Basic Internet Security for Authors – Better Browsing

Maybe you have never thought about the piece of software you’re using for your daily online doing. Your Browser is your door to the Internet. For a lot of people, this piece of software is their first means of communication – via social media, email or messengers with a web view. Depending on what browser you use, this is a more or mostly less private affair. If you use Google Chrome browser, then Google sees, registers, analyses and uses everything you do with it.

Our biggest problem is that nowadays only two browsers are NOT based on Google Chromium, Google’s open-source browser engine and that’s Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox. Yes, Chromium is open-source. But un-googling it is a rather nasty piece of work, since e.g. Google’s cut-offs of ad-blocking capabilities or sending of telemetry data are buried deep in the Chromium source-code and hard to remove even for large professional development teams. So if you’re not using Apple’s Safari, Mozilla’s Firefox or a Firefox-based derivate (getting to these in a moment), then your browser depends on the Google Chromium engine, which is something I wouldn’t trust. And yes, this includes Edge and Vivaldi and Brave. While Microsoft lives by always flying under the radar, Vivaldi is doing a good job in marketing private Internet surfing and still has the Google engine and Brave’s marketing shows how deep they are rooted in the whole crypto-bro scam hole. If you’re using Safari, then everything you do with this browser is analysed by Apple, who are doing a more or less good job in positioning themselves against the privacy-invading measures of the rest of Silicon Valley, but they are still a US-based corporation with a business licence depending on the goodwill of the US-administration.

Skip the fuss and go on directly to what you can do:

The Privacy-Friendly Problem

Houston, we have a problem; big one. Because finances have always been tight for everyone, especially everything privacy-friendly that’s not pre-installed on millions of computers and thus a matter of ‚the power of default‘. And since privacy-friendly doesn’t sell but analysing and using every click against the humans causing the click absolutely is, nearly all non-„GAFAM“ companies and NGOs have a huge financial problem. While billions are flushed into bank accounts of Google, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Apple and also Microsoft, basically everyone else is left empty-handed. That’s why Safari and also Firefox have Google pre-set as default search engine. They get a frickin‘ lot of money from Google, because we humans mostly accept the power of default. We never question what tech companies offer us and just use what’s there from day one.

The Entire World’s Problem With Firefox

Mozilla Firefox (and all their other projects) have financial problems. What they get from Google for pre-setting Google as the default search-engine, isn’t enough to fund ongoing development and maintenance; both are nifty words for paying salaries for working humans so they can pay their food and housing, send their kids to school and buy birthday presents. And no, replacing humans by AI is not a valid option, since then those humans are completely out of jobs and we as societies won’t have so many unemployed humans, but this is a different problem for another blog post on the worth of humans aside their working power.

So, back to Mozilla’s funding problem. They tried to get along with being the good guys for a very long time. Mozilla was my first browser back in 1999/2000 when I lived in that student’s dorm. Apart from a brief liaison with Google Chrome in 2010-ish, I have been loyal to Firefox for about 25 years now. But not only the whole of Silicon Valley pivoted to privacy-invading measures, analysing every mouse-stroke we make and using it against us for the financial benefits of advertising companies (Google, Meta and Microsoft being three of the biggest ones – yes, you read it correctly, Microsoft is among them –), this movement also has reached Mozilla.

In February 2022, Mozilla announced a partnership with Meta to develop „Privacy Preserving Attribution for Advertising“. It’s an inherent contradiction. The idea is to analyse the behaviour and let advertisers place personalised ads for the fields of interest of the person, but without knowing who exactly this person is. The currently ’normal‘ model knows the person behind the data, because they know where you have accounts, where you log in, they know your devices with which you log in there and your name and address when you buy something online. That’s because of technology called ‚ID-matching‘ or ‚probabilistic identifiers‘ or whatever else advertising companies and agencies call these technical measures. These technologies make sure the whole of the currently over 14,000 companies dealing with personal data have more or less the same set of data. So, instead of a much simpler solution like context-based advertisements, where you see an ad for e.g. a lunch box next to an online article on ‚green restaurants‘ who will fill your own lunchbox for you to take out, Mozilla wants to make a better advertising thing by doing just the same as everyone else: analysing individual online behaviour. In 2024, they already bought an advertising company called „Anonym“. And in February 2025, Firefox now has a new CEO and wants to make fast money with advertisements and, of course, AI, which is just another acronym saying that everything we do is fed into clusters of computers analysing everything we do as they did for the last 15 years but now with a fancier word and more venture capital.

After Mozilla changed the Firefox ToS in early March 2025 and also removed the sentence „We never sold your data and never will“, lots of Firefox’s regular clientele who loved the browser for being the only good as well as the last free, non-corporate, analysing the sh* out of every mouse-movement and selling the data one freaked out and Mozilla reworded some of the changed parts. But the sentence on not selling the data keeps missing.

So, What do We do Now?

Brilliant question. As long as there are no solid financial models for funding privacy-friendly browsers, apps or basically whatever, we’re generally in trouble.

We can either put our hopes into Mozilla’s Firefox and keep it (or switch over to it) or we can use one of the free Firefox-derivates like LibreWolf or Zen Browser. The problem with the derivates is that there are no big established development teams and we can’t be sure for how long these browsers will be kept up to date and thus safe and secure. Projects like these can come and go and it’s probably not wise to install it on your parents‘ computers while the next time you’ll visit will be in December, so the machines will probably be unmaintained for months. You can, of course, install Zen Browser on your own machine if you keep an eye out for regular security updates.

Use a Decent Browser

• Install Firefox, Zen Browser or LibreWolf.
• Export your bookmarks from your old browser and save them on your computer. You may put a date to the filename like bookmarks_20250305 and start a habit of making local backups of your bookmarks.
• Import your bookmarks (either directly from your previous browser or from your just created file) and, optionally, your browsing history and other data to your new browser.

