user.js VS user.js

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.

I don't know about Chrome based browsers but if you are using Firefox you can try user.js from arkenfox [link] or from pyllyukko [link] (I personally recommend the first one because they have a great wiki), you just put the script to your Firefox profile directory and it will spoof your screen resolution, link referrer, user agent, etc. (Remember to manually edit the file to suit your preferences, otherwise it may delete your history and cookies!). Also you can try User-Agent Switcher and Manager [Chrome] [Firefox] it is open source and lets you change your user agent to whatever you want. You can view your browser information on this website: https://deviceinfo.me, IMO this is a great website for identifying your browser's privacy issues.

I don't know how this one compares to Arkenfox, but from my limited understanding, it seems it's more/less of an out-of-the-box Arkenfox experience.

I recommend pyllyukko's hardened user.js https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/

I've been using the user.js script based on https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/tree/relaxed for a few years now, but today I noticed that it hasn't been updated for quite a while.

If you're that worried about privacy you should probably change your Firefox to one of these templates.

Already tried it. Pretty nice but I prefer hardening Firefox on my own (which just means copying and pasting this user.js accordingly and applying some extensions )