Google bullies you with Captchas if you have `privacy.resistFingerprinting` on.

One solution for this, at least for search, would be to use something like https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

I've also found DDG to be more then adequate for search.

The issue I had more often is random captcha's for sites I actually need to use not letting me through. (Thanks school).

My solution for this is to keep de-googled Chromium installed, and just use it when I run across these sites.

I've used DDG for about a year straight now, it's adequate but I find myself needing a !g at least once a day. Searching DDG for error messages & recent events from the news tab are really lagging behind what Google provides unfortunately.

I use !sp if I want to see Google results. I only use it two or three times a year for critical searches that I want more than one result set for but it may suit your needs. Google News is pretty good but I prefer Inoreader anyway, !ddgn is usually good enough for me, for specific news searches.

Increased captchas, sometimes sites will also break for non-obvious reasons (usually because you need to flip the setting that enables canvas data reading to the left of the URL bar), your time zone will be set to UTC on every website that you visit.

There are a few ways of looking at the captchas; the optimistic lens is to look at it as a response to people who say that it's impossible to meaningfully reduce fingerprinting. If that was true, Google wouldn't be so mad at me for flipping this setting on.

But it does make some browsing more annoying, especially if you're not technically savy enough to realize what's going on when something unexpected happens. I think it's the right decision for them to have it off by default (at least for right now).

A couple of the less debilitating yet still somewhat annoying downsides I've found:

If you have the "restore previous session" option enabled and have grown accustomed to Firefox remembering all the windows you had open before, you may find it annoying that it no longer remembers the size of your windows; it just puts them to the default size. Although now that I think of it, this might possibly be specific to the X11/Linux version, as other window systems might handle window size in such a way that it's not affected by this.

Also, if you like having websites automatically detect if your system uses a dark color scheme and adjust their CSS accordingly, that no longer works. Again, speaking from an X11/Linux perspective here.

This was infinitely more annoying to me than the endless captchas since due to age and my eyesight getting worse I have different zoom settings for pages I visit.

Besides captchas, I mostly have issues with trying to watch content from tv channel websites. Especially when trying to link a channel with a cable service.