I started expanding the overview on web browsers and Vanadium in particular at grapheneos.org/usage#web-brow. It's still just an overview but it's way beyond the scope of the usage guide and needs to be split into a separate page. Maybe it could go into the Vanadium README with a link.
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> At the moment, the only browser with any semblance of privacy is the Tor Browser but there are many ways to bypass the anti-fingerprinting and state partitioning. The Tor Browser's security is weak which makes the privacy protection weak.
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> The need to avoid diversity (fingerprinting) creates a monoculture for the most interesting targets. This needs to change, especially since Tor itself makes people into much more of a target (both locally and by the exit nodes).
Tor Browser approach needs to be done elsewhere.
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Enumerating badness and ignoring the tracking by first parties, including on behalf of third parties, is not a viable approach to privacy. IP addresses are the most basic building block for tracking, alongside state (cookies, cache, connection pools, [...]) and fingerprinting.
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Tor Browser approach is to work towards addressing the actual problems rather than an AntiVirus approach based on enumerating badness that's fundamentally unable to provide any real privacy. May give people the illusion of privacy but largely just makes them stand out far more.
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The comforting illusion is that doing work to improve your privacy gives your privacy. Changing settings, installing assorted extensions and dealing with the compatibility issues + friction those extensions create. It adds up to standing out from the crowd to an extreme extent.
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That doesn't make much sense. The whole point of using a shared IP, partitioning state and anti-fingerprinting is providing real privacy rather than relying on enumerating badness and still trusting first parties. The first party can do the tracking and pass it to third parties.
Blocking assorted things not from the first party domain is not giving you any protection from the site and their CDN, hosting service, etc. tracking you and giving that data to others. Huge portion of sites are on AWS, Cloudflare, etc. even aside from their own logs / analytics.
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You can apply all kinds of filtering and it's going to make you stand out from everyone else to those first parties. In this case, Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, etc. are first parties since I'm talking about the origin. Third party middleware, etc they run is first party.