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Comment by karyon | Hacker News Reader

notes/questions:

4. a citation why chrome would be "safer" than firefox (or edge) would be appreciated. in terms of privacy, i wouldn't trust chrome as much as i'd trust firefox.

7 and 10: as others have noted, where is the security risk in storing the encrypted vault in the cloud? actually, choosing user-friendly solutions has a security benefit in itself because it doesn't make you switch to less secure alternatives ("i'll just use my standard password for this one thing) out of laziness

9. should mention PGP, although that's certianly not convenient and might not work for less tech-savvy people.

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I think it's reasonable to trust Firefox's privacy more than Chrome's. But there are very few people in the industry who trust it's security more than Chrome's. Chrome has a more secure architecture and one of the best security teams assembled for any consumer product.

The iOS and Chrome recommendations are the things I'm saying that I believe to be somewhat unpopular here. But in the software security community, they've been commonly accepted for several years now.

I try not to recommend PGP anymore, not because it's unsafe but because it's difficult to use and discouraging for unsophisticated users.

Having said that: I actively warn against trying to use PGP for secure email. Email has inferior security even with PGP layered on top of it. Signal was designed for long-term asynchronous conversations; if you can use PGP, you can use Signal. Use Signal instead.

Yeah, its a mixed bag when choosing between Firefox and Chrome - especially if both security and privacy are desired. Personally, I trust and like Mozilla more than Google, but Chrome has better security from what I have observed.

The FBI has repeatedly found and exploited Firefox vulnerabilities. Chrome does all the dangerous bug-prone stuff (parsing) in a separate process that is sandboxed, so vulnerabilities are harder to exploit.

Standboxing what just introduced in Firefox as well. But yes I agree.

Chrome holds up far better in the annual Pwn2Own competitions than any other browser. The Chrome team really goes over the top on security and sandboxing. Firefox is unfortunately a CVE-fest.

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