On all platforms, Firefox. Firefox is a little disppointing in that it’s still bundled with stuff you probably don’t want, but it’s far far less objectionable than Chrome, Edge, Brave.
You might wanna take a look at Orion browser by Kagi. Built on WebKit like Safari, but not open-source (yet, as they say). The interesting part is that it supports addons from both Chrome and FF.
I'm fairly sure AdGuard works fine on Safari, though I have heard its performance is lacking -- shame, as Safari is a great little browser (despite my personal dislike for macOS).
That doesn't make it a non-shit ISP, though. And, honestly, there isn't a commercial VPN provider that I trust at all. Most of them are extremely questionable. I'm certain some aren't, and perhaps Mullvad is one of those, but it's impossible for me to know one way or another so I avoid them all.
For privacy I trust mullvad more than my ISP and I think they have the track record to back it up. If your ISP is shit in other ways then a VPN does not help of course.
All a VPN does is either move a bit of trust to the VPN or move your apparent IP to another ASN/location. The first of those can be helpful for dealing with some ISPs,
Honestly, though they are hyped a bit much to the general public, I have almost all my traffic on endpoints routed to ProtonVPN. Better than nothing and fuck ATT.
Honestly, Firefox with all the "privacy" addons I have (NoScript, CookieMaster, uBlock, Decentraleyes, behind a PiHole), the experience I have on the web is probably closer to Lynx than it is to stock Chrome in that it's heavily content-focused.
No, links is (was?) ab updated branch of lynx that optionally does images, media loading, and some simple JavaScript. I haven't used it for quite a while, at least a decade.
FF installs plugins without your consent. Brave installs software which can circumvent security controls without your consent.
Safari has no plugins and is Mac/iOS-only. Chrome is designed to be as privacy invasive as humanly possible. I think Edge is right behind it and has the added insult of looking like a Fischer-Price toy.
Arc, Vivaldi, Orion, and Opera are irrelevant jokes. I wouldn’t trust Pale Moon, Waterfox, Ungoogled Chromuim, etc. because I still remember Iron Browser.
I can’t use Google Meet on Lynx. Even if I could use Google Meet on Surf, I wouldn’t want to because the authors are Neo-Nazi trash.
Orion's just getting started. I trust in Kagi, for now. To cavil about "relevance" means you dismiss grassroots alternatives before they even have a chance.
Safari has plug-ins, Apple just calls them extensions.
Why wouldn't you use say, Vivaldi? Sure, they're irrelevant in the market, but their product is good and likely what I'd be using if I wasn't using Brave.
I tried it and it didn’t seem to provide any features not present in other browsers outside of the significant extension support, which isn’t really relevant for me (I rely heavily on like three FF extensions, if you have those I don’t really need Chrome extensions on top). It didn’t seem noticeably faster or more performant. It has no market share, which almost always means worse support overall. I don’t know of any security audits performed and I have no experience with Kagi so I don’t know if they are trustworthy.
Another comment pointed out since the browser is in beta, this might be premature judgement. That’s a good point.
On Macs, Safari.
On all platforms, Firefox. Firefox is a little disppointing in that it’s still bundled with stuff you probably don’t want, but it’s far far less objectionable than Chrome, Edge, Brave.