Tools for better web browsing

Introduction #

The Internet is a masterful achievement of human engineering, connecting everyone. Browsers are the user agents which enable our access, but they don’t always come with the best defaults. Not only that, but websites are full of dark patterns to make you click your privacy away. In this article I share a few tools I like and my own adventures in finding a good browser.

Speedrun #

My favorite browsers are Waterfox, Librewolf, and Dillo. I typically use tabs and bookmarks and not much else. For the search engine I use DuckDuckGo lite For all Firefox-based browsers, I use the following extensions:

Trying out browsers #

I used Chrome for many years before starting to become more aware of the privacy issues the google ecosystem entailed. After that I used Librewolf for several years, but after a move to Arch Linux, both Librewolf and regular Firefox would hard crash my machine. I was unable to debug it even after poring over the outputs of journalctl, but it seemed to be linked to hardware acceleration and my graphics card not being able to draw enough power, maybe?

Eventually I tried Waterfox and it’s been very solid. However in my ever-lasting quest for simpler software, I discovered Dillo and fell in love. I use it first whenever I can. It’s so fast I feel like I’m in the future, despite the outdated UI and the lack of Javascript.

I also tried Arc, Zen, Brave, Chromium, and a bunch of others, but I never found the additions to be worth it, and they all came with their own drama.

I also sometimes use eww on Emacs, especially for documentation. Although nowadays many documentation websites make fairly heavy use of javascript (looking at you Elixir…).

Browser defaults #

For Waterfox, I turn off all the tracking, history saving, and activate everything that stops and/or erases cookies. These days I’ve started using the side bar for tabs, just to save on space at the top bar. Between the computer’s bar, the URL bar, the bookmark bar, and the tab bar, it was getting a little crowded.

I use Mozilla’s account feature to synchronize across my devices. Since I rely on bookmarks a lot, this is very helpful. There are third party bookmark systems, but they usually come with a host of other options which I don’t really need. However I’m also not super happy with having everything through Mozilla. I don’t have a perfect answer yet.

Instead of relying on the browser’s history, I use hister, a project I discovered on lobste.rs a while ago. It has much better search, looking through entire pages instead of just the headers. I also recently learned of omry, and I’m keen to try it out. The downside is both of these are mostly local solutions (hister has a server set-up guide, but I just haven’t found the time). Moreover omry requires running a server in a docker image, which adds yet more overhead.

Extensions #

Privacy badger #

Built by the EFF, it does a whole bunch for you to avoid being tracked.

UBlock Origin #

Classic adblocker. Recently Waterfox started shipping with its own adblocker, but I’m used to this one.

NoScript #

Disables javascript by default on all webpages, and you need to reactivate all the scripts one-by-one manually. For generic browsing this is amazing and has made my Internet experience so much better. For all things government paperwork and banking, not so much… Usually for those operations I just restart my browser with the extension turned off…

DarkReader #

This one makes reading the web in low light conditions less strenuous.

KillSticky #

Removes floating banners and boxes which follow you around the page and cover half the content. Let me read your site without asking me to sign-up, I promise you your website will be better for it.

After you leave a page, delete the cookies. Extra layers to deleting trackers. Cookies can enable tracking across websites, so this is really key.

You know those GDPR banners which make you click on everything to say “no” to being tracked? This automates it for you. Such a dark pattern should really be considered a breach of GDPR. In fact, there is a movement for “privacy by default” for this specific case.

Old Reddit Redirect #

No more going into the URL bar and replacing www with old every time.x

Hister #

As explained in the browser section, I use this in lieu of history. The most important websites I bookmark (or sometimes even entirely using wget for local browsing), and the rest I search through with hister. It is a form of vendor lock-in I guess? But I’ve lost my browsing history more times than I can count and it doesn’t matter too much. And for all those interesting articles I’ve wanted to somehow preserve over the years, I now have my Bookmarks page!

Conclusion #

The web has become a worse place these last few years, but there are ways to still enjoy it: go to smaller sites instead of the big aggregators, seek out dedicated forums for the communities you like, explore the Fediverse, protect yourself from intrusive banners and cookies, and refuse to give in. At the end of the day, it’s about the human connection.