My practical approach to surfing the web safely
molily.deKnowing some folks that work on "major-browser-vendor" security in the era of Mythos-found-and-exploited vulnerabilities everywhere, the thought of running completely random untrusted Javascript on my machine has freaked me out to the point that I run NoScript on all of my machines now.
I've found NoScript actually very usable, as long as you allow yourself to be fairly liberal in marking domains "trusted." I only truly routinely visit a core 10-20 domains that require Javascript, and they're from "reputable" organizations (my bank, employer, etc.) so those all get marked "trusted" quickly and I don't worry about them going forward.
In the "long tail" of random things I click on from HN links, seeing a "You need to enable Javascript to view this app" message is actually a fairly good signal that I don't want to view that app (though you might be surprised how many websites are browsable comfortably---or even more comfortably!---without JS enabled).
One thing I wish NoScript supported was the ability to mark a domain as a "trusted page domain" in the sense of: "HTML served from this domain can load scripts from any domain" (rather than trust being assigned to the domain serving the script itself). Perhaps it has this feature and I just haven't found it.
I do the same exact thing, except I disable JavaScript for all sites by default in uBlock Origin.
Same experience as you, also: many sites actually work well enough without JavaScript, and the ones that do require it to display anything make me pause and ask if I truly want to give that site the privilege of running code on my computer. Majority of the time the answer is no.
> also: many sites actually work well enough without JavaScript
Some work better without JS. The most common are information-based sites with a paywall or signup or whatever. The JS loads some huge wall over the content. Bonus, no cookie popups or another annoyances, and most ads are loaded with JS. Popups are getting ridiculous.
Qubes OS is looking less crazy lately too.
If they have a systemD-less version I'd seriously consider using it.
On Qubes, everything runs in VMs, and you can choose many OSes for your VMs, including Devuan: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/devuan-or-other-non-systemd-tem...
See also: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/ultra-minimal-systemd-free-qube...
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/alpine-linux-template-non-offic...
https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/systemd-inclusion-in-qubesos/22...
The AdminVM is based on Fedora and has systemd, but it has no network and you you shouldn't run anything there. Unless you think that systemd is actively malicious and specifically targets Qubes, any vulnerabilities in it are not exploitable.
QubesOS recently had an escape-the-qube-and-escalate-to-root exploit
Which happened for the first time since 2006 (for the currently implemented architecture with VT-d).
Didn't [insert literally any distro/operating system] have a root exploit recently?
Omarchy did, and still does because they aren't going to fix it.
omarchy is a clown show run by racists. there's no reason to mention it in response to qubes os
Omarchy is the other one that made the HN front page
> Knowing some folks that work on "major-browser-vendor" security in the era of Mythos-found-and-exploited vulnerabilities everywhere
Is this a thing now? I hadn't seen any big browser vulnerabilities recently. Did I miss something? Or are the vendors not releasing horrifying bugs they found internally with AI fuzzing?
It's never clear what's "real" vs. marketing for the LLM companies, but Mozilla at least has made a big deal publicly about the "unprecedented" number of "latent security bugs" they've found using tools like Mythos:
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/privacy-security/ai-secu...
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behind-the-scenes-hardenin...
To be honest, I'm not sure how many (if any) of them have actually been exploited, but in any case, it seems like the cost to at least find a vulnerability anymore has really dropped dramatically.
I'm seriously strategizing how to best run a separate user-account for banking etc., to defend against a user-level compromise of my day-to-day stuff.
It seems like anything that involves sharing a desktop window (e.g. xhost tricks) is not really security worth the effort, I've got to at least stop block any malware that monitors the screen, clipboard, keystrokes that come after the phrase "sudo", etc.
I have a handy little script called `chrome-new` which I use whenever I want to browse one of those few sites that struggles with Firefox. It just starts a clean Chromium with a throw-away profile, then deletes it when I close the browser.
#!/bin/sh
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d /dev/shm/chrome-XXXXX)
chromium --user-data-dir=$TMPDIR --no-first-run --no-default-browser-check --disable-features=DefaultBrowserPrompt "$@"
rm -rf $TMPDIRIs there an advantage over just --guest?
Not sure - I have never used that flag! I like the idea of managing the profile dir myself, because then I know nothing will leak. For example, HSTS state persists across incognito, allowing fingerprinting. I don't know if --guest handles that differently (probably?) but this way, I can be sure.
I don't understand why author complains about Firefox performance. I use it everyday on laptop and mobile and I don't see the difference to the Chrome or Brave when I visit all my regular sites and all other I find on HN. She has to play HTML 5 games or something to observe such difference
I don't understand this common response.
I'm a former Mozillian and a lifelong Firefox user (continuously since Firefox has existed, at least). I know Firefox is slower. I can feel it and have felt it on every system I've ever owned, and am constantly reminded once every few months or weeks or so when I open up Chrome to check something and am confronted with how much snappier it is—even without an ad blocker, which I don't have installed because I don't actually use Chrome.
I know all this and I use Firefox anyway because I don't care.
What I don't do is go online and comment about how there's no difference when there is clearly a difference. Pretending things are otherwise comes across as some form of denial or delusion.
I just don't see the difference, as I said, visiting my regular sites is what I do on the Internet 95% of the time.
