@thomasfuchs
How would they disable in-app browsers in their app store? How is Firefox not an "in-app" browser?
Also, it may perhaps be foolish to depend on one giant corporation to protect consumers from another giant corporation...
@infosec_jcp@thomasfuchs my thought was rather, Edge and Brave et al use chromium. One could argue that is an in-app browser config. Edge being the app, chromium the browser.
Browsers use browser engines, but they do a lot more than that (for example managing cookies, sign-ins, passwords, etc.).
This also means that apps with in-app browsers can tightly control what's given or shown to the browser engine—for example read all your keystrokes in it and log what you're browsing to, including access to passwords, credit cards and session cookies.
@thomasfuchs I see what you mean, but i think there is not much difference. Some Electron apps do actually pull resources the same way as they would in a browser, but use caching mechanisms to not always do it. Slack and Discord do things like this I think to have 100% parity between web and "desktop".
@bastilian I'm talking about privacy (in-app browsers on mobile devices inject keyloggers and other tracking); not about resource-usage of desktop apps
@thomasfuchs@briankrebs Hold up… Mona app uses a built in browser also. I can “assume” it is not malicious, but I do wish it would default to my own browser. @MonaApp is there a way to disable the built in browser?
@outofcontrol@thomasfuchs@briankrebs The in-app browser in Mona is hosted by Apple, a.k.a. “Safari View Controller.” Third-party apps can’t access content displayed on that browser.
@thomasfuchs Because Apple (and Google) only care about user safety and privacy as far as they're required to. Occasionally they'll make a big announcement of some safety/privacy/security features, but that's just for PR. If they can get away with making a token effort (and they definitely can), that's as much as they'll do. Maybe if enough people make a fuss over things like this, they'll make a token effort to stop it, but they'll only go as far as they have to to quell the discontent.
@StarkRG I'm sorry, but that's bull. Privacy is like the top selling point for Apple because no one else offers it. No other big tech companies has the privacy measures they have, including total end-to-end encryption for all data on devices.
Google otoh openly data-mines all your data and uses it for everything from ads to AI.
The in-app browser thing is just a glaring omission, hence my post.
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