I’ve seen a lot of discourse around having multiple browsers to compartmentalize or, at the very least, make it more difficult to fingerprint you.
I currently use these browsers at the moment for the following things:
Brave - browsing services I have an account on (eg. YouTube, Amazon, Instagram), accessing my other mail inboxes aside from Proton
Firefox (w/ uBlock Origin) - Proton services, more sensitive account portals (e.g. bank, etc.)
Mullvad - one-off searches and things that don’t need to be connected between devices (e.g. “how to fix this problem,” really anything I will close and won’t need to think about again after it’s gone, unlikely something like YouTube)
I also use StartPage/DDG as my search engine on all my browsers.
An ‘endgame’ browser workflow for me would be having really only two browsers. It’s looking like Brave & Mullvad, but I’m thinking it would be less convenient to access services like Proton on Mullvad since I don’t want to install my PW manager, or other extensions, on it.
I want to compartmentalize my browsing that balances convenience and privacy. My threat model is probably the same as the average person, but I’m willing to do more for privacy than the average person.
So my question is, how should I go about it? How can I make better use of Mullvad and clean up my compartmentalization (e.g. banking on Mullvad? is that even worth it?)?
If you use one browser to “login to services” you can use that browser to login to your sensitive services too. If a website you visit does not include any third party stuff (fonts, ads, analytics, …) and the website owner does not collect and share user data with a third party. No third party will know if you ever visited that website.*
If the website is especially privacy respecting it will even set the “no-referrer“ policy for links. So when you follow a link on that website, the website linked to wont know where you are coming from.
(* Yes your DNS provider and your Internet provider or VPN provider will know, but that can’t be influenced by the choice of browser or how you compartmentalize your browsers.)
Personally, I wouldn’t use more than two browsers (not counting Tor), so I would really just choose either Brave or Firefox for your logged in browsing, while Mullvad could do the rest.
However, Mullvad is currently working on a persistent mode, which could be a potential option in the future. Then you could use Mullvad Browser for everything if you wanted.
Yeah. I think I’m going to stick with Brave for logins & Mullvad for general searches. Although b/c I’m using Proton VPN for free, the VPN isn’t always consistent and sometimes I don’t activate it. Surely using Mullvad without a VPN isn’t too bad is it?
My biggest gripe with Mullvad right now is that I can’t use dark reader without increasing my fingerprint, so doing searches at night is honestly not pleasant.
As other people are saying, I think you can cut out one of the accounts browsers and just login to everything on one browser and keep Mullvad for random searches, particularly if even the sensitive accounts are still your “main” identity, if that makes sense. The one exception I can think of would be if you’re a journalist or whistleblower of some sort, at which point I would recommend confining those activities to a different device entirely.
I use a similar setup, Mullvad is my default browser for opening links and random searches, whereas Firefox is where I do my email, banking, shopping etc.
On mobile I use Firefox Focus for random searches and IronFox for accounts and PWAs. I wish the adblocking on Focus was a bit better, though, or if they allowed you to install Ublock Origin… If Mullvad browser released on Android I’d be overjoyed.
Compartmentalizing multiple browsers for multiple purposes is the way to go for me. However, I use all Gecko browsers (Firefox, LibreWolf, Waterfox, etc.), and harden them like Fort Dietrich, since I don’t trust Chromium anymore. Brave and Vivaldi included.
I’ve switched to this now. It’s smooth and easy to use. The only issue is that I can’t use dark mode on Mullvad without fingerprinting concerns, and the Proton VPN Linux app is not working on my laptop (which I use often and connect to public networks). So, I have just been using the Proton extension on Brave for now. I’ll have to figure out a way to fix the app or just cave and subscribe to Mullvad VPN.