Searx VS user.js

I think searx was largely built by a single person.

https://github.com/searx/searx

I use Recoll to index all of it. Recoll WebUI exposes an API, which I plugged into Searx.

The quality of Google search results has been awful for many years now, but if you still want to use it, the only usable way is via a frontend like Searx[1]. Using any of Google's frontends for any of their services is an exercise in frustration from dodging ads and fighting their hostile UI.

[1]: https://github.com/searx/searx

RSS-Bridge has a Google search adapter. You can also fake it with Searx (which offers RSS feeds of search results).

I've recently wondered how effective local models were at chaining together thoughts as proposed in https://ofir.io/self-ask.pdf. Turns out they are indeed capable of doing so while also creating reasonable chains of thoughts that are easily as good as OpenAI's models. To make it completely free to run I used SearX running inside a Docker container with a second model curating the search results for the main model to get answers from the web.

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.