Lately, I find myself using more and more plugins to make the "modern web" tolerable. To list a few:
Channel Blocker (lets me block channels from search results on Youtube); uBlock Origin; Disconnect; F.B Purity; Consent-O-Matic (auto fill cookie consent forms); Kagi Search; PopUpOFF; Facebook Container; Privacy Badger; ClearURLs; Return YouTube Dislike
Basically, if I visit a website and don't like the experience, I either never go back (Kagi lets me exclude it from search results) or find a plugin to make it tolerable.
What I really want now is the ability to exclude entire websites from any permissions I grant to plugins. I feel like in the last year, I've read a couple stories about companies buying successful plugins and then using them to track you or show ads or whatever. I'm worried this will be the next stage in the battle for our attention -- best case: companies will buy popular plugins to track us and show us intrusive ads; worst case: nefarious actors will buy them to scrape information we think is private and collect it.
IE: I just want to be able to say "Hey, Firefox... those permissions that I granted to plugins x, y, and z? They don't apply to www.myfavoritebank.example.com"
Is there a browser that has that feature yet? I spent a few hours trying to figure out if Firefox did. It did not appear to.
edit: Added semicolons to separate plugins in list b/c HN stripped the newlines from my comment.
This will modify the browser fringerprint making you more unique.
I would not install so many extensions as you're trusting a huge number of organizations/people with privileged access to your browser. Anything that modifies CSS, Document Object Model (DOM) will make your browser stand out.
We wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.privacyguides.org/2021/12/01/firefox-privacy-20...
That includes any extensions that modify what is requested etc. See:
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions
See https://www.privacyguides.org/desktop-browsers/#firefox, you really don't need to do anything more than that.
> Facebook Container
etc, not needed unless you login to multiple Facebook accounts.
> Disconnect
Not needed, you should enable Firefox's ETP Enhanced Tracking Protection, this includes anything on that list. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enhanced-tracking-prote...
For everyone else: you're going to leak identity information one way or another, and it's going to get correlated. The more plugged-in and connected you are, the harder it is to remain anonymous.
If you really value your privacy, don't use the internet or any types of computers, including phones, and never go outside.
It's a cat and mouse game, and the cats have won.
I know by experience that the key isn't about refusing them, but letting them having those "user accepted" KPI values, even if it goes nowhere behind.
But that's mostly just a habit of mine that I know is pretty useless, as websites don't need cookies to track you, and I really don't know why they even bother anymore.
It's excellent. I have needed to disable it occasionally to make basic site functionality work on some sites that I absolutely need to use, though I'm forgetting which ones.