Staying safe on the Web - what can I do to make my browsing more secure and leach less data?

Friends and family often ask me about technologies they can use to make their lives just that little bit safer on the Web. So to save me having to answer the same questions repeatedly - I thought I would write a blog post to just highlight the tools,apps and extensions I use to make it better than just connecting to the web and hoping for the best.

• Use a VPN whenever and wherever you are. There are so many good and inexpensive examples to use these days - there is really no excuse not too. I hear good things about these ones Mozilla VPN or Proton VPN. Make sure when choosing a VPN that the provider guarantees to not keep logs - very important. I use my own - but those should be a good ones. This will work with you PC, iPad, mobile phone. So you will be covered whenever you decide to get some free internet in a cafe  you have never been to before :-)
• Use Mozilla Firefox, Safari or Opera Browser as your main browser. I know Google Chrome offers many features, but can you honestly trust Google to not be constantly looking to take your data and use it? I certainly don't trust Chrome anymore.
• Install a good set of extensions to stop trackers and unwanted information leaching.
• Adblock Plus
• Ghostery
• uBlock Origin or uBlock Origin Lite (needed for Chrome now)
• DuckDuckGo privacy essentials
• Privacy Badger
• HTTPS Everywhere

• Don't use Google as your default search engine - switch to using DuckDuckGo or Qwant- they are an option on all modern browsers - just change the default. You will be amazed at how all the targeted ads suddenly stop appearing everywhere - because you will have stopped Google building a complete profile of you on the web.
• Never use Facebook or Twitter to log into another site - always select to create a new account with your email and a strong password.
• Use a password manager to ensure strong passwords on all sites you use. Three good examples are Bitwarden, Lastpass,1Password or KeepassXC. 
• Where sites allow it use 2FA - 2 Factor Authentication - on all sites. Not all sites do - but check and where you can implement it. There are many apps you can use,  

1. Bitwarden Authenticator,  
2. FreeOTP, 
3. YubiKey Authenticator, 
4. Protectimus Smart OTP, 
5. Lastpass Authenticator, 
6. Google Authenticator.

• Turn on Firefox browsers "DNS over HTTPS" to keep your ISP from snooping on your site visits - it's to be found in Settings/Privacy&Security/DNS of HTTPS - might have to scroll down a little to find it.
• If you must use Facebook - I recommend you don't - then install an extension that puts it in a sandbox container - Firefox FB Container. This will reduce the amount of data you will leach from that app. 
• Talking about Firefox containers - using these you can isolate all sorts of other apps as well , using this add-on.
  Firefox containers - Howto
  
• Also for facebook - look at this article and turn it off - How to delete Facebooks off page tracking of you web surfing. There are many other settings, turn as much off as you can.
• Always look to use an anti-virus products on your phones, tablets and computers - there are many to choose from - I use AVG.
•  Make regular backups - so if you machine does get hijacked you have always got access to you valuable files. This can be to a secure cloud storage area as well as local USB type storage disk. Do this weekly, and occasionally attempt a restore to some files to make sure your backups are good.
  
• Glasswire is a great tool for keeping an eye on your Windows and Android machines activity and is worth installing https://www.glasswire.com/. They promise a Mac version soon.
• Useful YouTube video on securing Google Chrome if you must use it https://youtu.be/9lIMSzrjUrU
• Switch on DuckDuckGo anti-tracking feature on your Android phone. duckduckgo-app-tracking-tool-beta-android-users
• With Spam a constant threat there are now useful email relays/proxies which hide your real email address and offer security and spam prevention for free. There are two good ones Mozilla Relay or use DuckDuckgo email service. Worth the time and effort to setup and use.
• Switch to using as many open source tools as possible to stop being held captured by the technology Oligarch's. A good example is use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft office. Europe is doing this and moving away from these tools, so now is a good time to take that step. 
• Use the DuckDuckGo Extension to Block FLoC, Google’s New Tracking Method in Chrome Stop FLOC 
   
  Specifics for AI
   
  With the rise of AI tools everywhere, it makes sense to know if what you are reading is AI generated or not, this add on for Firefox helps with that task.
  AI Tool checker
   
  Also with AI tools now being present in your browser of choice, you need to make decisions on how you use that additional functionality. Picking the right model to use is the first choice, I tend to use Mistral, as it is European based. You need to understand how it works on your system, what data gets sent where, and how you can control that. 
   
