Browsers and Search Engines

Ello again!

Today is gonna be a short one about browsers and search engines!

Why change browser???

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser there is out there. But it links back heavily to google and lets google hover up all the sites you visits. It also allows third party cookies by default which are used to track you all across the web, after all google is an ad company so tracking you generates profit for them!! Also google chrome and its forks have a hard time with blocking ads which the alternative gecko/firefox based browsers don’t have!!

Why change search engine??

Similarly to Google Chrome, Googles search engine is the most used search engine in the world. Google tracks every search you make on their search engine to serve you ads and thereby track you!!

Recommended browser

Shadow would recommend you pick some firefox based browser that strips out the telemetry and comes with more sane defaults. The best pick if you are on linux would be librewolf as it sets up extremely well for normal browsing while also resisting fingerprinting. Alternatively you can use firefox with an user.js file to harden it, the most popular one being arkenfox user.js But if you wanna explore a bit just look around for firefox forks and read their privacy policy.

Recommended search engine

For search engines the top pick for many would be duckduckgo as it provides good results for a lot more minimal privacy problem. You can use the https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ if you wanna get rid of the AI summaries in the results.

For the very best of the best for privacy would be self hosting searxng, as then you can customize fully how the search engine works for you!! Even to the point of disabling all logs of what you have searched for. Not gonna go over how to setup your own searxng instance here as there are plenty of guides for that but would recommend the docker container way. If you just wanna use someone else public instance for searxng you can check https://searx.space/

And that is all for now

And that is all for today, Shadow Out!!