I feel like there is no web browser with a sane default configuration that I can recommend to other people. All browsers are preconfigured in a way that harms the privacy of their users or include services that no one wants such as Pocket and BAT.
Here are my problems with some popular browsers.
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Mozilla Firefox: Pocket integration, no ad-blocking without extensions.
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Brave: Everything related to crypto. Also its start page is horrible.
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Chromium: No ad-blocking without extensions and soon Manifest v3 will cripple all content blockers.
Now, these suboptimal defaults wouldn’t be such a big problem if the configuration files were easy to backup and restore and respected the XDG base directory specification.
What’s the problem with using uBlock on FF. Gets rids of ads, has ton of features to custom add filters and more.
Also, I kinda like Pocket Integration on FF. Found some interesting articles that way.
The problem with Pocket is: most of us don’t want it, and cannot get rid of it like you do with extension.
Well you can just remove the button by right-clicking on it. But if that’s not enough, Mozilla has a help page to completely disable it.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-or-re-enable-pocket-for-firefox
Disabling it (even “completely”) is not the same as removing it. The code is still there. Mozilla don’t even provide a method to exclude it when building from source code.
IMO that logic is really absurd. If you can disable it so that it doesn’t bother you, nor steal your data, then it’s completely fine. They are giving you the option to opt-out.
Pretty sure there was a flag to disable it.