Okay, now let’s go to the settings and set it as your default browser.

Make Your Browser More Secure Within 5+5 Minutes

Out of the box, Firefox and derivates are okay, but there are a few things you can tweak to make it more secure. It just takes a few minutes, promise!

Adapt the Settings

• First, go to the settings (via the context menu or at the top right, three lines) and set Firefox or the derivate as your standard browser.
• In the settings for the start page, deactivate sponsored links. You can also delete the tiles for whatever they offer you from the start on that start page and put in whatever you really want to be there.
• In the tab „Search“, change the default search engine to DuckDuckGo. I also uncheck Google on the field for keywords.
• The tab „Privacy and Security“ is your new best friend. Right on top, you find a section on tracking protection. Set it to „Strict“, one level more than standard. This one click already does a lot for your privacy online.
• Set the check for „Do not sell my data“. Older FF-versions also had a checkbox for „Do not track“, but that one is, unfortunately, gone now.
• Also, set the check for „Delete cookies and website data when the browser is closed“. This is an important one and will get you rid of a lot of cookie-based analysis. The trade-off is that you’ll have to log into your accounts next time you open the browser. But thanks to your password-manager, that’s a matter of 10 seconds.
• Uncheck that your browser stores your passwords for you. You have a password-manager for this.
• I also unchecked the auto-fill option, so I always type in my credit card number when I need to buy something online.
• Pop-up windows and warning if a website tries to install add-ons are pre-checked, and that’s good as it is.
• Uncheck both checkboxes at „Data collection by Firefox and its use“.
• Uncheck „Advertising settings for websites“, because, no, we do not allow websites to perform privacy-friendly advertising measurements.
• The rest on security, certificates, https and DNS can stay the way it is.
• The next tab is on synchronising your FF bookmarks, tabs etc. via the Firefox servers with all your devices. Since this means that they have your settings and data on their computers, I’d advise against this.
• Uncheck everything in the next tab called „Firefox Labs“.

Congratulations. Within 5 minutes of your lifetime, your Internet browsing got way more secure already. Let’s take another 5 minutes and do the next steps.

Install Add-ons That Help You be More Private and Secure

Switch to the Firefox (or derivate) settings for Add-ons and Themes (bottom left or via the menu).

• Install uBlock Origin. It’s a state-of-the-art ad-blocker that will improve your online experience so much! Apart from making it much more secure, since it’s frickin‘ easy to fetch malware via ad-banners that are all over the place on websites nowadays.
• You may also install Privacy Badger by the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s a second ad-blocker that sometimes finds a few more ad-tech-parts and supplements uBlock origin pretty well.
• Install Terms of Service; Didn’t Read. It will give you an idea of how privacy-friendly the website is you’re browsing with a nice A-E and green to red scale.
• Install Firefox Multi-Account Containers. It will supplement the built-in capabilities of hindering cross-site-tacking. If you opted for LibreWolf, you might want to have a look into the LibreWolf FAQ before installing this particular Add-o, since they seem to have built-in some other option of separating websites and prevent them from snooping around.
• In case you didn’t already, install your password-manager’s browser add-on, like KeePassXC-Browser. Optional: If you want a visual „map“ of which companies and services watch your daily Internet behaviour, you can install Green Beam. When you open it the first time, it will show an empty black page. This will change quickly as soon as you start browsing. Just come back an hour later and see what websites you actually have connected to and how many third parties have been notified about these connections.

Okay, that’s it. This may have taken you half an hour, including reading this article, and I hope it wasn’t too painful to set the checks or uncheck and install a handful of add-ons. But now you’re good to go and enjoy a much quieter and more secure online experience.

Use a Decent Browser on Your Mobile Device

What you just did, you can also do on your mobile device(s). Install Firefox or Firefox Focus (in German: Firefox Klar) on your mobile device and set it as your default browser.

Firefox is available for both Android and iOS as well as free operating systems like eOS or Lineage OS. It’s also available via the F-Droid-Store (look for FF-Updater).

Android

If you’re using an Android phone, you can install Firefox and Firefox Focus either via the Google Play Store or via F-Droid (look for FF-Updater). On Android you can use Add-ons like uBlock origin and all the above and I advise you to do so. You do not need any of the other „recommended“ ad-blockers you see advertised in the app stores. Most of them contain white-lists for several ad-companies so you’re often not safe with those. Just use uBlock Origin and maybe EFF Privacy Badger.

• Install Firefox Browser and Firefox Focus on your device.
• Open the app and go to the settings (top right-hand corner).
• Adapt the settings according to the list above. Remember to switch the default search engine to DuckDuckGo.
• Under „add-ons“ or „extensions,“ install at least „uBlock Origin“. You may also install the other extensions you use for your desktop browser, but I highly recommend to at least use uBlock Origin also on your mobile device(s).

iOS

If you’re using iOS, you can’t use add-ons in browser apps. You can install a Firefox browser or even Firefox Klar, but because of Apple’s restrictive policies, the engine inside still is a Safari engine. You can, of course, just stay with the pre-installed mobile Safari, but install Firefox Focus and use it as ad-blocker within your Safari!

• Head over to the App Store and install Firefox Focus (or Firefox Klar in German).
• Open the settings on your device and scroll down to „Apps“. Click on „Apps“.
• While you’re there, change your default search engine to DuckDuckGo. Also, allow it for private tabs.
• Scroll down to „“Extensions“. Click on it.
• Enable Firefox Focus as Safari extension and also allow it in private tabs.

You can also install 1Blocker as your content- or ad-blocker and activate it the same way. It also works additionally to Firefox Focus.

Basic Internet Security for Authors Series

Cloud and Backups
Strong Passwords
Better Browsing