search=konform no ebuilds on any listed overlays for Gentoo yet.

FWIW, it’s not planned at the moment but here’s the issue currently tracking Gentoo packaging: https://codeberg.org/konform-browser/source/issues/9

Appreciate the links!

And the option “Always show scrollbars” enabled because I have not found the preference to do it through the configuration file.

The labeling makes it less obvious but that maps to widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled=false so also part of Konform upcoming update :) In general I find the quickest way to identify the mapping of a UI configuration and the about:config key is to:

• launch a clean profile
• open about:config
• click Show only modified preferences
• open about:preferences
• change the thing
• tab back. what’s new?

BTW, widget.non-native-theme.enabled is a no-op since the direct GTK integration was removed a while back: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1726283#c4

You know, I think we should do at least something about those scrollbars¹ too. Not sure how close this is to what you prefer but hopefully a more sane default with more traditional fixed-width scrollbars should be part of next release. In general aiming to keep subjective and aesthetic UI tweaking to a minimum but I think the usability argument supports this one at least until anyone voices a different opinion.

So ty for that suggestion and also thank you for the warm feedback you left on the repo! :3

¹: Not only are they thin; they change the width dynamically when hovered and overlay on top of content. The potential for misclicks is not great.

In case you want to try this for yourself, adding container and running test for Waterfox should be about same as for Floorp that I wrote about here. Then you can really see what’s going on and reason about the difference when you see the URLs and stuff.

BTW the purpose of the report section here isn’t “look at my numbers and take my word for it” but “here’s some examples of things we can look at with this”. Please keep in mind both the Limitations section and that it’s intended as showing one way to easily and independently compare browsers yourself. Just reproducing the examples shown and then scrolling through the .har files JSON is a great start. Of course, me and I assume others would be very happy if you want to share anything that comes out of that so that we can bring people up together. I’m sure there’s a lot more useful insights to derive even with a small and scoped testing protocol like the one in article and wouldn’t mind input of any nuggets other people come up with :)

What are you curious about with Dillo And Netsurf? Isn’t it safe to assume at this point they will both be 0 across the board for all the queries in the report?

I think we need a different testing protocol for them to be interesting to include. AFAIK they don’t have add-ons that could be interesting to test either? Do you have any suggestion for step(s) you think could be added to the test in order to make those meaningful to include? Or is my assumption about Dillo and Netsurf out of date?

Oh, thanks for reminding me of Trivalent, I realize now I’ve come across it before but totally slipped my mind. If/when testing for chromium in place I think this can be interesting to sample next.

Assuming you mean the Mullvad extension (which is installed by default in MB) and not the Mullvad VPN app (which also exists but never came close to these machines) :)

That will indeed likely make a difference on Mullvad Browser numbers. However for now I’m not changing the “keep addons at stock defaults” invariant or the test matrix might get really out of hand… Should we disable uBlock Origin in LibreWolf? How about uBO or NoSccript in Mullvad then? Konform Browser loads uBO but only if its apt package is installed; should we do that? What happens when we try to explicitly opt out of everything under Preferences in Firefox? I guess the last one is something to actually consider but for now not touching the addons.

(Would be super cool if anyone else tries this out and reports back though! The compose should hopefully be straight forward and easy to get started with if you are on Linux and have podman available. The report mentions it TL;DR we had to work around the oBO install in LW not properly utilizing the proxy (?) like this and I think same approach could be used to Uninstall Mullvad extension from Mullvad Browser and prevent it from even loading)

Daily-driving it now. I think it’s great. If you’re somewhat familiar with the landscape otherwise I think readme explains how it’s different and why. If you don’t mind losing out on some "safety"¹ and latest upstream features² for the sake of a more stable and predictable base, not having reliance on proprietary integrations or even internet, and really removing all non-essential network integrations, then definitely worth a try!

¹: A surprising amount of people think (or at least write online) that a browser that doesn’t block user requests completely aligned with the Google SafeBrowsing blocklists is unsafe and that doing those syncs is an essential feature. If you think this is the only safe default option in 2026 I’m sorry but please consider uBlock Origin. See how opinions on who to trust can affect what “most secure” means. Konform Browser removes many assumptions of trust. But not all; Everyone still comes with an assumed PKI after all and there exists a default for DNS.

²: Since it’s ESR base it means new feature updates from Mozilla ~yearly instead of ~monthly. Still receiving security updates on the rapid schedule. No AI features out of the box.

There can still be winners, the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s just that we have to engage a bit deeper than a quick scroll and a oneliner to figure it out¹ than that.

they’re all doing differently privacy impacting things, but there are no “winners”.

The difference matters. Looking into the raw URLs and bodies involved is enlightening. Apart from that, which other queries can we run with jq (or other tools) can we add to the post to add more useful dimensions?

¹: The answer might be different for each of us and depend on what we’re doing at the moment. Different situations might call for different browsers.

I don’t think the data supports that. I’m curious what makes you single it out. Mullvad is in the top-tier but it is not alone (or clearly #1 - like the post gets into - it gets nuanced and I think any attempt at general objective “top 5 ranking” will be reductive to the point of being misleading or plain wrong. So I’m not trying that here). Read again? :)

For example of nuance displayed in results:

### Number of requests
119 firefox
81 firefox-esr
0 konform
7 librewolf
30 mullvad-browser
62 zen-browser

Oh and I forgot to mention, we have an Arch repo now with prebuilt bin package too. If you add the repo and pacman -Sy konform-browser-bin, then it will upgrade for you on future pacman -Syu when there are new versions published.

For trying out such a new project I guess you might still want to do the more manual route in the beginning but if/when you feel it’s earned your trust now you know <3

Thanks for checking in! Did you try importing the Release PGP Key listed under the release already? ^^ Maybe it’s a bit easy to overlook in the release notes but it’s right above the debian installation. There should be a pinned comment on that on the AUR package pages already.

If you save key to file on disk:

$ gpg --import ./konform-cb-ci.pgp

Then it should show up with that Key fingerprint when doing gpg -k after.

Please let me know still having issues

Someone asked me about donations. There is no way to directly fund the project today (TBD) but if you have cash to spare then:

• Codeberg e.V. providing supportive and enabling infra and a point of collaboration for growing part of FLOSS ecosystem. This isn’t free.
• EFF hopefully doesn’t need an intro here
• noyb.eu
• Tor Project
• The maintainer of some other FLOSS software you care about

Nice, I hope it lives up to expectations!

Oh and one more thing on the overrides: There are a couple of prefs flags that exist in one of Konform/LibreWolf but not the other mostly due to being based on different FF versions - so in case you have some particular override not being effective, I’d first check that it’s not just a case of differences between FF versions 140-147. Not expecting that to come up in practice and setting non-recognized prefs should be harmless, but knowing this might save some head scratching in case you have an extensive overrides config with recent additions.

Looking forward to any feedback you may have <3

Low-effort snark.