Knowing 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.

https://noscript.net/

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.

Separate account stops keyloggers reading your banking password, sure. But does it stop a compromised kernel or GPU driver? Session isolation assumes the attacker stays in userland. What's the threat model where account separation actually holds?

"Trusted" list grows forever, nobody prunes it, six months later NoScript's just uBlock with extra steps and a false sense of security. Seen it happen to every "curated allowlist" that touches prod too.

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 $TMPDIR

Is there an advantage over just --guest?

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.

Minor thing: "slower" and "snappier" aren't really about raw JS engine speed (Firefox's SpiderMonkey benchmarks fine), it's usually paint/scroll jank and process model overhead. Different bottleneck, same symptom. Doesn't make the complaint less real though.

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.

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/browser

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.

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.

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?

This tracks with what's been written on browser fingerprinting more generally — container isolation only helps at the network/storage layer, but any authenticated account you sync into becomes a stable identifier that ties everything back together. Mozilla's own container docs mention this caveat, though it's easy to miss.

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.

https://grapheneos.org/usage#web-browsing

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

Article about safe browsing, five different comments about custom sandbox setups. Checks out.