There is message for those of you in sibling thread!

https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/23650139

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

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 :)

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.

At least in most cases, the data is being leaked back to the developer and not third parties.

What is this based on? Why not see if that assumption is true¹? There’s quite a big difference in nature and quality here between them. This doesn’t really come through in the data aggregation put on display in the post but I hope more people will try to run this on their own. Zen and Mozilla are the only ones with significant (and it is significant) telemetry of their own at all between these while LibreWolf and Konform have 0 data going to the devs, for one.

The whole idea here is to be able to achieve more nuanced and accurate understanding so more educated decisions can be made and enlightening conversation be had. Not just keep rehashing the same memes we based on vibes and hearsay.

Was hoping more for answering questions or getting new input than shooting down uninformed takes 😅

¹: Well, staying inside the system we can’t prove that no sharing with third-parties is going on if we only see one domain involved. But that is not the case everywhere here. We can easily see when separate servers operated by multiple parties are involved by looking at the URLs and looking up the domain names. And then we can go look at what’s being sent to where.

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