Firefox and Ecosia. Surprised there’s not more Ecosia users!
I use LibreWolf with uBlock Origin, Bitwarden and Containers. Permanently connect to Mullvad. Searching done with a local Searx instance that I run.
Brave and Brave search.
Vivaldi browser and DuckduckGo
Firefox with Ublock Origin, Decentraleyes, firefox containers
DuckDuckGo
On mobile: Safari + 1Blocker
Google still has some good features like a calculator directly in the search bar, better translate, I also like how when my travel emails come in, they are auto-implemented into my calendar. With that said, I’m just having to get used to letting that shit go while Duck and Proton and Brave improve. So there are your answers, Brave and Duck for me!
Brave + Brave Browser
AdGuard does the trick for me. Do you have DNS protection enabled?
What’s the difference?
You should be able to get rid of HTTPS Everywhere in Firefox as that’s made redundant by recent Firefox updates.
Brave doesn’t recommends VPN
why excluding FF from VPN?
You can check Startpage or Qwant. Basically DeGoogled Google.
This used to be the case for me in the early days if DDG. Now I might use google search in a private session 4-5 times a year due to not finding what I’m looking for.
DuckDuckGo when you can, Google when you should. Try using DDG as much as possible and if you don’t find relevant results, add !g at the end of your search. This will redirect your search from DDG to Google.
In my experience, DDG has worked very well. The only time I have to use Google or any other search engine would be if I’m searching for a VERY specific image or page, and about half the time I DO find it using Google. So yeah, that would mean opening Google every week or so for my purposes.
PiHole is software that can run on a variety of devices. Most people use a Raspberry Pi (tiny computer) but it can be run on other things. I happen to have an old laptop.
PiHole blocks ads on all of your devices on your Wi-Fi. PiHole is a DNS server, so it doesn’t replace your router.
It can be difficult to get set up, doesn’t always block all ads, and for some reason I don’t think I can access the web admin interface properly.
Thanks for the heads up
Since I mostly just use it for streaming, I exclude it to get better speeds on those services.
Brave was caught injecting its own affiliate links into cryptocurrency websites to track users and make money.