noscript VS user.js

Good or bad depends on the intentions of the website you're visiting, and unfortunately also of the many 3rd party script sources it includes. Users should have a chance to decide which sites they trust to run JavaScript and which they do not, and this is the reason why 18 years ago I've created NoScript, and why it is still there and shipped by default inside the Tor Browser.

Use a different name, password, and email if you can. Keep an adblocker and noscript handy. Don't accept cookies from new sites. Maybe even use the TOR browser for better anonymity and safety while you're giving these new platforms a test run.

What is it?

I do (with the NoScript browser extension: https://noscript.net/). The main reason is to reduce my attack surface. A secondary benefit is it eliminates most ads and other annoying distractions.

I'll give an example of NoScript which is a great project that you should be using. Most people download the extension directly though their browser. Firefox shows 317,244 active users and Chromium shows 100,000+ users. Some people know of the website. Less people know of the GitHub project the NoScript Common Library (nscl). NoScript has 645 stars and nscl has 15 stars. 417,244+ active users and only 660 stars. If you use the project and you have a GitHub account, give it some love with some stars!

Here: https://noscript.net/

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.