nextdns VS user.js

I've tried hosted Pi-Hole and AdGuard Home. They are good as long as I'm around to fix stuffs. Then I tested something which can be global (home) and also for individual devices -- Control-D, NextDNS, and Adguard DNS. All of them works pretty well. If I really have to choose, then it would be in the order of NextDNS > Control-D > AdGuard DNS. Affiliated with none, and have decided to subscribe to all three to further test them for this year.

https://controld.com

https://nextdns.io

https://adguard-dns.io

Okay but NextDNS' own homepage says it "blocks ads and trackers on websites and in apps" - https://nextdns.io

I first used Safari on Windows around 2006. Put me off forever.

You just need Firefox and the extensions that mean ads are never seen.

That said, take a look at https://nextdns.io

just run snort and get nextdns.io account and use those DNS servers to control your DNS.

I'm using NextDNS which can be integrated into TailScale MagicDNS. It works seamlessly. You may need to pay if you have a high usage rate. I pay for the Pro version but that's less than $30 CAD a year. I did have in house Raspberry PI and Pi-Hole DNS but it was a lot of work.

pretty much to the same effect of a pihole, yet you can get up and running in minutes. You can then configure wherever you please: your browser, your laptop, your phone, or even your router.

[0]: https://nextdns.io

Check out NextDNS. You can set recreation time and block things like YouTube and Instagram at all times of the day except during your recreation time. Mine for instance is between 6pm and 9pm. At all other times, I can have it blocked. They market this feature to parents, which I think is short sighted because it’s great for productivity and works much more effectively at the network level compared to blocking apps which, at least on iOS, are limited in their capabilities.

Update: So I can see in https://github.com/nextdns/nextdns/wiki that the nextdns CLI I set up in opnsense is DOH, but I swear this wouldn’t work the first time I installed it, hence why I set up DOT. So confused now lol!

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.