this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Privacy

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I installed the mull browser revently. People who are familiar with this will know that it's a fork of firefox android. It's hardened but I haven't noticed much difference b/w the two. Mull has a few visible tweaks like Https mode by default, strict protection etc. but I haven't come across other backend/not so visible changes. How is it different from firefox android?

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It does the canvas anti fingerprinting with it's letterbox style display... Is strict with cross site cookie denial. A few more differences. Check out mulls site. I found it pretty detailed in its explanations

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

True! I was shocked looking at my pihole logs and see how much Firefox phones home for that crap the other day.

For example: Firefox today on my pihole.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Can you turn off privacy features?

I still want most things for convenience, but the one thing I want to get rid of is telemetry and somehow I just can't seem to completely get rid of it with firefox (I've tried both nightly and default firefox)

So a browser that gets rid of all the telemetry and then allows me to enable other things that I want would be fine by me.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

No pocket 😛

Fennec is firefox without mozilla stuff and mull is fennec with arkenfox settings

I use mull as a daily driver. I'm happy with it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://privacytests.org/android.html shows firefox vs mull (and other browsers) for different privacy tests.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks, that really helped!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Its not visible lol, its in the about:config.

Only Firefox Nightly has that, so have fun hardening that manually XD. Firefox regular cant be hardened, and if you read the arkenfox user.js you know what stupid things this browser does.

Hardend Firefox out of the Box (Librewolf and Mull) are the way to go

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

That's a good list. But the poster was referring to Mull browser on Android

https://gitlab.com/divested-mobile/mull-fenix

Similar names, but very different projects

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Firefox is bloated with telemetry.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

The more interesting question is: how is mull different from Iceraven?

To me it seems both of them do pretty much the same.

Personally I started using Iceraven because of the addons.

Edit: Downloaded Mull because nobody replied with the info - Iceraven has WAY more available firefox plugins. (while seemingly having the same privacy benefits)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Interesting! It kinda disappeared from F-Droid which is a pretty big problem. But FFUpdater supports downloading it.

Now I wonder, whats the difference to Mull?

Nice Addon collection, even though mine is more maintianed (lol?)

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/collections/17446767/Fenix-Addons/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Even more important question we all need to answer is what's the difference between Iceraven and Waterfox. Could not find it anywhere

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Or even, mull vs. Librewolf. Still haven't found a good comparison between those 2

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mull is as close to LibreWolf as you can get. LibreWolf is desktop only, Mull is Android only.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

But I have mull on desktop... And it's in the Arch repos. We're talking about the browser, right?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you talking about Mullvad Browser? That is different than Mull.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

That is most certainly the disconnect.

I apologize, I am an idiot. I thought "mull" was short for mullvad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You are far from the first.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you post a link to the package in the Arch repository?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's the Mullvad Browser. I know that it's available on Desktop, in fact, it's only available on Desktop. OP is referring to the Mull browser, which has nothing to do with Mullvad VPN or Mullvad Browser. Mull is a fork of Fennec (Firefox for Android) created by DivestOS. It's basically Firefox for Android with arkenfox user.js and some other neat privacy tweaks.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh that's different, Mullvad browser is a cringe chrome browser, don't bother. Mull is an Android Firefox fork.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Mullvad browser is a cringe chrome browser

Uh, no. Mullvad browser is definitely not based on Chrome or Chromium. It's based on the Tor browser which is based on Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol do you know these apps? Both do the same but on the different platforms.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yes, I confused mull and mullvad, I'm an idiot, ignore me lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

No, I can't use my yubikeys in fennec or Mull.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

See browser comparison table here: https://divestos.org/pages/browsers

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

If you dont have differences, great!

Make sure to install Ublock and noscript. Noscript to whitelist javascript for every single website and block the rest, thats the only way to really get privacy.

Also "forget me not" can be used to whitelist cookies, and delete the rest.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It’s always a good idea to stick with pure firefox instead of using unknown browsers that may be discontinued abruptly in the future.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

You're right about being cautious that they might be discontinued, but you can always port them to another Firefox port. Also this is a fork from Firefox stable and applies patches to it, so not a ton of custom code needs to be done.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Not possible on mobile though. On Desktop I am working on Arkenfox-softening that modifies the arkenfox user.js and makes updates easier.