Hello friend of software freedom,
In December 2017, after trying FF 57 for the first time, I saw some hideous
things and I started to test various browsers myself, from privacy
perspective. I have shared some of my findings as bug reports:
Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424781
Chromium: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=795526
IceCat: I have reported this directly to GNU and FSF as it shows similar
behavior to Firefox (with a little less messages sent). RMS himself replied
and forwarded the message to one of the developers who then replied:
"I'll be working on more a more strict cleanup of those "features" for the
next IceCat release cycle."
FWIW I am using openSUSE Leap 42.3 (and interested in trying Trisquel).
Considering the results: It seems to me that the so called FOSS browsers
don't really respect user privacy and as also mentioned in the bug report to
Mozilla, I consider this violation of Freedom 0 as privacy is essential to
freedom. Unfortunately Mozilla seems not to care at all. Chromium developers
replied much more sanely and as a whole Chromium so far seems the most
privacy respecting browser (as per my tests, feel free to share your
results).
Also looking at most recent issues of Spectre and Meltdown - personally I
have blocked all JS in chromium. Firefox doesn't even have such setting.
Waterfox (supposedly a version of FF with enhanced privacy) shows exactly the
same result as Firefox in tcpdump. I am still willing to test other browsers
when I have time.
Currently I am also looking for RSS reader which won't load any JS. Akregator
seems to load web pages with embedded and playable YouTube videos (which
means it also loads scripts, 3rd party stuff etc). If anyone knows about good
privacy respecting RSS reader, please share.
