Starter Kit to browse Web in 2024/2025 BUT BETTER! (Still Must-have)

Why is Badger bad?

It's not bad, just mostly redundant these days, as the heuristic features are no longer enabled, and the defaults ublock lists will cover a lot of the same.
- Also the heuristics can be exploited to create a unique identifier for your browser, so it’s not a flawless solution.
- Fyi you can still enable heuristic blocking from settings.

Consent-o-matic instead of cookies and adnausem instead of ublock origin.

Consent-o-matic will actively opt out of popups.

Adnausem is built on top of ublock origin and will silently "click" on the ads behind the scenes to mess up your advertising profile and cost the advertisers money.

uBlock Origin can just hide cookie pop ups if you enable said filter, and AdNauseam still loads the ad so you still have slower page loading speed and increased network traffic.
Adnausem is built on top of ublock origin and will silently "click" on the ads behind the scenes to mess up your advertising profile and cost the advertisers money.

Tried it a couple of months ago. Didn't nearly work as well as uBlock Origin, seemed buggy as hell.
Oooo. Now that's something to try.

A European shout out to Ghostery who auto refuses everything on our GDPR popups.

What's wrong with privacy badger?

Not OP, but what puts me off is that it calls itself badger, but really it's just a software that has nothing in common with those glorious animals. Did you know that badgers' keen sense of smell is about 800 times sharper than our own?
- !subscribe to badger facts
- Is that how they sniff out the ads to block?
I think UBO makes it redundant.
- The layered security model has redundancy built in as a feature.
Well, it can be replaced with uBlock Origin and some people dont recomend it anymore
Privacy Badger has historically allowed tracking until it successfully identifies a domain as a likely tracker. Like the air bags going off after you've already wrapped your car around a telephone pole. But it's now been changed and is now closer to a list-based tracker blocker (enumerate badness):

Privacy Badger no longer learns from your browsing by default, as “local learning” may make you more identifiable to websites.

They've since corrected one of the core issues with PB by doing so, but it still it is very weak. To see why, please glance through The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security.

uBlock Origin in advanced mode, with default-deny rules (only allow assets by exception) is going to be much stronger at blocking crap.

Personally, I use uMatrix with pretty much all asset classes blocked by default. I never see popups. I never see banners begging "please allow our cookies, pleeeeaaase!".
Not OP, but what puts me off is that it calls itself badger, but really it's just a software that has nothing in common with those glorious animals. Did you know that badgers' keen sense of smell is about 800 times sharper than our own?
Not OP, but what puts me off is that it calls itself badger, but really it's just a software that has nothing in common with those glorious animals. Did you know that badgers' keen sense of smell is about 800 times sharper than our own?

You could add that extension that replaces clickbait titles by community-made descriptive ones. (lemmy do your thing and find the name please)

It's DeArrow
- Thanks! I don't use it but I want it so much on freetube and newpipe 🥲
- Whats that?

Need to add a pihole to that stack

I love my pie hole and I love the functionality of being able to access a VPN and use on my home network stuff on the go it's pretty good
Truly! I have a streaming app for local TV and I recommended it to a friend and he said "no way man! Way too many ads in it!" That’s when I realized how awesome Pi-Hole is 🤣

except W instead of P. I don't really need that shit.

the return dislike plugin is just stupid. it's a community database now, so rather than being based on the actual number of dislikes on youtube it's based on the dislikes of the people who have the plugin.

it used to be that it actually got the real numbers but youtube removed that endpoint so now it's just a misanthropic echo chamber.

It's better than nothing. Also I'd probably weigh the opinion of people who have the extension higher than of those who don't.
- Is it? personally, when i think of "people who want to see the dislike bar" my mind equates that to "people who want to dislike", and that's not a group of people i want to interact with.
What an awful mischaracterisation. While the dislike feature may appeal to misanthropes, it also appeals to the much larger pool of people that are intelligent enough/respectful of their own time to understand the value of the feature in helping to avoid poor quality and misleading content.

It really bears out in the results. For those who recall what old ratios looked like, for sufficiently popular videos, they still hold true with this plugin.
- i just think dearrow seems like the better choice for that purpose.
It's honestly relatively representative afaik

Even though it, SponsorBlock etc. could just be neglected by using piped or just federated alternatives.
- how can we even know that though? there's no stats anymore.
  
  also, if peertube et al got bigger, surely sponsorblock would be useful there as well? if creators would use those services because people were on them, sponsors would contact those creators because they got the views.

I read, "With Butter"

Gotta finish my coffee

Pretty soon, Firefox will need to be replaced with Waterfox and LibreWolf, unfortunately.

Why?
- People at the top of Mozilla Org making crappy decisions.
I use Waterfox on my gaming computer and I love it.
- I use both, and that way when I have a game I need googling while I have it open, I can have a browser that won't open my 300 tabs, just have a second browser. I do this on my phone too, and yours

I would 1000% add temporary containers to that list. Wish I could get it on Android too!

Advanced kit: add NoScript and block first party scripts by default. Works surprisingly well for visiting sites you don't care about, just want to read the article etc. Just switch it off if you're trying to buy something and get through the checkout.

AFAIK every function of NoScript exists in uBlock Origin. So just get uBO and cut the redundancy. The less vectors the better

I just installed consentomatic right now and I didn't know it existed thank you

Youtube made changes that make Invidious pretty much unfunctional, videos won't load in my browser for me :(

Noitced their instanxce list shrunk ;-; also that Japan server does still work. Used it last night.

Is the one in the bottom left actually called "No Need YT Ads"? Cause I can't find that one

It must be Invidious alternative frontend for youtube

Gotta try Ctrl P

Does this actually work? I just tried it on a story on The Atlantic website and I just got a print page that looks exactly like the locked paywall page (i.e. not the whole article).

I use the web archives extension for firefox to easily get the archive.is version of pages. Unfortunately, doesn't work when I'm using a vpn, but otherwise works like a charm.

EDIT: I found this comment on the previous thread:

https://lemmy.world/comment/13080227

"The idea is you quickly press print before the paywall loads, so you can read the full article"

That may work in some cases, but not all. Because not all paywall pages behave in a way where this is functional. The Atlantic is an example, it produces a partial page if you're not past the paywall, so ctrl-p doesn't work. The web archives extension still works though (I use it to easily access archive.is) and the extension is available on mobile firefox as well.

I have also used 12 foot ladder in the past, and it works well. In fact, testing it now, it seems to even work when I'm using Proton VPN. archive.is does not work for me through the vpn, so I may switch back to 12ft.io. 12ft.io just has you append the paywalled url to their url, so it should be easy enough to make a bookmarklet.
- I haven't tried it yet :)

Librewolf

And Mullvad browser

Just installed Consent-o-matic and Unpaywalled. Thanks!

Librewolf instead of firefox

Not sure that its a must have and possibly uBO could handle it if I could be bothered to check but I like LocalCDN too.

What do you need dislikes on YT for? You can't tell a shitty video by it's shitty title and shitty thumbnail?

Replace Firefox with brave and you're set

Are you talking about the browser that added its own referral codes in cryptocurrency sites?

(Yeah, maybe I'm a bit vindictive...)
Prepare for downvotes.
- People can hate, but the shield is more convenient than uBlock. I know because I had uBlock origin and noscript back I'm the day. Too bad I tend to separate the app from its creator because it's beneficial for me.
Being a chromium based browser, they're fixing to loose access to the same features that's killing Ublock. So in the near future, the Brave CEO is still going to be a cunt, but your ad-blocking is going to be forever inferior.

No love for Ghostery?

No, use uBlock Origin.
Isn't Ghostery made by an ads company?