In other words, is this truly necessary?
In other words, is this truly necessary?
One question. How does website availability fare with all these plugins and options active? Does it mangle or render sites unusable? And at what rate?
On the sites with more heavy tracking —- chegg comes to mind or some different clothing stores with lots of media, payment service scripts, and heavy ad tracking like tentree — the plug-ins definitely interfere to the point where I will sometimes use a second browser so that the website operates as intended. NoScript seems to be the culprit in most cases, and I suspect the interface doesn’t adequately display all the scripts attempting to load after the initial render.
I’ve had some trouble with sites which communicate between themselves too. (Airlines do this a lot).
All in all, I’d say my browsing experience is normal to the extent that I don’t do a lot of browsing to new sites. I’ve got a good running list for noscript, but any new sites with lots of dependencies and media to load usually requires a couple refreshed after an updated rule list.
That said, one has to get used to making those configs every time a new site is browsed (or a previous site changes significantly what it does), but really, for some of us, the experience after the fact is well worth the investment, as browsing and reading become sane again.
I'd expect standard Firefox's protection + popular plugins to be good enough to reduce creepiness of everyday adtech. If you really don't like to be tracked, then the Tor browser may be a better bet. At least you'll look like every other Tor user, rather than stand out with your custom config and a niche-of-niches browser.