Without paywall:

https://archive.ph/WLKRs

I thought HN asks for titles to not be sensationalized and published as in the original link, but that's not the case here?

Yes it’s generally better to not spin the title and let readers make up their own mind as to bias.

As a DuckDuckGo fan as well, I'd have loved to see them/DuckDuckGo develop their browser on the top of Firefox with Mullvad as a partner with deep integrations.

Looks like they're getting closer: https://duckduckgo.com/mac?ref=duckduckgo

They are. Mullvad browser seems to be aimed at users that want a hardened Firefox out of the box with additional Mullvad extensions, while Firefox with Mullvad installed manually is all manual setup.

This is super interesting. From Leta FAQ[0]:

Did you make your own search engine from scratch?

We did not, we made a front end to the Google Search API.

Our search engine performs the searches on behalf of our users. This means that rather than using Google Search directly, our Leta server makes the requests.

Searching by proxy in other words.

[0]: https://leta.mullvad.net/faq

I thought it'd be possible by simply turning off "Always use private browsing mode" setting, but it doesn't seem to work. Sessions are still cleared upon browser exit.

In my case, I had to turn off that setting because without it, 1Password wouldn't work.

I decided to test it out on a website[0] and it does seem that the useragent goes by the Firefox name:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0

On my Firefox:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/110.0

It's interesting to note that the Mullvad browser seems to be based off on Firefox 102.0, which came way back on June 28, 2022:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/102.0/releasenotes/

[0]: https://gs.statcounter.com/detect

Firefox 102 is current Extended Support Release (ESR):

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/102.9.0/releasenotes/

You can see in the "About" window that it's based on Firefox 102.9, which is the latest ESR version. It masks the minor version in the UA string.

That's because it's a fork of the Tor browser, meaning it's based on Firefox ESR, which is currently on version 102.

Extended releases are counted a bit differently, it will jump from 102 to 115.

I'd especially be interested in seeing how they implement on iOS, with Apple considering opening up options beyond WebKit:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...

Both Chrome and Firefox are working on native iOS versions in preperation for the expected opening up of iOS this year so would imagine they can just fork that and release their version.

It's based on Firefox, and I am able to install Firefox extensions. With 1Password on it now, I think I am going to try this browser for a while.

Is okay to me as well in California, USA.