Re:On Our Abusive Relationship with Mozilla’s Firefox
by danShumway on Friday October 23, 2020 @05:07PM
(#24874185)
"Good enough" depends entirely on your threat model and what you're trying to prevent. I don't know that anyone here can answer that question for you.
That being said, the changes you made will make you more private than an unaltered Ungoogled Chromium build, and substantially more private than an unaltered Chrome install. I'm assuming you also have an adblocker installed (uBlock Origin recommended). If not, do that. Installing an adblocker is the easiest, most effective way to improve your privacy in terms of effort-to-payout, pretty much everyone everywhere even if they're non-technical should be running an adblocker; it should be the first step you take to improving your privacy.
If you're comfortable with the annoyances that come from enabling more advanced Firefox features, I personally also use the uMatrix addon (discontinued, I'm still trying to figure out how to replace it) to disable Javascript by default. Depending on your privacy goals, that can be either a substantial gain in privacy, or a ton of overkill.
And that conversation could go longer, we could talk about both the benefits and downsides of VPNs, canvas blocking, etc... again, I don't know what you mean by "good enough", privacy is a very wide spectrum.
But if you're just looking to pick a browser, and you've followed the steps on that page to configure Firefox settings, I would say you've done pretty well for yourself compared to the average person browsing the web.
Typically, if I'm setting up a computer for someone else, I'll just install Firefox, flip a few settings, and give them an adblocker. It's not unless I know someone's technical and they want stronger protections that I'll start talking about `resistFingerprinting` or disabling WebGL.
That being said, the changes you made will make you more private than an unaltered Ungoogled Chromium build, and substantially more private than an unaltered Chrome install. I'm assuming you also have an adblocker installed (uBlock Origin recommended). If not, do that. Installing an adblocker is the easiest, most effective way to improve your privacy in terms of effort-to-payout, pretty much everyone everywhere even if they're non-technical should be running an adblocker; it should be the first step you take to improving your privacy.
If you're comfortable with the annoyances that come from enabling more advanced Firefox features, I personally also use the uMatrix addon (discontinued, I'm still trying to figure out how to replace it) to disable Javascript by default. Depending on your privacy goals, that can be either a substantial gain in privacy, or a ton of overkill.
And that conversation could go longer, we could talk about both the benefits and downsides of VPNs, canvas blocking, etc... again, I don't know what you mean by "good enough", privacy is a very wide spectrum.
But if you're just looking to pick a browser, and you've followed the steps on that page to configure Firefox settings, I would say you've done pretty well for yourself compared to the average person browsing the web.
Typically, if I'm setting up a computer for someone else, I'll just install Firefox, flip a few settings, and give them an adblocker. It's not unless I know someone's technical and they want stronger protections that I'll start talking about `resistFingerprinting` or disabling WebGL.