  It is also worth being aware that as AI models require more and more data, that your personal information and posts on the internet are going to be consumed. This has many problems, especially with images that can then be manipulated with AI video to produce all sorts of unsavoury output. The need for digital privacy has never been higher and the thought before one posts is now a necessity.
  Linked-In is about to start mining everyone's data on their site, so make sure you go into your settings and turn that ability off. Also check all of the apps you use , and turn off all that data mining where you can.
   
  If you want to use AI tools safely and local only to your machine, then follow the advice in this article I wrote earlier in 2025.
  Truth about AI in Spring 2025 
  
  
   
  

There are other add-ons to stop javascript - which can stop a lot of nasty attacks - however - it can make a huge difference to the way the web looks and feels and a lot of sites depend on it. So unless you know what you are doing , I would stay clear of that to start.

I  also use pi-hole, a network-wide tool to stop unwanted advertising in its tracks. I will be writing an article shortly on how to set this up on your local laptop or network server.

Here is the article on using a docker container to run pi-hole - but you can use a virtual machine or a dedicated little machine like a Raspbery-pi to achieve the same thing. It is incredible useful and effective to stop all sorts of rubbish coming into your machine and network.

Setting up Pi-hole locally using Docker

Updated: 15/7/2019 
Updated: 13/11/2019
Updated: 9/02/2020
Updated: 1/3/2020
Updated: 16/6/2020
Updated: 11/09/2020
Updated: 15/03/2021
Updated: 14/05/2021
Updated: 8/8/2022
Updated:4/12/2022

Updated:8/2/2025

Updated:20/5/2025 

Updated:24/8/2025

Update:22/10/2025 

Updated:7/6/2026 

Useful reading on the Topic :

• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Security Crash course

Chromium adds a slew of new security features to Chromium

While looking through the latest improvements to the latest daily release of Chromium I noticed a whole new page of security management.



Now I have been reading some very foolish and childish FUD around the web about how chromium calls back to the mother ship and tells Google about everything you have ever done and what you are currently drinking. I have have always know this is nonsense, and you can control exactly what goes where if you have more than two brain cells available to you. Just switching in privacy mode is just one such option open to you.

This new screen allows you to control what happens with your cookies,images,Javascript,Plug-ins and Pop-ups, that's right you can tell Chromium never to allow pop-ups. I know Firefox has had most of these for a long time, and they could be more granular, but it really is a great step forward in controlling what your browser can and can't allow.

One other nice touch is the ability to control your Adobe flash plug-in settings which also allows you to protect yourself against some of the new breed of Flash plug-in exploits.

Yes this is a great step forward and one warmly welcomed here.

Firefox performance is fighting back with 3.6

I have just installed the latest nightly build of Firefox - Namoroka - which up until tonight has failed to live up to the performance of Chromium, but boy has that just changed. It is the 64 bit version I have been testing on Ubuntu 9.10 beta, which is also a first for Firefox directly from their nightly download sites, and it would appear that there will be a native 64bit version of 3.5.4 as well.

They have been busy with the overall performance but page rendering would now appear to be as fast as Chromium, or of such a small difference to be of little noticeable difference.

Using the Sunspider test, which is just one measure, but one none the less, I got this for FF 3.6b1

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 2869.0ms +/- 2.4%
--------------------------------------------

but I then got this with Chromium

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
--------------------------------------------
Total: 781.8ms +/- 5.9%
--------------------------------------------

So the libV8 javascript engine with Chromium still rules the roost on this test, but there is more to a browsers performance than just this, and Firefox 3.6 is clearly demonstrating that.

It is definitely worth a look to see how it performs on your machine.

Mozilla's new Adobe Plugin version check

With the latest release of Mozilla Firefox there is a built in check of the version of the Adobe flash plugin you are currently using. As this is the most popular plugin, and virtually everyone will have it installed if they want to use Youtube etc.This is a massive step forward for browser security, and assures people that they are using the most up-to date plugins when they are using the most up-to date version of Firefox. The problem comes when you have people who don't understand or are unwilling to upgrade, but that is problem that every software provider faces, regardless of design philosophy.

