Starting with Palemoon on Gentoo Linux

[mccmoon]

Hi,

(I am no native...sorry for any "glicht in The Matrix...

this is my first posting into the world of the Pale Moon

I want to evaluate Palemoon for Linux (64bit).
My setup is as follows:
GENTOO Linux with Palemoon and mv overlay running on a AMD 64bit Hexacore (8GB RAM).

What do I want to acchieve:
Two main reason for trying to make Palemoon a good replacement for Firefox:
1) I need a secure environment (secure in the sense of "hack resistent") for Online Banking.
2) I want to keep my digital footprint in the world of digital tracking and surveillance as small as possible.
(secure in the sense of "private data remains private).

Everyting including and above Palemoon 27.* is regarded as unstable by the GENTOO devs.
And that are also my experiences: Compilation fails and and binary install results in a browser whitch
crashes after the first steps on YouTube. This is no complain or critism!!! It is just my results including
all I did possibly wrong.

Here I found a good browser check:
https://anonymous-proxy-servers.net/en/ ... _test.html
(Just click "Check it" on the upper right of that page and then "start check")

With my current firefox setup I got this results (1.png,2.png).
The I installed PaleMoon version 26.50 and I got other results (3.png, 4.png)
For both browsers I installed addons, which claims to prevent the fingerprinting techniques
done by the JonDoe Testpage - and in a evil manner by many others.
With PaleMoon I got quite a few more "red" results than with Firefox.
Again: This is NO CRITISM or COMPLAIN. I am searching for a solution.
I do all this despite the results I already acchieved with Firefox because
I am sure Palemoon is the better one.
But obviously I am doing something wrong...

How can I acchieve a secure and privacy aware environment for Online Banking
and common internet surfing with PaleMoon?

Best regards and thank you very much in advance for any help!
Cheers
mcc

[Moonchild]

How can I acchieve a secure and privacy aware environment for Online Banking
and common internet surfing with PaleMoon?

By using it normally and not believing jondonym's bullshit.

[mccmoon]

Hi Moonchild,

could you give me more specific help?

What test page is more reliable than JonDoes Testpage?
What exactly do you mean with "bullshit"?
How can JonDoes testpage gather all that informations from
the access via Pale Moon.

Thank you very much for any specific information in advance!
Cheers
mcc

[mccmoon]

unfortunately there seems no more informations available than
"By using it normally and not believing jondonym's bullshit."
about a product from the product owner.

I prefer to know things instead of believing things -- that's
wht I am asking and awaiting answers.

Unfortunately there seems no way to prove the claims
made for PaleMoon other "not to believe....the bullshit".
This is at least not may way to prove things.

[HaleSun]

The intricacies of web security cannot be adequately explained in a few paragraphs. Long papers have been written about just one function of web browsers in regards to security, and here Jon Donym has listed a whole bunch of functions, many of which are not directly pertinent to the larger goal of "staying secure". To explain each and every function assessed by Jon Donym would be a pointless exercise since the browser itself is only a small part of overall security and basically any up-to-date browser would have adequately secure defaults so the user would not need to change much to begin with.

What would be far more useful is a general understanding of security "best practices". The key to security, not just on the web but with anything, is to limit the things that could go wrong, to the best of our knowledge. Probably the most important aspect of security is the concept of "isolation". The basic idea is, if in the event one part of a secure chain were to fail, other parts will not fall with it. This principle can be applied to web browsing as well.

If one of your primary goals is secure online banking, the best approach would be to use a portable instance of a browser solely for online banking, or other secure transactions. I personally use a portable version of an entirely different browser located inside a Truecrypt container for email, online banking, online shopping, taxes, etc and use a portable instance of Pale Moon as my general use browser. So in the extremely unlikely event that someone were to exploit an undiscovered flaw in Pale Moon and manages to steal user data, my most important information remains secure. This is the concept of isolated browsing in action, and it is what you should do if you were truly serious about online security, instead of relying on online browser assessment tools like Jon Donym. Usually it's not your own browser that is more important but the security of the server you're connecting with, which you can assess with: https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

Another important aspect of security that's not always talked about is 'trust'. Even security professionals do not know everything there is to know about all aspects of security, online or otherwise. Before Snowden, most people thought that online security at the time was "good enough" but then we learned that many systems and protocols were too weak, and so they were deprecated. This is why there is an implicit need to trust experts in regard to their respective fields. If you can assess the security of a browser yourself, then you most likely already have. But as for me, I believe that Pale Moon comes with optimally secure defaults since I have felt little need to change anything in regards to security. If however you do not trust me or Moonchild, the developer of Pale Moon, when we say that Pale Moon is secure enough as is, then you are free to use whichever browser you trust is more secure.

[kizo07]

general understanding of security "best practices"

Thanks HaleSun for excellent explanation. It was very useful for me.

Off-topic:
Even my grandmother (whose otherwise asks me for my 'email number') could understand this.