Hi all!
Not sure a lot of people are aware of Privoxy for Sailfish OS, except a strange warning about it in every instance of the release notes.
Well, almost co-inciding with the release of Sailfish OS 4.5EA comes a new release of Privoxy 3.0.34, so I thought why not take the opportunity to make the community more aware of it.
What’s a Privoxy?
It’s a proxy. A filtering proxy.
Which means it lives between your browser and the big scary internet, and it can filter things you don’t want the internet to know about you (privacy), or filter stuff the internet knows about you but you don’t want to see (i.e. ads).
So, like Defender?
No. Defender works with host lists on the DNS level. Privoxy works on http(s) web pages and their content.
Privoxy can do something similar to Defender (i.e. block access to certain hosts), but it
a) isn’t as low-level as Defender / the hosts approach
b) apps need to opt-in to use privoxy as a proxy for it to do anything.
So, like uBlock/AdBlock/…?
Kinda.
While we lack browser extension support on the Sailfish Browser, it can be the net best thing.
In fact, you can emulate things like AdBlock through Privoxy by using the Ab2P setup.
So you can se it in addition to and parallel to Defender.
OK, so I just click install and have privacy and am blocking ads?
No.
Well, after installing it will run, but it won’t do anything for you.
You need to follow the README in order to make use of it.
And even after you have done that, you will very likely have to do extensive tweaking to make it work for you.
So it’s basically a lot of work for little gain?
Yes.
But you have a choice of
- no protection from anything at all (default setup)
- Defender
hostsblocking (which is fine but not perfect) - Adding privoxy to the chain, or using it standalone.
That doesn’t sound very appealing.
True.
A wise man once said something like:
Still, some people enjoy a game of Golf.
Privoxy, in practice is very much that.
So why this post?
Because I think the software still does have it merits - but we need the community to cook up some privoxy rules to make it work better.
So please, if you enjoy tinkering, give it a try, and if you come up with some rules or configurations which work well for SFOS, share them here, or even better, submit them to be included in the packaging.
Links:
Home page: https://www.privoxy.org/
Guide: Privoxy 3.0.33 User Manual
Packaging Repo: Peter G. / harbour-privoxy · GitLab
OpenRepos: Privoxy - now in Chum | OpenRepos.net — Community Repository System
Chum:Show sailfishos:chum / harbour-privoxy - SailfishOS Open Build Service