Since the launch of Firefox 3.5.3, Adobe reports a huge increase in the numbers of people downloading updates, and current reports show this to be in excess of 10 Million, which is a lot of machines with a previously unpatched bug. It was highlighted by the fact that the latest version of OSX for the MAC - Snow Leopard - shipped with an old version of the plugin, which effectively made the machines vulnerable from a default new install.

I think Mozilla are to be applauded for this, and it is something all browser suppliers should look at implementing to help remove vulnerable software from peoples machines.

Mozilla are hard at work at producing some fantastic new add-ons

I have blogged before about the marvelous Mozilla Weave plugin that saves all your personal browsing data anonymously in the cloud, so you can keep your bookmarks always to hand.

What I have installed and started playing with today is Mozilla Ubiquity and I have to say this is also going to be an extremely useful addition for easy and productive browsing. It also allows you to leverage even more of the great apps that Google have out there, like calulator.

Simply search the add-ons for Ubiquity and it will install as it is a typical add-on format.

You start the add-on by typing the ALT key and the Space key togther. Now on my Ubuntu machine this keyboard shortcut was already taken, so I changed that for Gnome, and I was ready to go.

The add-on comes with a very useful tutorial, which I recommend you take to fully explore the sort of facilities you have at your fingertips.

This is going to be a great new addition to my web surfing armoury.

Chromiums latest build on Linux is the best yet

While testing the latest version, shown above, it has dawned on me that I haven't come across a site it doesn't like for at least two weeks. I'm sure there might be some but I haven't found one.

Today , I was happily surfing the web, and listening to the latest one day cricket international on the BBC web site using the Linux Adobe flash plugin, with 25 other tabs open and working well. It was seamless, and the experience was very pleasant.

I have noticed that the developer task manager is working properly, and the "stats for nerds" also now display a proper page. I also stumbled across a feature that I had been missing, which was the ability to grab a tabbed window, and move it's location on the list of tabs. This is a very useful feature, and is working really well.

I'm sure that a beta/stable version of Google Chrome for Linux can't be far away, as then we can really get stuck into bug tracking and reporting. I can't wait to see what other distro's will package this, especially with Google offering their own OS. I know that I will be getting it into the Eeebuntu repos, once it is stable. I fully suspect that the fur will fly for some, and a minority of die hard Firefox supporters will be flinging some mud, but the simply truth is, Chromium is significantly faster that FF on Linux, and once the extensions are added to Chromium, and they are on the way, then speed becomes the deciding issue. I'm also testing FF 3.6 and it is better, but still nowhere near as fast as Chromium.

I'm certainly not going to knock FF, it has served me well upto now, it's just that the open source wheel has turned, and there is a new kid on the block that just does everything faster. The Cloud + fast browser speed = good experience, it's as simple an equation as that.

I'm obviously an early adopter and have switched completely now, but I'm also convinced that once people test and experience the difference in performance, then they will to, regardless of extensions. To be fair FF has been in competition with many good browsers on other OSes for a while, but it's had the lions share of installed browsers for Linux, it now has some real competition, and they are going to have to improve or suffer the same fate as their nemesis on Windows.

Opera 10 release candidate for Linux

I have been been playing with the beta's of this release, and I have been very impressed, and this release candidate is of the same high quality.

It has several new features including turbo mode, faster javascript engine and enhanced tab thumbnail, look at the image above.

Get it here and give it a go, it's available as an RPM/DEB or tar binary package.

New security features in latest Linux Chromium Release

I have just updated to the latest build of Chromium on Linux - 4.0.203r23815 and the developers have been very busy, as it now includes the selection of the type of SSL security you wish to use via the nss security system, which is extremely important for secure access to the web, so not a minor endeavour.

Also the language support has been enabled and implemented, English only at the moment, but obviously with the framework in place it will be a lot easier to build in worldwide language support now.

I now the dev's are work on getting the bookmark sync working for the open-source community, which will also come in very handy for testing on multiple machines.

It just keeps on getting better.

Chromium has moved to version 4 on Linux

I noticed this morning that the version of my latest Chromium installation on Linux had moved to 4.0.202, wow that was quick ;-)

Having read the forums, it would appear the devs are polishing the version 3 series code ready for a stable release, which for Linux and the Mac I guess is going to be the beta code first, though I haven't seen any announcement on that.

