World War Privacy Part 7: Stitch up Safari

World War Privacy Part 7 is for Apple users and gives five ways to stitch up Apple’s Safari browser to ensure greater privacy and anonymity when online.

You know Apple users live under the impression they Apple is secure and private. While its walled garden and hardware offer some additional protection, apps, including Safari, can still leak data. See the 1563 CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) listings here (and these have mostly been patched promptly).

Safari is based on the open-source 2004 WebKit browser engine, which Apple forked for free from KHTML, the engine developed by the KDE project. KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software to run on Unix and Unix-like forks (which is the root of macOS and iOS. It is also the basis of every other browser that runs on Apple, including DuckDuckGo and webOS.

KDE is long gone, but it was also the root of Blink based browsers which include Google Chrome, UnGoogled Chromium, Chromium, Microsoft Edge, Samsung Internet, Opera, Vivaldi, Opera GX, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Yandex Browser, Orion, Arc (on iOS), Epiphany, Midori, Konqueror, Otter Browser, Dooble, Epic Privacy Browser, Slimjet, Comodo Dragon, SRWare Iron, Cốc Cốc, Torch Browser, Orbitum, UC Browser, Kiwi Browser, Bromite, Blisk, Colibri Browser, Min Browser, Iridium Browser, Avast Secure Browser, AVG Secure Browser and Brave.

CyberShack does not recommend KDE-based browsers because the open-source nature and the hundreds of forks and versions don’t really ensure a safe or consistent patch environment. While Apple’s market share means its version is more secure, it’s still a minnow compared to the whale of KDE Chrome-based browsers.

We do recommend Gecko-based browsers, including Mozilla Firefox and some security-hardened versions like Librewolf and Tor Browser. These are by no means perfect, either, but are generally acknowledged as the safest browsers.