Achieving Great Privacy with Safari

23 Mar, 2025

Browsers have always been an arena for fighting and flaming over why your browser is the best and has the most features, while all others are inferior and unusable. I’ve never liked to fight those wars (not with browsers and not with code editors, another hotly debated topic), and I’ve never really understood how people get so religious about their tech choices.

So, first of all, use whatever you want and have fun with whatever you choose—there’s no need to be mad at someone else’s browser preference.

With that being said, browsers have indeed been all over the news lately, with the latest updates about Chrome introducing the new Manifest V3 and uBlock Origin being turned off for new Chrome versions. Privacy is once again a hot topic, and browser choices are back in the headlines. “Use Firefox,” they say. “No! Brave is the only browser that will save you!” Blah, blah, blah.

I won’t say anything about that because, well, I’m not into these wars, remember? I try to stay positive about my choices, and therefore, I’m using this post to show how I’m taking care of my privacy with Safari, my browser of choice. Is it perfect? Of course not. Can anything be privacy-perfect these days? Come on.

• iCloud Private Relay. As someone deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem with many of my devices being Apple products, I’m subscribed to iCloud+ and have activated iCloud Private Relay. This does two key things: it hides your IP address from websites via a relay and encrypts your DNS queries.

• Wipr. One of the best pieces of software I’ve encountered. It’s a simple and effective ad-blocker, developed by a single indie developer, with a one-time purchase—and then you can forget about it.

• StopTheMadness Pro. An extension that’s all about stopping annoying tricks on the web. This includes removing URL tracking parameters, preventing websites from changing your context menu, and much more. It’s was also created by an indie developer.

• Hush. Blocks annoying cookies and pop-ups. It’s great and open-source.

That’s it. Three extensions and one service—and honestly, you can do well with just Wipr installed. How effective is this setup? Using the EFF online test, this configuration achieved “strong protection against web tracking,” but it also includes a unique fingerprint among the 272,373 tested in the past 45 days, which is not so good:

Using an online ad-block test, this setup achieved a 96% block rate:

Just for fun, I compared it to two other “private” setups (all with iCloud Private Relay still enabled):

1. Firefox, with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and I Still Don’t Care About Cookies. It still got “strong protection against web tracking” from EFF but with an improvement of the fingerprint being only a nearly unique fingerprint—not a fully unique one (“one in 136,187 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours”). In the online test, only 52% of the websites were blocked—not so great:
   
2. Brave Browser, with its built-in Brave shields. It seems to randomize its fingerprint, which according to EFF “provides very strong protection against tracking companies trying to fingerprint your browser, surely better than a unique fingerprint. It also achieved 68% on the online test:
   

So, to conclude, I’m pretty happy with my setup. Is it the most comprehensive test and comparison? Probably not. Do I want to fight with others over their setups? Nope. I do hope that if you use Safari and didn’t know about these extensions, I’ve helped you improve your setup (if you wanted to).

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