Nowadays the Web has become barely usable. Invasive advertisement are rampant, tracking is basically normal, to reveal our preferences and tastes to the big companies appears unavoidable.
Yet, we can do something to make the web almost as good as it was.
The browser of choice is LibreWolf , a shallow fork of Firefox that removes telemetry and other annoyances. Firefox, and so LibreWorld, is chosen because it implements containers that allow to open different tabs that cannot read each other data.
Firefox uses a special mode to do DNS that ensures encryption, but it ignores system-wide settings.
To ensure to use the normal DNS, one has to go to the special page about:config, look for network.trr.mode and set it up to 5.
This is the add-on necessary for using containers. However it forces to manage containers manually greatly reducing their utility.
Temporary Containers fixes the problem. It needs a bit of setup to enable the auto mode, but it allows to open tabs by default in temporary ephemeral containers. The result is that easily each website only see their own stuff and it gets deleted quickly. It is still possible to setup a normal container for the websites where one wants to keep the state; for example to use webmail services.
Some website, like Quora, allows to use their content for free. Yet they put unreasonable restrictions like that one needs to be logged on. Bypass Paywalls allows to use this websites without interruptions. One logs in only if he needs to.
Containers stop most classic invasive trackers based on cookies and being logged in. The Privacy Badger helps again fingerprinting and other techniques.
Lots of websites love to mangle with their URL putting all kind of needless information in them. It may help the website to track from where the link comes, but it makes the link unwieldy and difficult to share. ClearURL helps minimize the URL removing needless information. Depending on the context it works automatically or when copying the link.
The European Union, showing it has no idea how the Internet works or what are the real problems, forced all the websites to ask for permission to uses cookies. A modicum of cookies is basically necessary, this add-on will answer “Yes” to the requests. Together with the ephemeral containers will allow to use the websites as intended, no distraction but also no invasive tracking.
Often one needs to focus on a part of a webpage or one needs to keep only a part of the page for printing. The Lizard add-on allows exactly that, once activated with few simple keystrokes it allows to remove what is unneeded.
Internet has always been a fragile place, a website now is on and tomorrow is gone, when something interesting appears it has to be saved quickly. One possibility is to “print” in a .pdf file, but .html files are better to be seen on a screen. SingleFile allows to store the whole page, as the name suggest, as a single file with everything embedded in. Great for storage.