There is no doubt that this code is getting better with each release, and I very rarely now use anything else.

There are now themes available for Chromium on Linux

The developers are about to offer a library of themes, but there are currently two that work with the latest build of Chromium on Ubuntu.

1) Is a snowflake theme
2) Is a funny army type theme

All you have to do is click on the links above and they will get automatically installed.

I have changed to the snowflake, and will continue testing with that.

Next release of Firefox - 3.6 Namoroka - is taking shape

Since Firefox 3.5 is now out of the door, I have started to play with Minefield again - the daily trunk builds - and the latest release of the trunk code which is marked as 3.6a1pre, is looking very interesting. There are several stated goals for this release, initial browser start speed improvements and also an enhancement to tab speed as well. Well during this very early phase it would appear on Linux that the start speed has definitely been improved, and even with a large number of tabs to open , the browser loads impressively quickly. Also once loaded the response is good, so things are moving in the right direction.

One of the add-ons I always used to install was Firefox showcase, which mimicked operas and chromiums list of open tabs in a window, but this now comes built into firefox 3.6 and it works well. It's not exactly the same, but an improvement over 3.5.

One of the other major objectives is to integrate the browser seamlessly into your operating system of choice, but there are few signs of that as yet. I feel this is going to be tall order with both Gnome and KDE offering different look and feel, but time will tell.

A rich environment for web based applications so that the boundary between the operating system and the browser starts to blur.This is obviously in the to-do pile, as I use a lot of web applications, there doesn't appear on the surface to have been many changes there yet.

Personalization & Customization will allow you to change theme and add-ons, without having to restart the browser, but again this is in the to-do pile.

There are many other improvements marked for this release, and they are not insignificant:
- Better UI (user interface) for uploading files.
- Common site specific preferences to merge with the site button.
- Button to “convert website to application”.
- Implementation of Aero Glass and Aero Peek.
- File management capabilities (move, copy, delete) to be added to the download manager.
- New tab page (we’ve already seen the Cognitive Shield tab concept).
- “about:me” to offer web browsing statistics.
- Identity management.
- Firefox for Mac will use the OS’s native spell checker and will get Keychain and AppleScript support.

You can get more information here :Firefox 3.6

Chromium on Linux changes continue apace

The latest installable version from PPA, today shows a lot of changes in the search engine selection and editing, and the options tab has now been populated under the "Under the Hood" section. The bookmarks manager is now working correctly from the right had selection menu, without having to use the CTRL-B keyboard shortcut.

I think there is no doubt that the team are pushing for a late summer Beta release with a formal release coming in the autumn, as this browser just get's better with each development build.

If you haven't tried it, then I would recommend having a look, as when the beta is released with plugin support, it is going to change the browsing experience on Linux for ever.

A funny thing happened on my way to web

I have been testing Firefox 3.5 and Chromium now for a while, and it dawned on me today that I'm using Chromium more and more, even though it is missing some plugins and options. I started to wonder why this might be, given that even in the developers eyes it is a very early release. The plain truth is the speed. I know some sites just don't render properly, like Vaughan-Nichols Linux blog, but I'm prepared to put up with that, because it just flies along. I use it for Gmail, Google reader , Google analytics , my blog, many forums, the BBC and it just works so much faster that I'm prepared to put up with it's foibles.If I do hit an issue I know I can always fall back to Firefox, which is normally the case when I want to watch something with Adobe Flash. This however will disappear the moment Chromium supports Adobe Flash, and we are not now talking many months away from that happening.

The Mozilla community have plenty of time to face the performance issues of Firefox on Linux before either Chromium or Google Chrome are out of the door, but they really are going to have face that daemon ;-)

The issue you see, is that on small power computers like Netbooks, every CPU cycle counts, even more so when the ARM based babies hit the streets, and Chromium with v8 is cutting the mustard now, and I can see many distros. , including the one I help with , Eeebuntu switching to Chromium simply for speed reasons.

I have every confidence that the Mozilla community will step up to the plate and address the issue, as version 3.5 is a big improvement over 3.0, and I it will be interested to see how 3.6 and eventually 4.0 shape up, but they have some real competition now and the Microsoft type complacency just won't be good enough.

