I am of the opinion that most of what we do on a computer occurs in our browser these days, anything from banking, shopping, connecting, reading and learning all occurs within this one box.

My browser

Firefox is my daily browser. I like their open-source commitment and I’ve never had any major issues, I’m sure I’ll switch without any guilt if that changes. I’m also a big fan of Firefox Focus for mobile browsing. A browser that has caught my attention is Qutebrowser, its characteristic feature is the vim like key-bindings, maybe in the future I’ll use it a little more.

My add-ons

Attempting to balance privacy with usability is hard, websites break without much effort if you use tracking and add blocking tools or the wrong combination of them. However I have found the following to not ruin my experience at all. I have three main add-ons that I advocate everyone to use without thinking about it:

  • uBlock Origin
    • Block annoying ads and can prevent WebRTC leak IP leak without going into about:config
  • HTTPS Everywhere
    • Make sure you connect to a site using the encrypted https protocol
  • Privacy Badger
    • Detect and prevent tracking

Some more obscure add-ons I’ve added, which may be overkill, include:

Along with this I set my browser to never remember passwords or autofill forms (I use a password manager for this), to only accept cookies from sites I visited, and I also enable Tracking Prevention while Do Not Track Request is on. Firefox can be further customized by entering the about:config, I recommend reading trough Privacy Tools before configuring settings here, some settings make the browsing experience a little less convenient or break websites. Of course you can use TOR if you’re really paranoid, but this post is probably not for you if you reach that level.