Browsers & Search

A Chromium-based browser that blocks ads and trackers out of the box, so the protection works without configuring anything. It is the easiest first step away from Chrome while keeping full site compatibility. It is made by an ad-tech company with its own opt-in ad and crypto features, which some people prefer to disable.

A paid search engine with no ads and no tracking-based business model, which means you are the customer rather than the product. Results are clean and you can rank or block domains yourself. The tradeoff is direct: it costs money, it is closed source, and your queries still go to a company you must trust.

A community build of Firefox with telemetry stripped out and privacy settings hardened by default, including uBlock Origin preinstalled. You get strong tracking protection without trusting any company's incentives. The hardening breaks some sites and resists fingerprinting at the cost of convenience features like built-in sync, which you must configure yourself.

A self-hosted metasearch engine that queries Google, Bing, and dozens of other sources, then returns combined results without profiling you. Run it on your own server and no search company sees a query history tied to your identity. It requires a server and some upkeep, or trust in whichever public instance you choose.

A free, open-source browser extension that blocks ads, trackers, and malicious domains using community-maintained filter lists, running entirely in your browser. It is the single highest-impact privacy install for most people. It works fully on Firefox; on Chrome, Google's extension platform changes limit its capability, which is itself an argument for switching browsers.