here i will tell you how i browse the internet at the moment. i am primarily writing this to have reference for myself if i am on a new computer so i don't need to recall the stuff i use by memory and can just use the links. im personally pretty satisfied with the browsing experience i have with this setup at the moment; maybe you will like to copy the way i do it!

librewolf. it's a fork of firefox with excellent default privacy settings. just download and run it, you don't need to necessarily change any settings manually. i used to use ungoogled chromium which is a great browser as well, but it somehow didn't run well on debian, so i ditched it in favor of librewolf. and i am glad i did, because i think librewolf is a bit more comfortable to use. using addons is a bit of a pain on ungoogled chromium, since you can't simply add them with a click from the google addon store, you have do download them and then add them externally one-by-one. classic google garbage. with librewolf adding addons is just one click in the firefox addon page and thats it. if you consider switching your browser to any other one, you should check this page first.

the only things i change are the search engine, setting it to dark mode and enabling cookies for websites i log into frequently. librewolf deletes cookies by default each time you close the browser, so you might want to add some exceptions so you don't have to login everytime you open the browser. go into settings, type in "cookies" into the search bar, click on the "manage exceptions" button and type in whichever websites you want your login to be remembered.

as a search engine i use librex, a privacy-focused metasearchengine that fetches results from various other search engines. specifically, i am using this instance. you can also search torrents with it. i highly recommend it!

• autotab discard

automatically puts tabs on standby that you have not been using, saving resources

• dark reader

dark mode for all pages. can be heavy on resources if your pc is slow

• decentraleyes

tracking prevention

• ghostery

another tracking prevention tools, also blocks some ads, you can set it up so it always declines unnecessary cookies automatically

• imagus

shows a picture in max resolution just by hovering over a link or picture

• libredirect

redirects you to privacy- and resource friendly frontends for various pages. for example if you open reddit you automatically get redirected to libreddit

• noscript

blocks potentially dangerous javascript requests

• privacy badger

yet another tracking blocker

• return youtube dislike

the title says it. pretty straight forward

• simple translate

allows you to highlight text and instantly translate with ctrl+space. only downside is that it uses google translate although you can set it up to use deepl, that however requires a deepl account where you'd have to add a credit card sadly

• sponsorblock for youtube

automatically skips youtube sponsorship segments during the video, also community driven, you can add segments that need to be skipped yourself as well

• ublock origin

adblocker. the most important addon of all in my opinion. i do not even think about browsing the web without this addon installed

and that's about it. this list is subject to change obviously, but it's a good baseline how to browse the internet without instantly getting cancer from all the garbage that is thrown at you.