Is there a configuration for this browser, or another micro-browser, which has anti-tracking, anti-social, adblock and flashblock built in?
Would be cool to store the history outside of the browser, in a kind of standard format. Im not sure if it is easy enough to extract firefox history from its sqlite3 db. It would also be cool to switch where to store history/activitiy very fast, for example "send to home computer" or save for later synching with your other browsing profile...
sqlite3 isn't that hard to work with, you know; for example, I only spent an hour or two writing a script to extract recently visited URLs from Firefox (http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs#browser-history) and I don't even know SQL.
- Uzbl: http://uzbl.org/ Haven't had much luck with this one, but it's quite interesting. A while back, there was some work into getting this to play nice with emacs (google: Ezbl)
At one point I used and loved Vimperator and then migrated to Pentadactyl, but ultimately got fed up with Firefox's bloat and memory management issues.
I'd recommend checking out Firefox Aurora (http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/) - Firefox is really looking great these day. The new native developer tools are coming along nicely and hopefully will prove more stable than Firebug.
There's an Arch Linux dev that maintains a custom repo with Aurora builds and matching Aurora Pentadactyl packages in the AUR, for those on the distro.
For a browser that seems to be built with security and privacy as top priorities, it seems to be missing some obvious features. How do you allow first-party scripts and cookies while still blocking third-party scripts and cookies? Does it support surrogate scripts like NoScript does, to deal with sites that actively try not to work when you block ads and tracking scripts? Where's the AdBlock-style blacklist?
we have another project, adsuck ( https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/adsuck ), that blocks ads via DNS proxying. it can be setup to proxy DNS requests for a single host, e.g. a laptop, or on a network perimeter, e.g. a firewall, and it works by using blacklists to map DNS requests for 'bad' sites to return a NXDOMAIN. this way the ad images and their associated js are never downloaded or executed. see http://rlwpx.free.fr/WPFF/hosts.htm for more info about the blacklists.
you're right to point out that there is not yet a way to separate 1st and 3rd party scripts, but the cookies are handled by the xxxterm.conf setting
cookie_policy = no3rdparty
there is no handling for surrogate scripts atm. i can say that i personally don't bother with sites that require advertisements for viewing but i can understand the desire to do so.
A blanket ban on third-party cookies or third-party scripts is not enough. You need to be able to specify which third-party domains are trusted. There are lots of decent sites that need to be able to load assets from a different domain in order to be functional, but which also like to load Google Analytics, or set cookies from Omniture (2o7.net). These aren't ads, but are still things I'd like to block.
Many sites also break if you don't load GA, hence the need for surrogate scripts. If you dismiss and don't try to support the secure use of sites that exhibit any of the above behavior, then your browser doesn't have anything to offer users that care about privacy and security. Privacy doesn't have to be the antithesis of compatibility.
DNS blacklisting is useful and has its place, but I would expect a secure-by-default browser to not load any resources from domains outside the one in the requested URL (like lynx) and to provide a simple way to selectively whitelist external resources for that domain only (like the RequestPolicy Firefox extension). That's one important omission from your otherwise impressive list of features that will probably make me stick with Firefox + Vimperator + RequestPolicy.
Lynx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) This is the most minimal browser I've ever used. It doesn't even have javascript. A lot of the web isn't supported on it due to the lack of javascript support.
Would be cool to store the history outside of the browser, in a kind of standard format. Im not sure if it is easy enough to extract firefox history from its sqlite3 db. It would also be cool to switch where to store history/activitiy very fast, for example "send to home computer" or save for later synching with your other browsing profile...