Mullvad: mostly news. As an Independent who hates everyone I feel finding real life, agenda-free information really difficult, but I know where to look. I like to turn over a lot of rocks and its nobody’s business. Mullvad was born for this.
LibreWolf: all accounts/commerce in containers: EOS Forum, personal emails, banking, ebay, github, etc. A single browser for all accounts? Maybe that’s stupid..?
Chromium: work only, no exceptions
Does this have any merit? Or does it matter at all? I don’t know if what I’m doing is smart or just antiquated thinking…a relic of approaches past?
For me, I don’t run multiple browsers to isolate the traffic from each other, I do it because each browser has a different risk profile I want to manage.
The difference is what add-ons/extensions I run.
Zen: My main browser, I run a ton of privacy enhancing and convenience extensions. Many of which can read all site content.
Floorp: I use this for everything where I need to login(except forums). Here I have less extensions and the focus is on isolation. Keeping each site separate from each other.
Firefox: Banking and Healthcare. Here are run no extensions at all
Librewolf: This is connected to a permanent VPN proxy
Mullvad: I use a VPN browser extension so I can set my region arbitrarily. I use this mostly for watching youtube videos without google being able to track what I am watching.
Tor: I use pretty rarely but it is there when I need it
Brave: I use this when I want/need a Chromium browser for something
As you can see, most are Firefox-based. This is because those browsers give me access to full ublock origin and containers both of which I use heavily. Also, most Firefox-based browsers support auto-updating.
Firefox: Daily driver with EFF Privacy Badger, UBlockOrigin, & Facebook containers (I will likely swap FF for LibreWolf which has containers now that it moved off the AUR)
Vivaldi: The only chromium browser I can tolerate. Only used for when I need to configure my keyboard/mouse with Keychron Launcher (only works with chromium browser).
Firefox Main Profile (no VPN): Daily driver using containers for different websites, use cases, social media, banking, email, etc. and sometimes work. Pretty much every website I visit often is in a container, and some new websites are place in a throwaway container initially, depending on whether I trust it.
Vivaldi (no VPN): Work only.
Brave Main Profile (no VPN): Same as my main Firefox profile. But I’m looking to switch to Brave Origin. May do that in January.
Brave Second Profile (no VPN): Same as Vivaldi, but I mostly use Vivaldi.
Zen and Helium: Testing in case I want to leave Firefox and/or Brave for my main profiles. But with Brave Origin, Helium makes no sense anymore, and I really don’t think I’ll ever like Zen’s vertical tabs, so I may not reinstall them on my new computer that I’ll be getting soon.
FireDragon/Floorp: Same as my main Firefox profile, but I may uninstall FireDragon. I used to use FireDragon as my daily driver, but ended up switching back to Firefox in the last few months when FireDragon was transitioning from v12 to v13.
Lastly, I’m noticing that I’m using Firefox for more and more things, so I may just end up having Firefox for myself and Vivaldi and Brave for work, with Brave Origin for streaming.
PS: It’s been umpteen years since I’ve logged into YouTube. FreeTube, Anonymous VPN browsing, NewPipe, Grayjay, YT-DLP, jDownloder2, MPV, etc. have all made this possible.
I haven’t used bookmarks in perhaps a decade or so My bookmarks are completely empty.
But perhaps the use of a separate password manager has negated my need for it. The URL’s for various online accounts are all stored in there anyway and they’re what I’d trust when signing into online resources.
Oh, very few of my bookmarks are for accounts or forums that I’m a member of. Maybe a dozen.
I have wide-ranging interests and hobbies, so most of my bookmarks are related to products and product reviews, historical data, movies, essays, some YouTube videos on various subjects…things like that. I keep them organized by categories.
chromium always has to be specific use for me, too.
The reason I ditched Firefox was precisely because of LibreWolf’s settings—LibreWolf, despite popular opinion, has never been cumbersome at any site for me.
Fair. I usually go much further than Arkenfox/betterfox did underneath the hood. I considered those decent profiles, not great profiles; but I am no security expert.
@ddnn that is some radical separation. what’s your theory about that? would love to hear it
that’s interesting, too. A main browser and then chromium when there’s a specialized task. Decreases footprint for sure.
With international news I am all primitive just cutting and pasting large blocks of type into a translator (Dialect in the AUR–it uses a FOSS translator not google) and reading it that way. Cumbersome I know. edit/typo
It’s actually not all that radical. It’s just me having browsers that are basically backups/tests to/for my main browser profiles.
I used to use Brave all the time for work, but part of my work involved using Microsoft Teams. Occasionally, and eventually seemingly permanently, Teams decided to stop allowing me to share my screen, then eventually I couldn’t send messages - followed by them logging me out and not allowing me back in when using Brave. This started after I tested Vivaldi and logged into Teams with a different web browser (Vivaldi). Microsoft didn’t like that, so they made it so I could only use Vivaldi for Teams. Eventually, I got my clients to use Signal and ditch Teams. So, good job to Microsoft for driving their user base away.
It’s so stupid that they did that too because I had 2FA and everything to prove that I am me. But that doesn’t matter to them. All that matters is that you use the same clients/browsers and never switch.
Otherwise, Zen, Helium, Brave Origin, Floorp and FireDragon were either just for a potential move, or in the case of FireDragon, I moved to it from Librewolf, and now I just use Firefox with my customized version of BetterFox.
But since I basically only use Firefox for my personal stuff, Vivaldi for work, and Brave Origin for (occasional) YouTube and Streaming, I won’t reinstall the rest in a few months when I set up my new system.
Apart from the odd website and my work-related websites, Firefox with Betterfox customizations, profiles, containers, uBO, and other extensions is all I really need.
I feel finding real life, agenda-free information really difficult, but I know where to look. I like to turn over a lot of rocks and its nobody’s business. Mullvad was born for this.
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My bookmarks are completely empty.
