disconnect-tracking-protection VS user.js

Right, but Firefox’s ETP blocks Statcounter’s JS (see https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protecti... which is where, I believe, Mozilla source their ETP blocklist from).

Is there a particular reason portmaster uses the depricated and unofficial Disconnect.me Ad Domains (DM-AD) found at https://s3.amazonaws.com/lists.disconnect.me/simple_ad.txt rather than the official up-to-date list found at https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protection/blob/master/services.json ?

You're wrong. People have noticed that they use Whiteops (now called HUMAN Security) browser fingerprinting.

The lists are part of an open source project that can be found on Github.

Like Microsoft Edge has shared that they use Disconnect's list. Which list is being used by Brave?

However the ultimate proof that it’s effective is that advertisers use it: a quarter of the top 10,000 websites globally use fingerprinting (https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-quarter-of-the-alexa-top-10k-websites-are-using-browser-fingerprinting-scripts/) and basically every company you’ve heard of uses it: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protection/blob/master/descriptions.md

Firefox Focus is based on the Mozilla/Firefox/Disconnect tracking block-lists. (https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protection)

Edge and Firefox use lists provided by Disconnect. I find it quite lacking. If you take a look at their GitHub, it's only occasionaly updated and there's a lot of ignored open issues.

I see what you're saying. I don't expect that will have much, if any, effect. First, their block list is limited: https://github.com/disconnectme/disconnect-tracking-protection/blob/master/services.json

Re: firefox and privacy, if you want to use firefox for privacy, consider using https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js . There is a case to be made that Firefox (with arkenfox's user.js) is one of the best privacy-respecting but still fairly usable browsers.

For extensions, I recommend people follow the recommendations[1] in the arkenfox repo and either harden their firefox or use librewolf. Umatrix is unmaintained since 2019.

[1] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions

For macOS : Thunderbird and you can harden it even more with this : https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

only arkenfox

This article is shit. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/ is what you want.

If you make time to dig through settings and change them away from their official use (99% of users don't), then you should use a customized setup (in this case, a user.js). That way, you're good to go no matter what Firefox fork you use.

> Firefox remains a stable option to come back to everytime

Don't get me wrong, I've been using Firefox for the last decade and I don't intend on using anything else for the foreseeable future, but Mozilla has no idea what they're doing with Firefox nowadays. Firefox View is the most useless thing I've ever seen, that expiring "independent voices" theme picker was some weird hippie stunt[1], the latest UI redesign which split the tab from the window looks hideous, and it's not like Firefox doesn't have things you can tweak for a more private experience[2]. I miss Firefox Test Pilot where they tried out different new features, I found a lot of them to be very useful but sadly lots of them didn't make it.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-news/in...

[2] https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/

Like others have said you can customize the browser to the point that it doesn't even look like the default anymore. Or customize it to maximize privacy.