Oh, you know, just the usual internet browsing experience in the year of 2024
Some links and explanations since I figured it might be useful to some people, and writing down stuff is nice.
First of all, get Firefox. Yes, it has apps for Android/iOS too. It allows more extensions and customization (except the iOS version), it tracks less, the company has a less shitty attitude about things. Currently all the other alternatives are variations of Chromium, which means no matter how degoogled they supposedly are, Google has almost a monopoly on web browsing and that's not great. Basically they can introduce extremely user unfriendly updates and there's nothing forcing them to not do it, and nowhere for people to escape to. Current examples of their suggested updates are disabling/severly limiting adblocks in June 2024, and this great suggestion to force sites to verify "web environment integrity" ("oh you don't run a version of chromium we approve, such as the one that runs working adblocks? no web for you.").
uBlockOrigin - barely needs any explanation but yes, it works. You can whitelist whatever you want to support through displaying ads. You can also easily "adblock" site elements that annoy you. "Please log in" notice that won't go away? Important news tm sidebar that gives you sensory overload? Bye.
Dark Reader - a site you use has no dark mode? Now it has. Fairly customizable, also has some basic options for visually impaired people.
SponsorBlock for YouTube - highlights/skips (you choose) sponsored bits in the videos based on user submissions, and a few other things people often skip ("pls like and subscribe!"). A bit more controversial than normal adblock since the creators get some decent money from this, but also a lot of the big sponsors are kinda scummy and offer inferior product for superior price (or try to sell you a star jpg land ownership in Scotland to become a lord), so hearing an ad for that for the 20th time is kinda annoying. But also some creators make their sponsored segments hilarious.
Privacy Badger (and Ghostery I suppose) - I'm not actually sure how needed these are with uBlock and Firefox set to block any tracking it can, but that's basically what it does. Find someone more educated on this topic than me for more info.
Https Everywhere - I... can't actually find the extension anymore, also Firefox has this as an option in its settings now, so this is probably obsolete, whoops.
Facebook Container - also comes with Firefox by default I think. Keeps FB from snooping around outside of FB. It does that a lot, even if you don't have an account.
WebP / Avif image converter - have you ever saved an image and then discovered you can't view it, because it's WebP/Avif? You can now save it as a jpg.
YouTube Search Fixer - have you noticed that youtube search has been even worse than usual lately, with inserting all those unrelated videos into your search results? This fixes that. Also has an option to force shorts to play in the normal video window.
Consent-O-Matic - automatically rejects cookies/gdpr consent forms. While automated, you might still get a second or two of flashing popups being yeeted.
XKit Rewritten - current most up to date "variation "fork" of XKit I think? Has settings in extension settings instead of an extra tumblr button. As long as you get over the new dash layout current tumblr is kinda fine tbh, so this isn't as important as in the past, but still nice. I mostly use it to hide some visual bloat and mark posts on the dash I've already seen.
YouTube NonStop - do you want to punch youtube every time it pauses a video to check if you're still there? This saves your fists.
uBlacklist - blacklists sites from your search results. Obviously has a lot of different uses, but I use it to hide ai generated stuff from image search results. Here's a site list for that.
Redirect AMP to HTML - redirects links from their amp version to the normal version. Amp link is a version of a site made faster and more accessible for phones by Bing/Google. Good in theory, but lets search engines prefer some pages to others (that don't have an amp version), and afaik takes traffic from the original page too. Here's some more reading about why it's an issue, I don't think I can make a good tl;dr on this.
Also since I used this in the tags, here's some reading about enshittification and why the current mainstream internet/services kinda suck.
