NdMAND an hour ago

Single-handedly, Firefox (independently from how crappy it can be at times) is what is keeping me on Android. Its full extension support (i.e.: uBlock Origin support) is something that I can't really do without. I do wonder if the crowd here knows of other good alternatives though - specifically, Android and/or iOS browsers with "full" uBlock Origin support (no uBlock origin lite, no other blocker, ...). I would love to be made aware of a few alternatives. I am aware that there is a browser from Kagi that works on iOS (I think?) but it's still in beta and closed sourced so not ready for prime time on my device. I am also aware of some peers of Firefox like Waterfox.

  • christophilus 24 minutes ago

    Brave on iOS is fine. Works roughly like my old Android Firefox did.

MrAlex94 3 hours ago

Not sure why it took so long for Mozilla to expose the setting on Android, it's been a 'secret' setting for a long time. In fact, sometimes they let features ride the rails for a little bit too long IMO.

For Waterfox for Android I exposed the setting by default and also added an addition DNS over Oblivious HTTP setting (DoOH) which uses Fastly as the relay (they host and control it, for privacy sanitisation) and Cloudflare as the resolver.

  • mikae1 6 minutes ago

    It's been accessible via about:config, yes.

    But more importantly, there's a system wide DoH setting in Android (or at least in GrapheneOS). I don't see why it would preferable to only configure DoH in the browser.

  • sersi 2 hours ago

    Hey, just wanted to say thanks for your work on Waterfox!

  • temp0826 2 hours ago

    > DoOH

    How is the latency?

    • martinald 37 minutes ago

      In theory could be as low as single digit ms overhead, assuming fastly and cloudflares PoPs being used are very close to each other. In reality it seems higher than that but I'm sure a lot of optimisations can be done.

LiamPowell 4 hours ago

This doesn't address why this needs to be built in to the browser when Android already does DoH by itself. I assume there's a reason, does anyone know what it is?

  • alerighi 3 hours ago

    First not all Android versions do that, and not all vendors implement that. Not everyone is running the latest version and has a Google Pixel. Second passing from the OS is less secure since there are a multitude of actors, Google, the device vendor, eventual VPN app, etc. that could get access to that queries (in fact apps to block ADS such as ADAway if you don't have root use VPN functionality to intercept DNS queries). In the end if you want to be safe better not pass from the OS in the first place.

  • thyristan 4 hours ago

    Query statistics is valuable data you can sell. Client DNS queries are in that regard similar to search queries and a default search engine setting, you can sell that to the highest bidder. So browser makers are incentivized to implement their own resolver with its own set of DNS servers instead of just the system ones. Either because they want to sell those statistics themselves. Or because they want to protect their users from the statistics collection of the underlying OS resolver or ISP resolver.

    • khc 2 hours ago

      the browser, being the originator of these DNS queries, already knows what website you are visiting.

      • thyristan an hour ago

        Yes, but for a browser to be overtly reporting visited sites somewhere is often seen as dubious. Doing it stealthily by sending DNS queries less so, at least for less knowledgeable observers.

  • ekr____ 3 hours ago

    Android does same-provider auto-upgrade if it determines that the recursive supports DoH (last I checked, if it's on Google's list). However, this means that unless you configure your own resolver, you're vulnerable to whoever controls the network substituting their own resolver. Firefox uses a set of vetted and pre-specified resolvers ("trusted recursive resolvers"), so is less vulnerable to this form of attack. I say "less vulnerable" because by default it will fall back to the system DNS on failure, but you can configure hard-fail.

    You may or may not think this is a better design (I was one of the people responsible for Firefox doing things this way, so I do), but hopefully this explains the difference.

    See: https://educatedguesswork.org/posts/dns-security-dox/ for more on the difference.

    • wander_forever 40 minutes ago

      Yes, this. AND while Firefox is providing you the control to choose when to enable or disable DoH, you don't get that control at OS-level, or even the visibility of what the OS is choosing on your behalf for each such query.

  • wander_forever 35 minutes ago

    DoH in Firefox provides you the control to choose when to enable or disable and which DNS provider to choose, while Android does not provide any such choice or even make it known to the user when DoH is used or not. In addition, Firefox only partners with DNS providers that have legally-binding agreements for strongest privacy guarantees - see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/doh-resolver-policy .

  • noirscape 3 hours ago

    Android privacy tools are leaky (which is bad given it's privacy tooling, you don't want that to leak!) Their VPN tools on OS level are pretty notorious for not properly respecting kill switch settings[0].

    That alone makes a native browser implementation a better solution than the OS version.

    [0]: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/dns-traffic-can-leak-outside-the... is just one example I found on Google (in this case, using the C function getaddrinfo bypasses the tunnel entirely, which Chrome in particular uses for DNS queries - only android API calls respect the tunnel), but you hear about stuff like this every couple years; in that post they also link to a prior incident where connectivity checks and NTP updates were conveniently not using the VPN even when killswitches are active. Neither of these incidents have been fixed as of the time of writing (and Google explicitly doesn't consider conncheck/NTP calls occuring outside of the VPN tunnel to be a bug.)

    • izacus 3 hours ago

      What does your post have to do with DoH though?

      • noirscape 30 minutes ago

        Moreso giving a reason why you'd want an app to force DoH instead of trusting the OS to do it "correctly".

        Google has already shown to have a habit of not properly respecting privacy focused settings, and DoH is intended to be primarily privacy focused. (As it's used to prevent DNS tampering.)

  • jansper39 3 hours ago

    I thought Android only supported DNS over TLS, so at least this opens up options for people.

  • seanieb 4 hours ago

    Privacy.

    • LiamPowell 4 hours ago

      Why is DoH in the browser more private than DoH in the OS?

      • lucideer 3 hours ago

        Because there are fewer actors to trust.

        In the OS you need to trust (1) the OS vendor, (2) the client vendor & (3) any VPN app or HTTP intermediary that's integrated with OS network APIs.

        In the client you need only to trust the client vendor.

        • e12e 2 hours ago

          Surely you're at the mercy of the hardware vendor and os in either case?

          Granted, the os would need to read your address space, not simply supply a recording DNS API, but still...

          • lucideer an hour ago

            You're at the mercy of the hardware in all cases. You can't do anything without trusting some external party unless you make an apple pie from scratch, but reducing the number of parties needing trusting is usually a good security approach.

          • cogman10 an hour ago

            The hardware and OS in the case of DoH only gets the IP address for the connection. It's not horribly hard to figure out who owns that IP address, but it's definitely harder than just reading a domain name.

      • DetroitThrow 3 hours ago

        It's all about whether you trust the OS to not track you when doing DoH at that level. In both mobile browser ecosystems, I can see why users of a browser would prefer the independent browser to do the DoH themselves, rather than leave it to the OS.

      • add-sub-mul-div 3 hours ago

        It's not Google. My heuristic is that the bigger the tech giant the more sophisticated, indirect, and obfuscated the sharing/selling of data.

        • benoau 3 hours ago

          The fact that Google has incurred over $3 billion in fines in recent years specifically for infringing people's privacy should be a consideration!

    • ape4 4 hours ago

      Yeah, Android is Google

      • woodrowbarlow 3 hours ago

        does android not allow you to configure a custom DoH resolver? could Mozilla simply offer a public resolver, and encourage users to switch at the OS level (possibly including a first-launch dialog offering to set the configuration for you)?

throw7 2 hours ago

Does anyone know how to force disable DoH on a network?

In https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-appli... it says that the canary domain does not apply for users who have made the choice to turn on DoH by themselves.

I want to avoid running an sslproxy, and it seems an application level proxy on the firewalls is necessary.

  • xvdAZh 2 hours ago

    Outside of IP-blocking known popular DoH hosts (e.g. https://github.com/jameshas/Public-DoH-Lists, and even then it's not the best since there's overlap with popular DNS hosts like Cloudflare), there's no good way to do it without break-and-inspect. That's because DoH is TLS traffic over 443, just with DNS inside instead of HTTP.

  • ndriscoll 17 minutes ago

    It should be possible to have a firewall rule to default deny outgoing connections and a DNS resolver that tells the firewall to allow a connection only after it has resolved it, but I don't know that there's anything off-the-shelf to do this yet. I imagine DoH providers are also either using known SNIs or ESNI, so you could block both of those.

    The former approach is where we need to go with security IMO. If you don't have some auditability for why a computer on your network is making an outgoing connection (and ability to inspect/refuse it before it happens), then it should just be blocked. There's no reason for computers you own to reach out to random IPs you don't understand and can't inspect at your gateway. Most computing devices are preloaded with malware these days and need to be treated as untrustworthy by default.

nemomarx 4 hours ago

What's the good DoH provider nowadays? I feel like cloud flare has some downsides in terms of centralization

  • AlgebraFox 21 minutes ago

    Quad9 (supports DoH,DoT,Dnscrypt) and Mullvad are both good secure DNS services.

    Choose Quad9 if you want better security and Mullvad for it's adblocking options.

  • grepfru_it 3 hours ago

    For those wanting a bit of privacy, you can run your own DOH server[0]. Be aware that the upstream requests can still be tracked, but additional safety steps can be taken such as hosting your own dns resolver (bind/powerdns), sending dns/doh queries over a vpn or tor connection, or spanning queries over multiple sources. Each has its own security and privacy implications, which is beyond the scope of this comment :)

    [0] https://github.com/DNSCrypt/doh-server

    • mrweasel 3 hours ago

      Running your own DOH server comes with it's own set of risks, depending on your adversary. If you're the only person using a DOH server, then any requests that server make must belong to you. I'd argue that it's better to use a public server and hide in between the other users.

      • cortesoft 5 minutes ago

        My main issue with DOH is failing to honor my internal DNS overrides to provide local addresses for services on my local network (externally the DNS entries point to the external address but internally the LAN address) It is so annoying fighting against DOH for this

  • jsheard 4 hours ago

    Mullvad runs a privacy-oriented DoH service, which is free to use regardless of whether you use their VPN service.

    https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

    • traceroute66 3 hours ago

      Mullvad DoH is great, and things like ad-blocking seems to be more effective on Mullvad.

      But, and its a BIG BUT ....

      Mullvad don't have the geo-coverage that Quad9 has. They are predominantly Northern Europe with very limited server coverage outside (6x Northern Europe, 2xUSA, 1xSingapore)

      Which is fine if you spend most of your time in those three places.

      But if you are a road-warrior or you live elsewhere, then Quad9 is the better choice as they have global coverage (200 locations, 90 countries).

      Avoid Cloudflare. They log traffic. Sure for a short-time period ($n days) but Quad9 still has the better privacy policy.

      Quad9 is also Swiss, not US, so they can't be compelled to do anything under PATRIOT or whatever.

  • qiine 4 hours ago

    I like quad9

divbzero an hour ago

Why did Firefox choose to implement DNS over HTTPS (DoH) instead of DNS over TLS (DoT)? Doesn’t HTTPS add an extra layer for DNS queries?

  • ekr____ 40 minutes ago

    Firefox is a browser and so (1) people at Mozilla are comfortable with HTTP and (2) there has been a lot of investment in making the HTTP stack good. You will also notice that the lead author of DNS over HTTPS [0] was a Mozilla employee.

    [0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8484

  • SoftTalker an hour ago

    Some ISPs block DNS except to their own resolvers.

  • pkulak an hour ago

    I believe it's easier to hide in regular traffic.

afh1 3 hours ago

>DNS query [...] in the clear. [...] (DoH) plugs this privacy leak [...] no one on the network, not your internet service provider [...] can eavesdrop on your browsing

Whoever could see DNS traffic can still see the target you're connecting to...

  • bscphil 3 hours ago

    The promise is especially dangerous when a huge fraction of traffic doesn't use Encrypted Client Hello, [1] so the domain name is sent in the clear with the initial request to the server.

    A while back I wrote a quick proof-of-concept that parses packet data from sniffglue [2] and ran it on my very low powered router to log all source IP address + hostname headers. It didn't even use a measurable amount of CPU, and I didn't bother to implement it efficiently, either.

    I think it's safe to assume that anyone in a position to MITM you, including your ISP, could easily be logging this traffic if they want to.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...

    [2] https://github.com/kpcyrd/sniffglue

  • kyrra 3 hours ago

    But if that request is going to a large provider (GCP, AWS, CloudFlare), without the hostname, the request is going to be close to meaningless for the snoop.

  • ekr____ an hour ago

    This is correct. The right way to think of DoH is as part of a package of mechanisms (including ECH) that collectively are designed to close network-based leakage of browsing history. Used alone, it has some value but that value is limited.

Aldipower 4 hours ago

DoH centralizes DNS traffic at a few DoH resolvers. Bad thing.

  • ekr____ 3 hours ago

    Actually, DoH doesn't change the situation here one way or the other, it's just a transport. It's true, that Firefox's approach to DoH ("trusted recursive resolver") does. centralize traffic some, but DoH need not be deployed this way. For example, Chrome does what's called same provider auto upgrade, which doesn't change the resolver, but just tries to use DoH if available.

  • mikepo 3 hours ago

    One approach to mitigate this is to spread the queries to multiple DoH providers: https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~mikepo/papers/k-resolver.mad...

    • ekr____ 2 hours ago

      I'm not sure that this mechanism delivers the desired privacy benefit, and it's quite hard to make sure it does so.

      For example, the paper you cite here uses consistent hashing, where you hash the domain name and then divide by K where K is the number of the resolvers. However, consider the case where you have a conceptual site (e.g., Gmail) which actually loads resources from multiple FQDNS. For example, if you pull up the network console for a naive load of X, it loads resources from at least the following domains:

      x.com, api.x.com, abs.twimg.com, pbs.twimg.com, video.twimg.com

      All of these are relatively characteristic of X, but in a naive design they would often be loaded from multiple resolvers, with the result that you're actually sharing your browsing history with more resolvers than if you just had a single resolver. As is suggested by this list, you might be able to improve the situation somewhat by hashing on ETLD+1, but even here there are 2 ETLD+1s, which is not an uncommon scenario.

      In general, for this strategy to work you need to hash not on the domain but rather on the conceptual site, but this information is not readily available to the browser.

mentalgear 4 hours ago

I wonder why DOH is in the intro described as getting activated by region. Is DoH now active globally for every region, on any (desktop) platform (Mac/Windows) ?

quantumwoke an hour ago

Anyone else never seen this acronym for DNS-over-HTTP before?

  • jorams 35 minutes ago

    It's been in the title of the RFC since 2018 and practically every mention I see is formulated as "DNS-over-HTTP (DOH)", so I imagine that's pretty rare.

anon1395 2 hours ago

That took way too long. I was getting so tired of my default ISP's DNS blocking websites it just doesn't like.

neworder56 4 hours ago

[flagged]

  • kattagarian 4 hours ago

    > If you don't like people seeing your history on the web, maybe think twice about what you do. Maybe you are the problem.

    Thanks for your input, google.

    • neworder56 3 hours ago

      Sorry this is Microsoft, I get the confusion.

  • nemomarx 4 hours ago

    "if you have nothing to hide" sure sure. show us your history please

  • 63stack 4 hours ago

    Please post your browsing history from your past 14 days to back up your insane hot take.

  • idiotsecant 4 hours ago

    Tiresome 0 minute old troll. Disregard.

    • DetroitThrow 3 hours ago

      Kind of wish brand new accounts would get auto-banned if they get comments flagged within a certain timeframe of their creation.

      • bigstrat2003 an hour ago

        And I wish people wouldn't flag a post because they disagree with it, rather than because it violates the rules.

      • neworder56 3 hours ago

        I wished if you made a new account on a platform, you wouldn't automatically be considered a 'troll' if you go against the mainstream narrative.

        Very welcoming to new comers.

dbcooper 3 hours ago

Firefox for Android is some of the worst software I've ever used. A lot of extensions won't work in it, and even Edge Canary is far better with them. It is extremely slow, and the UI is horrible.

I'm running it on a device with a Qualcomm SM8635 Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, and it just crawls. The UI is very unresponsive, and page load times are terrible. It also has to reload the page if it was running in the background and you switch back to it.

  • future10se an hour ago

    Strange, I am running it on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (Z Fold 5), and it's totally fine for me. (If anything, it's a little too good at staying in the background; if you have private tabs open it insists on persisting in memory.)

    Not saying your issues aren't real, but rather maybe there's another app or your manufacturer's flavor of Android that's causing the issue (like those aggressive background killers).

    As for Edge, I used to be a big fan, but when they finally introduced history and tab syncing in 2021, it didn't have E2EE, and it still doesn't, which I find inexcusable. All the other major browser vendors offer it, even Google (though you have to opt in).

  • MaKey 3 hours ago

    I don't have any issues with it. NoScript and uBlock Origin are working fine for me.

  • veyh 3 hours ago

    That's pretty harsh. It works fine for me. But even if it didn't, I'd still use it just for uBlock Origin.

    • SoftTalker an hour ago

      Yes. The web, and especially the web on mobile, is unusable without an ad blocker.

    • dbcooper 3 hours ago

      I'm running it on a device with a Qualcomm SM8635 Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, and it just crawls. The UI is very unresponsive, and page load times are terrible.

      For youtube background play Brave is much better.

  • nemomarx 3 hours ago

    Edge canary runs on android with full extension support?

    • dbcooper 3 hours ago

      Yep. Enable extensions in edge://flags/. Then you can use ublock origin. You can install any crx file extension if you enable developer mode.