The Internet is currently overwhelmingly centralised around ad companies collecting personally identifiable information (PII) in order to sell ads. They collect much more than they need and the whole thing (including ads) can often slow the user experience down quite a bit.

So, what to do about it?

While Firefox has recently taken a turn towards supporting the ad industry after many years of an inability to directly monetise outside of selling the default search engine to the highest bidder (which has become a problem), they’re still my current go to browser. There’s a lot of features built into the browser already to support privacy and this is enhanced with plugins. There’s also LibreWolf and other Firefox derivatives which can take this a step further.

Occasionally, people will ask about plugins to enhance privacy or make Facebook/YouTube/etc suck less. There are a few I’ve found useful, detailed below:

• Buster: This automatically solves many CAPTCHA prompts. CAPTCHA was useful for a while, but they’re basically pointless these days.
• ClearURLs: Strip tracking elements from URLs.
• Cookie Auto Delete: Does what it says on the tin. Any cookie you don’t mark for keeping will be deleted when you close the tab. This means that most of the invasive tracking cookies just don’t work as you look like a fresh browser every time. Having said that, the ad industry is moving away from cookies, so the biggest offenders are already moving on.
• Decentraleyes: Locally caches common JavaScript libraries. This speeds up browsing and reduces tracking (mostly done by referrer).
• Facebook Container: Puts all Facebook related content into its own container, making it harder for Facebook to track you around the web.
• FBP: Allows disabling various “features” in Facebook and hiding unwanted parts of the feed, making it more useful.
• Firefox Multi-Account Containers: Like the Facebook container, but customisable. For example, Google (and related sites such as YouTube) is in a separate container.
• Flagfox: This is more for the tech crowd, providing insights into where the site is located and useful links to diagnostic tools.
• LeechBlock NG: Find yourself surfing the web late at night wondering where the time went? This puts a speed hump between your time and endless scroll.
• Improve YouTube: I’m currently testing switching from Unhook to this, as it provides a lot more fine grained control. Seems to be a bit heavy on the CPU though.
• NoScript: Configure where you permit JavaScript to run from. This is both the most powerful plugin installed and the one most likely to break a site. Be prepared to spend the first few hours after installing this adding sites to the allow list and occasionally debugging why a site doesn’t work.
• Terms of Service; Didn’t Read: Many websites have horrendous terms of service. This provides a bit of insight as to how bad the site you’re on is, making decisions about providing them information a bit more informed.
• Tree Style Tab: Display tabs as a sidebar with a tree layout. When doing lots of research, I find it’s easy to end up with lots of tabs and it’s impossible to tell what’s what across the top. This helps both by giving more space to titles and showing the hierarchy based on where it was opened from.
• uBlacklist: Strip results from unwanted sites when searching. As the web gets more enshittified, being able to block bad actors who happen to be good as SEO is a boon.
• uBlock Origin: Content blocker, stripping ads, trackers, miners, and various other junk.
• Unhook: Remove YouTube Recommended Videos and Comments: Hide parts of the YouTube UI, including shorts, suggestions and other distractions aimed at maximising the time you spend on the site. Makes it less likely that you’ll get sucked in and wonder where that hour went.
• Unpaywall: If you read a lot of research papers, this is useful for finding the full text.
• User-Agent Switcher: Some websites still haven’t learned from the browser wars of the 1990’s. This can be helpful in convincing them that you’re using a “supported” browser.