Unfortunately Qwant is free. I really want to pay a one-off fee to remove ads but that’s not an option. It’s also less feature-rich than Kagi (can’t hide certain domains from search, for example). Also, it blocks me from using it whenever I set my VPN to singapore because they haven’t set up ads there yet.
What makes Qwant noteworthy is that it uses it’s own web-crawler. And unlike Mojeek this web-crawler is half-way decent, although it is weirdly common for pornography to come up. Most other search engines are based on either Google or Bing.
I wonder if there’s a security (not privacy) focussed fork of Firefox?
The wikipedia page for Zen Browser, LibreWolf, and GNU Icecat mention security so they’d be a good start. I don’t have the technical knowledge to investigate them. I think I’ll change to a de-googled Chromium browser when visiting shady sites but stick to a Gecko-based browser for anything mainstream (including Lemmy).
I should probably also do all my banking on mobile and make my security settings on Proton Mail stricter.