Epic Privacy Browser Forums

hey guys, so i’ve been lurking here for a while and honestly i’m at my wits end with some cross-browser compatibility stuff, specifically dealing with strict privacy browsers like epic browser, brave, and heavily modded librewolf setups. i figured if anyone could understand the headache of trying to balance a heavy e-commerce site with modern privacy blockers, it would be this forum. i run my own vps right now, juggling about five different domains, and trying to keep everything optimized is turning into a full-time job that i didn't really sign up for.

to give you some context on why this is such a nightmare for me, you have to understand the niche my main website is in. it’s a high-end south asian bridal and fashion store. we aren't selling generic graphic tees or basic sneakers where a highly compressed, blurry low-res jpeg is acceptable. we deal with extremely heavy, traditional formal wear. if you know anything about pakistani or indian bridal fashion, you know it is entirely about the micro-details. i’m talking about intense hand embroidery, specifically zardozi work, dabka, sequins, beads, cut-dana, and thick resham threads. the materials we use are complex—things like pure raw silk, organza, chiffon, and deep velvets. these fabrics and embellishments catch the light in very specific ways. when a bride is browsing for her wedding dress online, she expects to be able to zoom all the way in and see the literal texture of a single dabka stitch. she needs to see if the silver embroidery has a warm undertone or a cool undertone.

because of this, my image payloads are massive. i’ve tried everything to compress them without losing that crystalline quality in the embroidery. i’ve experimented with serving next-gen formats, switching between webp and avif depending on the user agent, but here is where my problem with epic browser and other strict privacy tools comes in. the aggressive tracking protection and script blocking seem to randomly break my lazy loading implementation. i use a pretty standard intersection observer setup to only load these massive high-res dress images as the user scrolls down the grid. but on epic browser, sometimes the script just fails to fire entirely, leaving the user staring at a blank space where a $2000 dress is supposed to be.

it is incredibly frustrating because i am actually a huge advocate for privacy. i hate the modern web filled with trackers and bloat. i don't even run aggressive retargeting ads, but my site gets penalized by these browsers just because i'm trying to efficiently load heavy assets via a cdn.

the page that is giving me the absolute most trouble right now is our nikah and engagement collection. for those who don't know, a nikah is the official islamic marriage contract signing, and the dresses for this specific event are usually very distinct from the main wedding day reception. they tend to feature lighter colors, soft pastels, whites, ivories, and delicate silver embroidery rather than the heavy reds and golds of the main event. capturing the subtle off-white tones of these dresses on a screen without them blowing out or looking gray is a massive challenge in itself. if any of you are running epic browser, brave with strict shields, or just a hardened firefox with ublock on medium/hard mode, i would seriously owe you a massive favor if you could test this specific url for me: https://deemasfashion.com/nikah-engagement/ and just let me know how the image grid loads for you. do the images snap in instantly? do they lag? do you just get broken image icons unless you turn off the shields?

i've been trying to debug this from my end, but testing locally only gets you so far. i recently spent weeks overhauling my entire server infrastructure just to make things faster. like i mentioned, i have five domains on this single vps. i even had to deal with migrating my email systems recently because google retired their old pop3 fetching service that i was relying on for years. i had to set up a whole new mail server configuration just to fetch all the info@ and support@ emails from my different domains into one central gmail inbox via pop3 so i didn't lose my mind checking five different webmails.

on top of that, i’ve been trying to improve our customer service for international clients. we get a lot of brides from the uk, the us, australia, and canada. i ended up registering four different local phone numbers from telnyx so people from those countries could call us without paying insane international dialing fees. i spent a whole weekend trying to configure separate inbound and outbound sip profiles on telnyx and linking them up to zoiper on my end. it was a massive headache because for the longest time, zoiper wouldn't correctly display which of the four numbers the customer was actually dialing, so i’d answer the phone not knowing if i should be saying "good morning" to someone in london or "good evening" to someone in sydney. i finally got that sorted, but i wanted to add a click-to-call voip widget directly on the website for those numbers.

and guess what? privacy browsers absolutely hate the voip widget. epic browser strips the entire script out, which i sort of understand because a third-party script initiating audio connections looks sketchy as hell to a heuristic blocker. but it just adds to this feeling that making a modern, feature-rich e-commerce site that actually works for privacy-conscious users is an impossible task.

so now i'm at a crossroads. do i just accept that users on epic browser and brave are going to have a degraded experience? it feels wrong to ignore them, especially since tech-savvy users are often the ones recommending products or helping their less tech-savvy family members make big online purchases. if a bride's brother is an IT guy using epic browser and he tries to load my nikah dresses page and it looks broken, he's going to tell her the site is sketchy and they shouldn't spend thousands of dollars there.

i’ve looked into server-side rendering for the image grids, but given the dynamic nature of the inventory and the filtering system (sorting by color, fabric, work type like zardozi or gota), caching fully rendered html pages for every possible combination on my little vps would probably nuke my storage and ram. i’ve also considered just ditching the lazy loading entirely for users with certain user agents, but that feels like a hacky workaround that will just result in 50mb page loads and destroy my core web vitals score anyway.

it's just a constant push and pull. i want the site to be beautiful. i want the patterns like the pat3, pat4, pat5, and emb1 designs i've spent months perfecting with my artisans to be showcased in their full, uncompressed glory. the zardozi work deserves to be seen clearly. but the technical reality of delivering that across a fragmented browser landscape is exhausting.

if anyone here has experience optimizing heavy image grids for strict privacy browsers, or if you have a moment to just click that nikah link in your epic browser and tell me what the network tab looks like, i would be incredibly grateful. are there specific headers i should be sending? is there a more privacy-friendly way to implement lazy loading that doesn't trigger tracker-blocking heuristics? or should i just slap a plain text warning at the top of the site saying "please disable shields to see the dresses"? that feels like the ultimate defeat, but i'm running out of ideas. anyway, sorry for the massive wall of text, just needed to vent to people who might actually understand the pain of modern web dev and hosting. let me know your thoughts or if you see anything glaringly obvious in my source code that i'm missing. thanks.