In the previous THS posts we have setup the hardware and the OS and installed the dotfiles. In this post we will talk about web browsers.

Two years ago, I’ve written an article about the web browsers I was using at the time. Most of the things in that article are still the same, but there are some changes.

My primary Browser

I use Firefox as my primary browser. I use it because it is fast (post quantum era), customizable, provides more privacy option. Also because I love Mozilla and their mission as well as their other products.

Another reason why I love and use Firefox as my daily driver is DoH(DNS over HTTPS) and Firefox Containers:

  • DoH: When it comes to privacy, DNS is a point of failure since it doesn’t support encryption. Although the content of your http requests is encrypted thanks to TLS, ISPs still can know where you are headed because by peeking into the DNS requests. Enters DNS over HTTPS or DoH for short which uses HTTPS to encrypt DNS traffic too.
  • Firefox Containers: This is a browser extension developed by Mozilla, which adds the ability to isolate browser tabs into containers. These containers can be thought of as isolated browser sessions by themselves. In addition to the generic containers extension the is another one called Facebook container to isolate Meta websites and prevent them from following you around.

How I use Firefox

I have two profiles: Personal and Work. The names are self explainatory! I have each profile bound to a key combination in my windows manager. I also have a key combination for incognito like so:

super + shift + f
	firefox -P default -private-window

super + shift + e
	firefox -P default

super + shift + n
    firefix -P work

In each profile, the first thing I do is install these following extensions:

For the time being I am exploring more privacy add-ons like Decentraleyes and CanvasBlocker. I have created a seperate profile (Hardened profile) that I try to tune in order to reach maximum security and privacy.

A chromium browser

Sometimes Firefox alone is not enough. Many web applications does not support Firefox, Teams and Zoom to name a few. Also there are some cool add-ons that are chromium only (like this one).

For this I always have a chromium based browser installed. I don’t use Google Chrome because it is bloated, not FOSS and not the best when it comes to privacy.

However, I use Brave! which is a privacy oriented chromium based browser. Before that, I was using qutebrowser which is an awesome chromium based browser, it is so minimalistic and keyboard based and supports im keys which was very convenient for me as a vim user. I stopped using qutebrowser because it has a loose support for chrome extensions, which is an important requirement for me.

Let’s get back to Brave! In addition to being a FOSS chromium browser that respects users' privacy, Brave have many cool features like built-in ad-blocker, built-in Tor, built-in jitsi, IPFS …

Bonus

  • In addition to all of that I use w3m + readability-cli to read articles without having to leave my terminal.
  • Firefox is so extensible, you can custumize however you want using about:config or directly in the config files inside your profile folder. Here are some guides you can follow to learn more about Firefox tuning:
  • For Mobile, I was using Chrome. Now I am using duckduckgo browser + firefox focus (and maybe I will add brave to the mix).

That’s it! Thank you for reading! See you next time 👋!