settings VS user.js

FireDragon is really pleasant for those on KDE distros, combining the LIbreWolf tweaks with some shit from the OpenSUSE patches to make it integrate more nicely with Plasma, as well as having everything use system libraries whenever possible. Also includes some good extensions pre-installed so you just immediately have an ad-blocker, though I'd swap out Dark Reader for Midnight Lizard since the latter will let you do theming for all websites rather than just having a generic "dark mode."

If you're on Linux, you can use Firedragon (previously named dragonwolf), which is like Librewolf but it's based on Firefox Nightly. Easily available from Chaotic-AUR and AUR if you're on Arch.

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.