Libb

They sell ads and they work with MS (Bing). But they’re EU (French) and I hope more respectful of our privacy because of GDPR.

It’s my fallback engine but my main search engine is Kagi, even though it’s US and paid-for (no-free tier, beside free trial).

I know saying good things about a paid product is frowned upon around here but I certainly won’t lie, or change what I think in order to please some random self-proclaimed vigilante. Imho, Kagi works very well and, as long as you can afford it, is worth every single cent.

It’s ad-free, tracking and seo-crap free too. Comes with some nifty features (to further filter and control the type of results you see, for example). I also love their ‘small web’ search that focuses, well, on small websites by default. That’s so cool. Plus, it gives excellent results that must be among the most useful I’ve ever gotten… like in the 90s and 00s when Google used to be disruptive and useful to its users, not to advertisers ;)

Does anyone have any suggestions for a more private setup browser-wise? Tracking blocking at DNS level will continue and I’m on debian-based linux.

My worries sound similar to yours but my approach is a bit different.

• I switched from Mac to Linux (Arch, then Debian and for the last 4 years, Mint).
• I use EU services as much as I can instead of the US ones.
• I do block as much tracking and ad crap as I can. Still use javascript on a few sites.
• I use different browsers for different activities.

But I also consider this a lost cause. Sadly.

• I consider anything I do online (read, write, watch, listen to,…) is at risk of being tracked, and exploited, mined or whatever and somehow linked to the real me (not to one of my pseudonyms).
• With an increasing speed and willingness to destroy any remaining rights to privacy we may still have, I’m also expecting my country (France) to sooner than later make it illegal to use real encryption, to use a VPN, or even to use a pseudonym instead of my real name—all of that for my own good and for the protection of little kids which is obviously something that I as a law abiding citizen would not ever dare question.

So, instead, I do as much things as I can offline. Reading, writing, watching stuff, listening to stuff, communicating with people.

Note that they have their own ad-blocker (not as good as uBo, mind you).

I like Vivaldi even though it has started to become a little bit too much of everything for quite some time (mail, calendar, RSS, notes luckily one can deactivate all that). For years, Vivaldi has been my second browser next to FF (which I’ve been using since… way before it was a thing as I started with Mosaic ;)). I also have a copy of Brave.

That said, yesterday I installed LibreWolf on my Linux machine to test it out as an alternative to FF because, well, that last change they made was one more I’m not a huge fan of and maybe it’s time to start considering changing my main browser and I’m not sure I want a chromium-based browser as my main one.

I don’t know it, my first question would be: who really owns it?
Then, I would immediately be suspicious of a deal promising me a 90% discount… But that’s just me.

As suggested, I would also encourage you to use separate emails for each of you, no matter how close you are— and that’s coming from an almost 30 years (and counting) lasting couple.

To be clear, we both have full access to the other accounts (email, health, everything, including financials) so keeping our own little ‘secret’ is not what’s at stake for us (not mentioning that we simply respect the other’s privacy). We just want to remove useless noise from our inboxes, and to be honest I really don’t care much about reading her emails like she doesn’t care about reading mine much either ;)

So, we own both our own domain name (name/surname). I also own other ones, including the one I’m using to log in here and to blog. I also heavily rely on email aliases/relays to subscribe to whatever I want to, so I know can always easily delete a spam-contaminated alias the moment I notice it starts sending me too much spam, without compromising my main email.

Are you trying to be hired by Google? Then, maybe ;)

More seriously, I don’t know if this matters. Do people really care about the address?

I’ve been using my own domain names for decades, what I’m using behind that name doesn’t show. But I’m also old enough I don’t need to worry about (un)pleasing any potential employer.

How does this even make sense? The criminals would just move to another platform like SimpleX or use a VPN.

Next move (and not just from Sweden): make the use of a VPN (and any fully encrypted service) illegal for the average citizen—who needs a backdoor when the law makes it a crime to simply use full E2EE? Let those be used with trust by the army, the press, organizations and people like that just not by common people that should have no privacy at all.

Politician incompetency and dishonesty will finish to ruin what little of Europe remains and what the word democracy was supposed to mean (which is not to consider your citizen like clueless children that can’t understand shit and that can’t be trusted).

But in exchange of ruining that they will get some more power and/or money, so that’s fine I suppose.

