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Firefox

masonbee
masonbee Internet

Firefox is the default browser that comes with KDE neon. Although it currently holds only 5% of the browser market it is a good idea to use and support it. This is for a variety of reasons,

  • It is free and open source
  • Only using the most popular browser leads to stagnation
  • It is a very good browser

It should already be installed on KDE neon but if for some reason it isn't it can be reinstalled by opening Konsole and typing,

sudo apt install firefox

Although Firefox is a lot more concerned with privacy than Chrome there are some changes that I think should be mandatory to the default configuration.

The first is the installation of Privacy Badger, an add-on from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Privacy Badger learns over time to stop advertisers and other third-party trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. It can be installed from the Privacy Badger page at the EFF.

Go to Privacy Badger page

The next is also from the EFF and is called HTTPS Everywhere. It makes sure that when you are connecting to many websites where there is an encrypted option the browser uses it.

Go to HTTPS Everywhere page

There are many more add-ons available for Firefox and these are just a start but in my view they should be default. Some other interesting privacy add-ons are,

And no, you shouldn't use them all at once. Also, add-ons like No Script will break many web pages as they don't just rely on scripts to tracks you but also to function in many cases. Lightbeam is safe to use though. It is also disturbing in some ways as it shows the interconnections between the sites you visit.

Lastly, there is a feature on Firefox (and many other browsers) called New Private Window. People get the impression that it somehow guarantees privacy and this is a long way from the truth. All it does is stop records of your browsing being recorded on your computer. To put it bluntly, the rest of the Internet can still track you but when you type "hot chips" into the search bar auto complete won't show a list of sites that you have been that include the word "hot".

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