policy-templates VS ungoogled-chromium

There is no such thing as a "known trusted extension" ever since they killed sideloading extensions and forced auto-updates. 10 years ago not force updating extensions was also a thing they moved behind a flag, and then just dropped.

Also - if you want to blacklist certain extensions from certain sites, you abso-freaking-lutely can already... see: https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/master/READ...

you want the `restricted_domains` field.

It gets worse - Mozilla is the fucking worst at checking submitted extensions. They tried to the play into the whole "app store" thing that Google/Apple were doing, but those are justifiable cost centers at those two companies in a way that just doesn't work for a player like Mozilla.

Mozilla's store checks for extensions are fairly pathetic. You can submit a near empty shell with excessive permissions, get approved the first time, then auto-update to a new release (which will deploy to users immediately thanks to auto-updates). That new version has to pass a battery of useless automatic SAST checks, which will happily highlight all sorts of things it doesn't like (it flags words like "hello" because it contains a curse word) but which won't do shit to check if you're hoovering up credentials, browsing data, tracking users, etc.

If you're unlucky, at some point in the next 24 months you'll trigger a real review from Mozilla and get caught.

To be blunt - I have 15 years experience writing extensions. I don't like Google. If you think Mozilla is better you're wrong.

You can do that with policy templates. Use the Discussion tab at the top of the GitHub page if you need help setting them up.

Policy Templates for Firefox

They very well could do this for a a company that requires really strict privacy and security, but unfortunately in its current state Firefox doesn't have nearly the corporate sysadmin-friendly tooling that Chrome and especially Edge do.

When I was tasked with implementing CIS browser hardening policies at a previous job a few years ago, this was just a matter of enabling some Group Policy template settings for Chrome and Edge, but for Firefox this involved distributing a prefs.js file to all the workstations. In any corporate environment it's very likely going to be point and click Windows admins that are implementing browser standards, who tend to be allergic to anything resembling code and are already used to using GPOs for just about everything.

Yes, Firefox does have GPO templates but it's not nearly as rich as Chrome and Edge. Edge has even more GPO templates than does Chrome iirc, Chrome already had a lot to begin with and then Microsoft added even more of their own on top of that.

https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/blob/v4.11/READM...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/configure-micro...

That alone already puts Firefox at a huge disadvantage for corporate deployment, the other thing that makes it even less attractive, even to companies where privacy/security is a huge requirement (like my previous job) is that Edge is already bundled with the OS, and is one less thing that needs to be manually patched. In high security corporate environments, just keeping things patched is always a huge task so it's very hard to convince someone that they need to put in more work to keep an extra piece of software patched (which is already very difficult considering how frequently browsers are updated). To make things even worse, just about all vendors will only support Chromium-based browsers for whatever SaaS they sell you, so Firefox is a nonstarter for getting support, even if it will work just fine 99.9% of the time.

For all these reasons, I lost the battle to keep Firefox around, which is a huge shame because of how much I love it and wanted to fight the Chromium monoculture. So I guess for a corporation to support Firefox despite how corporate-friendliness the alternatives are, they'd have to reaaaally want to.

You can see the relevant JSON code in the changelog. As I said, you can post a comment on this page to remind Mike to update the documentation for policy templates.

This GitHub repository has a Discussions tab where you can ask questions about deploying Firefox: Policy Templates for Firefox.

Check out the official documentation here: Policy Templates for Firefox. You can use the Discussions tab if you have any questions.

Cromite[0] is the best on Android, it's a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium.

Cromite has a desktop build, but it's a bit more experimental than the mobile build, so you can use Ungoogled Chromium[1] instead. Ungoogled is also a privacy-oriented open source patchset on top of Chromium. Check the beta flags to enable some more interesting features like getClientRect anti-fingerprinting measures (unfortunately breaks some React-based sites that go into infinite re-render loop).

Both of these browsers selectively include patches from Brave, but they are community-oriented builds so imo more trustworthy than Brave, which continues to package various shady anti-features and always will because it's backed by a for-profit company.

LibreWolf[2] is the nicest Firefox-based one for desktop, I think. It's pretty hardcore, though, I most only use it to visit mainstream social media sites.

I tried a bunch of the Firefox-based ones on mobile and none of them clicked for me. Cromite is just too slick on Android. Put the address bar at the bottom and off you go. Only downside is no online syncing of tabs and bookmarks, but meh. You can save all open tabs to bookmark bar in one hit then export your bookmarks, send the file through whatever E2EE channel you want to your other device and import then reopen them again.

[0] https://github.com/uazo/cromite

[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

[2] https://librewolf.net/

For those that like Chromium but want to remove any integration with Google, there's Ungoogled Chromium

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

If you're entirely partial to Chromium browsers, use Ungoogled Chrome https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

what about https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Firefox or Ungoogled Chromium (needs to update uBlock manually) in Incognito window with unchanged vanilla uBlock Origin with lists updated and no other plugins and without YouTube account. Works perfectly. Also FreeTube.

Ungoogled Chromium is a Chromium-based browser with Google services stripped out.

- Project and source: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

- Binaries: https://ungoogled-software.github.io/ungoogled-chromium-bina...

Using these sort of downstream patch set browsers is rarely a good idea. If it has multiple full-time developers from a respected org dedicated to it, then it can be justifiable (Tor Browser, Brave), but take a look at the gaps in time for these two pages:

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/rel...

https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/c/ch...

There's often days you're going without security patches. If you want a browser without Google tracking, Firefox is a much better choice.

While these screenshots use Google Chrome, they will also work on all 'Chromium' based web browsers, like Brave, Vivaldi, ungoogled-chromium, etc. Window's Edge is also compatible, though some the button locations are changed.

I would highly recommend the Ungoogled Chromium fork instead: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Entirely volunteer maintained, there is no for-profit entity behind it looking to do crypto referrals or ad swapping or anything like that.