People clearly like lying… or just maybe their experience is different than yours for a multitude of reasons. I have absolutely no clear difference.
My practical approach is to have a microvm for firefox and a bubblewrap “jail” for a firefox instance that runs on the host. Of course, the config options mentioned here are good too.
This sounds interesting and useful. How do you set something like this up? Are there good tutorials to follow?
> Main browser: A restricted Firefox
Mullvad Browser[1] is an example of just that, ready to go for people in the real world who don't have the time or inclination to mess around with random extensions and `about:config` hacking.
Also surprised the blog author made zero mention of the importance of keeping your OS up to date. Its all very well having a patched and hardened browser but not if you're running it on a vulnerable OS.
For a while, I used a firefox extension called "Temporary Containers" which would, as the name implies, create a temporary container for each site you visit. Combined with specifying some custom rules for ones you want to open in a specific container, that was a very convenient setup. But the extension at some point corrupted my firefox profile and has been unmaintained for a while so I didn't try again. I am not sure what happened and it may have been the combination of extensions that was the cause of that. Sadly, the author passed away, if I remember correctly, and it's been difficult to find maintainers for the project so I gave up on that.
You can still install that extension but from the reported issues the functionality and bugs were increasing with every new firefox version. And obviously that setup only helped with the cookie aspects and not necessarily any security issues from javascript and so on.
Try either https://github.com/kintesh/containerise (unmaintained), or a maintained fork of it, https://github.com/max-dw-i/container-redirect -- both have a settings-setup that mimics exactly a temporary container for every site (i.e. those that are not explicitly defined in custom rules).
For Firefox I recommend Cookie AutoDelete 3.8.2 addon. It is possible to configure it to erase all storage (cookies, indexeddb, localSorage and others) after chosen time (default 15s) after changing/leaving domain. It has many other useful options.
Another good addon is ClearURLs 1.27.3 which clears suspicious parameters of query strings on everything what's loaded by page. It sometimes break sites.
Cookie-AutoDelete is effectively dead, for both Firefox and Chrome, as seen from the many Issues on its repo, e.g. https://github.com/Cookie-AutoDelete/Cookie-AutoDelete/issue... -- and hasn't been updated since 2022.
There's a supposed spinoff @ https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/auto-clear-site-dat..., but apparently it's not ready for widescale use (and it's not open-source).
Isn't that somewhat pointless if you don't also regularly rotate your ip address?
If you use Firefox sync, then your sync identity is leaked across all containers.
This makes you identifiable across containers and subverts the whole idea.
So don't use sync.
I see that you reported and described this behavior over at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2061493
Interesting. From the response at bugzilla it seems that the feature is built on top of "FF accounts" (which I'll have to look into) and that the browser communicates directly with the Firefox sync servers. Meaning that only Mozilla would know your sync identity across containers. Did I get that right? Whether that's a privacy concern is something that I'll have to think about. What's your take?
I remember this, looks like this submission got second-chance'd. (Times shown on comments may be inaccurate, known-issue.)
I use Vanadium on mobile and Brave on desktop–I think those are the best options. Brave is also a valid choice on Mobile because of the better adblocking.
trivalent is your best bet on desktop if you're on a fedora-based distro: https://github.com/secureblue/Trivalent
Librewolf (sometimes Palemoon) + Ublock origin to disable Javascript. Many websites work a lot faster as well.
Pale Moon? That doesn't even have sandboxing?
Why?
I just use Tor Browser by default a lot of the time.
Just run your browser in a non-persistent VM.
I just run a VM with linux running WINE so I can browse securely on Safari, and all of this is on an rPi I actually vampire tapped into the coax network of the local town hall.
Still feels unsafe.
What are the easiest ways of doing so though? I'm running Windows Sandbox on Windows, and MacOS has Bromure. What's the easiest for Linux? KVM?
> I’m using Firefox because it still has better built-in security and privacy controls than other browsers.
isn't firefox like far less secure than chromium? its sandbox pales in comparison, for one thing.
configuring trivalent on fedora-based distros is a good way to get the security benefits of chromium without all the adtech slop.
anybody using firefox should consider the patches by celenity at https://codeberg.org/celenity/Phoenix
I would disable javascript JIT, pdf renderer, graphical acceleration, svg...
And use chromium based browser (I preffer Brave Origin). Using firefox for "secure browsing" does not make much sense in 2026! Mozilla has different priorities! Firefox development is under financed for several years now, and Firefox has weaker security model!
Just run your browser in a secured VM and you won't have to basically kill the experience to be able to use it.
Aren't we in an era when you literally can build your own browser with everything just you need? I have no knowledge in browsers developement. But in my field it became often easier to make your own tool\app then trying to use third party and make it work for you
There have been recent attempts. Apparently not.
We're exactly in that era of insanity that someone will use agent drivel development to cobble together a browser from existing browser sources in exchange for thousands of dollars of compute. Will it be standards conformant? No. Will it have security issues? Yes.
How would you expect your AI to build you a more secure browser than Microsoft or Google could?
Are we? Build your own browser, and if you can do that, then we are.
I mean you might be able to if you squint hard enough but the experience of using it would be absolitely piss poor so no. Realistically speaking AI is not even nearly that good yet and buildong a browser is an absolutely huge undertaking