After the whole Firefox debacle I’m trying to find a new privacy oriented browser for my Mac and iOS devices with bookmark syncing. Ideally an open source browser but I don’t think one exists right now that has both macOS and iOS versions. For example LibreWolf has a Mac app but no iOS app.
It’s not open source but Orion browser which exists on both Mac and iOS is the only browser I can find on Apple’s App Store that has “Data Not Collected. The developer does not collect any data from this app.” on its app store page.
And it has some interesting features like being able to run Chrome/Firefox extensions on iOS (including uBlock).
But I did some digging into Kagi, the makers of Orion and was turned off by them being an AI search company. Also, despite Kagi claiming Orion completely blocks fingerprinting I couldn’t get Orion to pass EFF’s fingerprinting benchmark tool; it always said I was unique no matter what settings I tried. And I’ve read some other questionable things about how Kagi operates its business which I won’t go into here.
I know there’s Brave but I’m turned off by the company’s connection to crypto and their inclusion of AI in their browser.
Maybe Vivaldi? Vivaldi however says they do some anonymized telemetry to collect usage statistics. And again these two browsers also aren’t open source either.
I’m afraid there are no good macOS + iOS browser setups? I’m hoping someone will correct me. 😬
edit: typos
AFAIK apple only allows their own browser engine on IOS, so there isn’t really a fundamental difference beyond having an account to sync bookmarks and history
While the rendering engine (WebKit) is the same across iOS browsers, WebKit is an open source project. To my knowledge there isn’t any telemetry baked into WebKit that reports back to Apple or whomever about user identity or behavior; tracking would have to be added by the developers making use of WebKit for their browser, I think? So in terms of privacy, it should make a difference which iOS you select.