searx-instances VS user.js

I still recommend a Searx instance over google. Independently run search engines using an open-source software that aggregate searches over multiple engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, DDG, Ecosia, and many many more.

This kind of thing is why I use searx

I recommend hopping on public SearxNG instances. https://searx.space/

This was my default search in Safari, the "new tab opens with" way.

Now it shows "Cloud provider terminated all my servers, service is down for the moment. Working on it. Sorry. Please use other instances on https://searx.space"

Assuming you don't publicly list this instance on searx.space, you should be fine with a small vps. I don't see this thing having more than a dozen concurrent users so I wouldn't bother with a vps larger than 2gb of ram and 2 cpu . This should cost less than 10-20 bucks a month on vultr or digitalocean. Then you just need a domain, which can be as little as like 8 bucks a year depends on where you get it. So I'd estimate it would cost 80-120 a year to run.

If anyone is interested in getting around search related privacy issues, look into a public SearXNG instance. It doesn't mitigate all privacy concerns but does a lot to move in that direction.

Try SearXNG (https://searx.space/)

If you want to try it out before creating your own, check out https://searx.space/

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.