[GLLUG] Web Browsers

[Thomas Hruska]

On 3/3/2017 11:41 AM, Chick Tower wrote:
> I was planning to write a message telling you of my search for a new web
> browser after Firefox began sending so much telemetry that my dial-up
> internet access speed was cut down to a quarter or less.  Then this
> article showed up on LinuxToday.com
>
> http://www.zdnet.com/article/whats-the-fastest-linux-web-browser/
>
> You may recall that I complained about Firefox a few months ago.  Since
> then I've tried several other browsers.  I stayed away from Chrome and
> Chromium, since I'd like to avoid Google's attempts to collect my
> private information.  I tried two privacy-enhanced versions of Chromium,
> Slimjet and Iron, and another modified version of Chromium called
> Vivaldi.  These are pretty much covered in the article.  I also tried
> Midori, Qupzilla, Arora, and Rekonq, which use the webkit library.  I
> even tried some keyboard-driven browsers, Xombrero and dwb, thinking
> that being stripped-down browsers would make them pretty fast.
>
> Speed was my primary criterion, although stability and the proper
> display of web pages was also important.  I didn't use any of the tests
> SJVN did in the linked article, but differences in speed are pretty
> apparent over dial-up.  I'm happy with Firefox on my laptops when I'm
> someplace with a wireless access point, but it sucks over dial-up, even
> with as much of the telemetry turned off as I could figure out.
>
> The webkit browsers were unsatisfactory, either through lack of features
> or instability.  They weren't noticeably faster at displaying web pages,
> either.  The stripped-down browsers weren't faster at displaying pages
> and lacked even more features.  Of the modified Chromium browsers,
> Vivaldi was noticeably faster than any of the other browsers I looked
> at.  It has a lot of nice features I had never seen before.  All of the
> Chromium browsers use Chromium add-ons and extensions, of which I use
> only two, Ghostery and Vanilla Cookie Manager.  So I am a happy Vivaldi
> user now.
>
> I do use the text-based browser links frequently, just to read articles
> that I don't need any graphics for, like news stories.  That is the
> fastest way to browse the web, but there are many sites it doesn't work
> with.  For those interested, some other text-based browsers are lynx,
> links2, elinks, and w3m.  The latter can view images, although the
> layout on the page is messed up.

Third-party requests will chew up bandwidth like crazy.  You've got 
Ghostery but you might want to add uBlock Origin or AdBlock Plus to the 
mix as either of those will block whatever Ghostery misses:

http://cubicspot.blogspot.com/2014/03/why-i-run-adblock-plus-and-ghostery.html

You might also want to install an image blocking extension that will 
block images by default but let you click a button to download the 
images on a page.  A quick Google search for Chrome extensions turns up 
the "Block images" extension and a few others.

Lots of images and large HTML files will chew up bandwidth too.  I've 
seen uncompressed HTML files exceed 1MB on some sites.

Have you thought about using a mobile device/low bandwidth compressing 
proxy server like Ziproxy?  You would point your web browser at that and 
the proxy would make HTTP requests on your behalf, compressing nearly 
all of the data it sends over the wire.  You'd install Ziproxy on some 
sort of public infrastructure (e.g. a budget VPS like OVH or 
vpscheap.net).  A VPS adds some minor cost.  You might also ask your ISP 
if they provide a compressing proxy server like Ziproxy.  They already 
see all of your plain HTTP traffic anyway, so they might as well save 
you a few bytes.

To compress HTTPS traffic, you'll need to force a MITM attack to be able 
to compress the underlying data.

http://yalis.fr/cms/index.php/post/2014/01/23/Compress-the-mobile-web-even-further-both-HTTP-and-HTTPS

For maximum security, you'll want to set up your own trusted root and an 
intermediate certificate and then all HTTPS requests via mitmproxy will 
appear to be signed by your intermediate SSL cert.

http://cubicspot.blogspot.com/2016/12/setting-up-your-own-root-certificate.html

Maybe you can strike a balance between multiple technologies.

-- 
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President

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