I encourage anyone with a brain to try for themselves instead of letting others make decisions for them.

May I ask how do one try the trustworthiness of a VPN?

I mean, if the question is to decide if it works or not, well, chances are it does work but that’s not saying much. As much as I appreciate your suggestion to make up our own mind, well, in such a situation we can hardly decide by ourselves and we need independent audits. So, my question would be: are there any for that VPN you mentioned (I don’t know anything about it myself, never heard about it, never used it, which means I have nothing against or for it).

Thx for sharing. I do (happily) use Kagi as already stated in my other comment but I’m always willing to be more informed.

I’ve been using it for more than a year and it’s worth every cent. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s already so good. Useful results (no SEO crap) no ads, no tracking, great filtering tools (those alone, to me at least, are already worth paying for) and real cool features. If you have not done so already, get their 100 search trial account and you will see how you like it. I did that and I switched to a paid sub less than 3 days later.

When my first year ended I thought to myself, well, I could try to save me some money here and did not renew kinda yeah, Kagi’s cool and all but why pay when there are free options? I ran back to Kagi in the same month I decided to not renew ;)

I if I had to use a free search, it probably would be Brave Search, FYI

We have not owned a TV since the 00s and have no intention of buying one any time soon, but I had a look at the FUTO website you linked and it’s interesting read (even for the non-expert I’m).

Thx for sharing :)

Yep, you’re right. I tend to forget that… way too often. [Sad face]

Oh, thx for the clarification. That certainly would not help.

It looks to me like Google has that idea they own their viewership and can treat them like trash if they fancy doing so. The not too distant future will tell us if they were right or not.

What I can say is that they don’t own me. I was a Premium subscriber fir years (I can afford it and I want to support creators) but I cancelled the day they became serious against ad-blockers. For me, it was not about them forcing people to pay a sub. It never was. It was about destroying the free Web and making it a privately-owned something a few corporations would then be able to do what the fuck they wanted with. I certainly did not want to give them a cent more of my money to achieve that.

Shouldn’t you be able to access YT without a Google account? So uBO correctly configured (at least on Firefox) should do a lot already. Maybe sharing with us what specific issues you’re facing or what you want to be able to do may help you getting more specific solutions?

1. Do I actually need it?

+1

How do you judge which extension to install?

• I install as few extensions as possible, like Leraje mentioned already: I really consider if I need the extension or not. Because every single one of them is a potential security or failure risk. One extension may be cool; but if I don’t have some real need for it, I won’t be installing it. I will also consider native app solutions (I will use yt-dlp in a Terminal instead of using some web extension to easily download vids)
• When I’m interested in one extension, I consider if Firefox is recommending it or not. If not I may decided to not use it. May as it really depends how bad I need it and want to try it.
• I check the options of the extensions I’m already using

1. to disable whatever it is I don’t want
2. to enable extra features that may saves me the need to install more extensions. Because, once again, the fewer extensions I have to install, the better I am.

uBO (wikipedia) is an amazing example of that. (edit: I should probably say that I use it on Firefox which supports the extension without limitations, unlike Chrome-based browsers.)

Most people know it as one of the best, if not the best ad-blocker there is. Which it is. But it’s much more than that and it can also be used to get rid of cookie banners, url tracking, social media buttons removing (and their tracking), better privacy, I’m sure I’m forgetting some stuff. Heck, it can be used to easily block whatever content I may not want to see on any website. Say, I don’t want to see Shorts or News crap displayed on my YT homepage? That’s just two clicks away.

So, thx to uBO, I don’t need install a shit ton of other extensions I would otherwise be using to get the cleaner and less intrusive web experience I wish. And it only required me to do some reading and tweakings in its settings

What’s the best alternative to Google these days?

I use Kagi, it’s great (great results, no ads, no tracking, a lot of clever filtering tools) but it’s paid. Free, I would use Brave Search but I doesn’t give me as much results as Kagi.

Edit: added links.

I recently learned that my company prefers closed-source tools for privacy and security.

I will suggest that same logic to my banker too: a vault whose key they won’t own, but I will. Don’t worry, all your money will be safe with me, it’s a promise 😇

They could have made a (second) fortune selling vaseline, or some water-based lubricant, to their customers.

The less ‘digital services’ in my life, the better.

edit: forgot a word :p