Web Browser telemetry
25 points by jeda
25 points by jeda
This site uses JS to change the favicons and page titles to mimic popular websites. What the heck?
I can’t make heads or tails of this chart. There are twice as many data points as there are browsers, and why is this a line graph anyway? The X axis isn’t continuous so it should be a bar graph.
Hover/click on the actual datapoints and it shows you the browser the datapoint is actually for. Definitely don’t understand the point of the x-axis labels if only half of them are there.
There’s a 2021 datapoint from when he first measured this and a 2025 datapoint, for each browser. But yeah, why they used a line graph for this X axis is a good question.
Zen browser had 82 connections, what’s going on here? It has YouTube, Notion, Discord, trello, Reddit, I feel like OP forgot some of his tabs open while measuring.
IIRC Zen comes with some default pinned tabs, they may be loading when you open the browser.
I’ve been using Orion for a few months now and despite running into occasional bugs, and having to fall back to Firefox to stream videos, I enjoy using it as my daily driver. Glad to see it makes 0 connections on startup.
This appears to show the first launch connections, not telemetry. A bit misleading IMO.
No librewolf?
Scroll down a bit, it’s listed.
And it phones home rather excessively, methinks. Makes me want to dig into ‘fixing’ that default config.
It has Ublock Origin preinstalled, which I think explains most of the traffic. UO supports automatic update from the Mozilla plugin repository, and UO also automatically updates adblocking scripts from a variety of sources.
The author has installed Librewolf on MacOS using Homebrew. The connection to gitlab is probably related to automatic update from the Homebrew repo on gitlab.
I don’t have LIbrewolf installed, and it would be interesting to disable the things mentioned above and see if there is any traffic not from those sources. Librewolf does advertise “no telemetry” as a feature, which I like. But I also like UO and auto updates.