If Google delivers on the rumours of a version of Android for the Intel Atom and the ARM processors, then they are going to be pushing Chromium very hard on all platforms, but especially there own, which is Linux at it's heart. The pressure on features like audio, video, Adobe flash, and ogg will be relentless and they have within this development community the talent to deliver these improvements. The pressure to improve these is only going to increase.

These are very interesting browsing times, and the only people to really benefit are the surfers.

Chromium browser config files in Linux

After looking for some time , and poking around in the bug/discussion forums I have found where currently Chromium stores it's variable information, information like stored cookies,url history and option settings. It can be found in your home directory under .config - the full stop shows it to be a hidden directory in *nix. Under there you will find chromium and google-chrome, if you have installed both. In the lower directories you will find a selection of sqlite, JSON and text files which are all very obviously named. This is very useful during my testing to check the database configs and what xml/sql is being written out. It has also given me a chance to get better acquainted with sqlite, which is a great embedded database tool, and worth the effort to learn.

Why there is no .chromium directory is not obvious, but I'm sure there is a reason. Firefox very neatly stores all it's workings under the .mozilla directory, using the same techniques and that works well.

Chromium also uses the .pki/nssdb directory for it's secure certificate storage if you need to have a look at those. After reading several post's it would appear that there is an attempt for the projects to share this database, but time will tell.

There is more information here:

Chromium.org

Firefox 3.5 release candidate 1 is available

You will notice there is no mention of beta now in the about screen

Firefox 3.5 rc1 - get it here

Now as I'm still using using a 3.5 pre build, the developers may well be looking for another release candidate, as RC1 is dated 12th June, and my 3.5pre has just been update to a build on the 13th, but that could just be post launch development for the first patch release. The next few days will confirm this, but whatever the case, the release of Firefox 3.5 , with all it's great new features is now extremely close.

I also noticed on the download page that there is a Mac version and a Linux version, but I could not see a windows version, so maybe there is some development going on to squash bugs on that platform.

Playing with Firefox 3.5 beta 5 , which wasn't meant to be

I have been installing the latest alpha and beta builds of firefox 3.1/3.5 since they became available , mainly for testing for eeebuntu, but also to see what is coming down the pipe and looking for speed improvements for on the Linux platform. Well , it has been faster since the early nightly builds, and has been showing improvements from each new installation, even with the version of Ubuntu being upgraded underneath it.

Well I was under the impression from all the development feeds that there was not going to a beta 5 , and it would be an RC after beta 4, but this post is coming from a nightly build of 3.5 beta 5.

Firefox 3.5 beta5 pre

The developers must have found a few more major bugs, although as yet after much testing I have yet to find any show stoppers, the only thing I find is that it does not shut down properly, and you have to force the quit. This is certainly not a big issue for me, as I very rarely shut down the browser, and always suspenf my lappy these days.

I have also been following the latest alpha builds of Chromium, but have noticed that it has not been building for the last few days, so it is obviously under going a considerably amount of development at the moment. I can't wait until it goes alpha, so I can start testing it properly.

Getting Mozilla Fennec to work through a proxy on Linux

I have just downloaded the latest version of Fennec to have a look at the latest Mozilla mobile offering to run on Linux. Now as my machine sits behind a proxy, I had to make the following changes to the preferences file at the command line, as I couldn't find a way to do this through the UI.

Basically all you need to do is add these lines to the following file, and then re-start Fennec

nickh-desktop:~/tmp/fennec/defaults/preferences$

I added these lines to the bottom of this file:

pref("network.proxy.backup.ftp", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.backup.ftp_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.backup.gopher", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.backup.gopher_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.backup.socks", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.backup.socks_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.backup.ssl", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.backup.ssl_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.ftp", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.ftp_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.gopher", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.gopher_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.http", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.http_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.no_proxies_on", "localhost, 127.0.0.1,192.168.54.56,wiki,192.168.55.130");
pref("network.proxy.share_proxy_settings", true);
pref("network.proxy.socks", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.socks_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.ssl", "192.168.1.2");
pref("network.proxy.ssl_port", 8080);
pref("network.proxy.type", 1);

Now it works a treat, though with a few graphic issues, but at least you can see what the developers are upto.

Nick