[jacobheric]

I use firefox with ublock origin and privacy badger and I can't recall the last time I ran into a site that was broken because of it. But, I visit a fairly narrow section of the internet regularly so there might not be much overlap between what I browse and you browse.

I also use the multi-account container add on and the temporary container add on. This allows me to pin a few big sites to their own containers (google, amazon, etc) and open all other new tabs in temporary containers. This setup works great and appears to help keep firefox fast over time. I use duck duck go to search but firefox makes it trivial for me to re-run a search with google if I need to.

I also run an ad blocking vpn on google cloud using Algo. I use google cloud because the vpn can run on the permanently free tier and I only pay for network traffic (which is near zero), and I also enjoy the irony of it. I have wireguard clients setup on all of my devices to use the vpn either permanently (phone) or on demand (laptops). Having this vpn is nice as it makes it easy to block ads in apps on my kids mobile devices.

This vpn setup works ok but not quite as well as when I ran the same thing using Streisand and open vpn clients. I only say this because I have a homebrew whole-house audio setup with a bunch of google audio chromecasts and no matter how I tweak the wireguard client settings I cannot get that casting to work properly. With open vpn clients, those settings are a cinch.

[mosselman]

I did some tests and found that privacy badger adds a significant amount of load time. I couldn’t justify it for the minimal effect it has. If you use ublock with firefox’s protections and block third party cookies you are pretty good from a browser point of view.

[jacobheric]

Interesting. I never really had a firm grasp on the overlap in functionality of ublock origin and privacy badger. I threw privacy badger in the mix at some point as I like the EFF and wanted to give it a whirl. I haven't noticed any sites loading slowly, but I'll do a comparison on some of the sites I use and see if it's slowing things down.

[mosselman]

In my case it really made a difference. Close to 1 second in some cases even, which on a total of 3-4 seconds of course is a big deal.

A way to beef up your privacy protections might be to look at DNS filtering. I use dnscrypt-proxy with a blocklist. You can also put trackers in your hosts file in order to route them to 0.0.0.0. https://filterlists.com/ is a nice resource to start out at.

[dontbenebby]

Also every additional extension makes you more fingerprintable.

A bit of a catch 22 - by protecting my privacy (unless I make myself unfingerprintable, which is very difficult) I make myself unique.

[ce4]

PS: DuckDuckGo itself makes it trivial to rerun the search with Google, just add "g!" to your search terms and you'll get redirected.