I have used firefox from like 2005 to 2024. I am now using brave and I am quite happy with it. I just disabled all this useless cryptobro crap that it comes with. I tried most of the chromium based browsers and this is by far the one that better fits my needs. It has an adblocker that works well, it has a sync option that is not on google servers and supposedly they dont have that insane telemetry that chrome has. And yes an adblocker is tottally needed and will probably be allways needed. I do run a network adblocker with pihole and nextDNS. I haven’t seen a single add in years and do not miss them at all. I rather ahve a half broken page than some random website trying to sell me satisfiers and blue pills.

It doesn’t have good privacy defaults and is easily fingerprintable with all the mods and tweaks it has… You will have to use a user.js at least but it will probably not get as good as mullvad or librewolf

Waterfox is based on esr, so quite outdated. Just use librewolf and some css. You have firefox-one that will make it look pretty and similar to zen. Zen is no good if you care about privacy.

librewolf

well yeah I guess some decide to make revenue with this “shady” practices like brave does and others just take 400 millions from google.

I will take a look, it looks interesting. Thank you very much

Its is pretty easy to get rid of all the rbave crap. You just need a policy file:

# cat /etc/brave/policies/managed/brave_policies.json
{
    "BraveRewardsDisabled": true,
    "BraveWalletDisabled": true,
    "BraveVPNDisabled": 1,
    "BraveAIChatEnabled": true,
    "NewTabPageLocation": "https://search.brave.com/",
    "TorDisabled": false,
    "PasswordManagerEnabled": false,
    "DnsOverHttpsMode": "automatic"
}

I would suggest Debian. Rock solid and it usually has all you need. If you need newer software on it you can allways use backports and there is also a really cool project called distroboc that will let you run pretty much any application in a container.

I gave up on firefox 1 year ago and went to the dark side with Brave. I am really happy with it even tho part of it is closed source.