ThrillingHuman
always be casual, never be careless
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2019
- Messages
- 4,738
- Points
- 183
I felt like trying it when I was it on fdroid:
So I did. And decided to write my review about it as I went along. Maybe it will be useful to anybody.
I am writing it on it rn btw. I have already changed some defaults but I will get to it later.
The first page we are greeted with is the monocles metabrowser:
I have played with it and it seems okay, as okay as a metabrowser can be. I will not be doing extensive testing of it.
Then the most important parts are its privacy policies and licences. All too many "privacy-friendly" services and products sell all you have shamelessly.
Let's see:
I inserted full image since it's important.
Their privacy policy is good enough on paper. I downloaded it with f-droid anyway, so whatever google needs I do not care.
Licenses:
Good. The rest below are icons and whatever, all under GPLv3+.
Let's see some more, out of curiosity:
In the guide section they talk in simple terms about various useful features of the browser and various ways malicious agents may try to track you. I consider it useful to read even if you do not feel for privacy, or do not want to use the browser. Very good stuff.
Now, let's look at its features:
1)Let's look at homepage again:
Near the url bar you see a red dot. It is a dot that enables javascript. You can toggle it on and off by pressing it for each site.
Below you see the tab menu. It looks strange for an android browser and takes a bit to get used to, but it's what it is. That you have to press the "X" at the very left to close a tab feels kind of annoying, and that when you close all tabs the browser session dies too, but I have yet to find any way to redeem this.
You may think that this whole menu takes prime real estate on the screen and you'd be right. But it can be hidden when you scroll down like in most browsers, so it is not a problem.
Now let's look at some more interesting stuff:
The three dots on the right are settings per page. When you press on them, you get the following menu:
Which I guess is nice that we have control over each and every page, but it is kind of annoying that we don't have the same granular control over what we load and receive and send and where we connect as with umatrix
(will be continued in next message as I can only attach 10 files)
But the developer said something along the lines that it is a limitation of the technology they are using rn, and they gonna switch anyway, so maybe it will change?
I just don't feel like relying on literal lists to block is very reliable.
Though one thing you can do is disable 3rd party connections but on umatrix you can not only do that, but also enable individual 3rd party connections and gradually and granually set the site to work more or less okay while not doing anything unnecessary.
Can't do it here.
But I have yetbto find an android browser that gave such a functionality or had an extension that allowed to do it and this browser is doing better than most.
(continued next comment as I have to go away for a bit)
Now let's get to the global settings. I will go over what I did and why. Don't take my word for it, I am prone to mistakes and lay no claim to knowing how to be private on the Internet, otherwise I would not be here.
I enabled JS and cookies (they are disabled by default and break most sites) and set incognito mode on (because there is literally no reason not to)
I switched the user agent to firefox on android. It seemed to make more sense than just leaving monocle there, as identifying myself amongst all the 3 people who ever used it must have been a Herculean effort.
I allowed screenshots because I do not know what risk doing so entails and I frequently take screenshots.
Maybe I shouldn't have done that. The lists stay on. I did not ban 3rd party connections because the all-favourite MitM Cloudfare would hate me.
Here I left defaults. I will trust monocle to not steal my data when I query it, and it may be a bad idea. Hm. Maybe I should change the default search engine after all...
Clear everything I think was there by default. It is a good thing that will clear any cookies or whatever that I have accumulated when I close this session.
Dark theme gang! I am okay with the top bar staying on top.
And that's it! There probably is a lot more I could go into here, but I am kind of tired of writing my impressions about this thing. So that's it.
All in all it is a very solid browser.
So I did. And decided to write my review about it as I went along. Maybe it will be useful to anybody.
I am writing it on it rn btw. I have already changed some defaults but I will get to it later.
The first page we are greeted with is the monocles metabrowser:
I have played with it and it seems okay, as okay as a metabrowser can be. I will not be doing extensive testing of it.
Then the most important parts are its privacy policies and licences. All too many "privacy-friendly" services and products sell all you have shamelessly.
Let's see:
I inserted full image since it's important.
Their privacy policy is good enough on paper. I downloaded it with f-droid anyway, so whatever google needs I do not care.
Licenses:
Good. The rest below are icons and whatever, all under GPLv3+.
Let's see some more, out of curiosity:
In the guide section they talk in simple terms about various useful features of the browser and various ways malicious agents may try to track you. I consider it useful to read even if you do not feel for privacy, or do not want to use the browser. Very good stuff.
1)Let's look at homepage again:
Near the url bar you see a red dot. It is a dot that enables javascript. You can toggle it on and off by pressing it for each site.
Below you see the tab menu. It looks strange for an android browser and takes a bit to get used to, but it's what it is. That you have to press the "X" at the very left to close a tab feels kind of annoying, and that when you close all tabs the browser session dies too, but I have yet to find any way to redeem this.
You may think that this whole menu takes prime real estate on the screen and you'd be right. But it can be hidden when you scroll down like in most browsers, so it is not a problem.
Now let's look at some more interesting stuff:
The three dots on the right are settings per page. When you press on them, you get the following menu:
Which I guess is nice that we have control over each and every page, but it is kind of annoying that we don't have the same granular control over what we load and receive and send and where we connect as with umatrix
(will be continued in next message as I can only attach 10 files)
But the developer said something along the lines that it is a limitation of the technology they are using rn, and they gonna switch anyway, so maybe it will change?
I wonder.
I just don't feel like relying on literal lists to block is very reliable.
Though one thing you can do is disable 3rd party connections but on umatrix you can not only do that, but also enable individual 3rd party connections and gradually and granually set the site to work more or less okay while not doing anything unnecessary.
Can't do it here.
But I have yetbto find an android browser that gave such a functionality or had an extension that allowed to do it and this browser is doing better than most.
(continued next comment as I have to go away for a bit)
I enabled JS and cookies (they are disabled by default and break most sites) and set incognito mode on (because there is literally no reason not to)
I switched the user agent to firefox on android. It seemed to make more sense than just leaving monocle there, as identifying myself amongst all the 3 people who ever used it must have been a Herculean effort.
I allowed screenshots because I do not know what risk doing so entails and I frequently take screenshots.
Maybe I shouldn't have done that. The lists stay on. I did not ban 3rd party connections because the all-favourite MitM Cloudfare would hate me.
Here I left defaults. I will trust monocle to not steal my data when I query it, and it may be a bad idea. Hm. Maybe I should change the default search engine after all...
Clear everything I think was there by default. It is a good thing that will clear any cookies or whatever that I have accumulated when I close this session.
Dark theme gang! I am okay with the top bar staying on top.
And that's it! There probably is a lot more I could go into here, but I am kind of tired of writing my impressions about this thing. So that's it.
All in all it is a very solid browser.
Last edited:
