Vanadium & F-Droid

Now lets set up a browser with privacy in mind, we will use Vanadium. Vanadium is our Chromium based browser that comes build into GrapheneOS with all the security features that you’d need. The browser is frequently updated and is a strong choice and therefore if you fully follow this then you will be using Vanadium. If you want to use FireFox or Brave or something else entirely, do that. But in that case you will need Aurora store. What we need to do is to:

          • Open up Vanadium.
          • Click on the three dots in the upper right corner.
          • Click on “Settings”.
          • Click on “Privacy and security”.
          • Click on “Third-party cookies” and make sure it blocks third-party cookies.
          • Go back.
          • Enable “Close tabs on exit”.

          • Disable “Improve search suggestions”.
          • Disable “Open external links in incognito”.
          • Disable “Send a “Do Not Track” request” (Explained later).
          • Set “Safe Browsing” to “Enchanced protection”.
          • Set “Always use secure connections” to “Warns you for insecure public & private sites”.
          • Set “Use secure DNS” to your custom NextDNS (I use a different profile than on my network setup).
          • Disable “Access payment methods”.
          • Go back
          • Click on “Password Manager” and disable all.
          • Go back.
          • Click on “Payment methods” and disable all.
          • Go back.
          • Click on “Addresses and more” and disable it.
          • Go back.
          • Click on “Autofill services” and disable it.
          • Go back.
          • Click on “Tabs and tabs groups”.
          • Click on “Move to inactive section”.
          • Set to “After 7 days inactive”.
          • Enable “Archive duplicate tabs”.
          • Enable “Automatically close inactive items”.
          • Go back to “Settings”.
          • Click “Site settings”. Disable all under the “Permissions” section.
          • Set “Clipboard” to ask first.
          • Under the “Content” section – same tab, block “JavaScript JIT”.
          • Block “Pop-ups and redirects”.
          • Block “Ads”.
          • Block “Background sync”.
          • Block “Automatic downloads”.
          • Enable “Automatically remove permissions”. 

The reason we are disabling “Do Not Track” requests is because it sends a request which in most cases is seen as just another identifier. There are zero reason to send these as the companies has no reason to honor our request. If the law was changed so that they had to honor our request it would be different. Anyways “Do Not Track” is helping companies and hurting your privacy.

The reason we disable password manager is that instead of letting the browser read our password manager, we will be tabbing in and out from from the browser to copy the password. The reason for this is privacy, plus you don’t have to reveal the password.

So you have now setup your device and you are gonna need some apps. First and foremost, there are no real appstores on GrapheneOS by default, so by default nowhere to get apps. What we are gonna do is to install Droid-ify.

          • Go to Vanadium.
          • Search for Droid-ify. (https://f-droid.org/de/packages/com.looker.droidify/).
          • Scroll down and find the versions.
          • Scroll down to the bottom of the first version you see.
          • Click the download button.
          • Allow Vanadium to install software.
          • Close Vanadium.