IronFox is a privacy-minded fork of Firefox mobile for Android. It comes recommended by the LibreWolf project, who have a similar privacy focus for the desktop. What I like most about both of these forks is that their choice of defaults requires minimal effort on my part to set up and maintain my primary browser.
Because I already make use of F-Droid for installing open source apps that are not included by Google's Play Store, I have added IronFox's standalone F-Droid repository to the F-Droid app on my Android devices and use that to install IronFox.
Here are the changes I make to Settings in IronFox after installing:
- Open browser and accept the setup defaults (choose Cloudflare as DNS-over-HTTPS provider)
- General > Homepage: Clear all except Bookmarks
- General > Homepage > Opening screen: Homepage
- General > Set as default browser: Enable
- Privacy and Security > Delete browsing data on quit: Off
- Sync > Sign in using Firefox account
- uBlock Origin (installed and enabled by default)
- Dark Reader (darkreader.org)
Unblock embeds of YouTube videos:
Extensions > uBlock Origin > Open the Dashboard > My filters
Add the following:
@@||youtube.com^$3p,frame
@@||youtube-nocookie.com^$3p,frame
(this can be exported and imported between different machines)