Recently I’ve had time to look at this myself properly. Just like the author, it seems that a modified Firefox is the best compromise. It comes with its own has

Recently I’ve had time to look at this myself properly. Just like the author, it seems that a modified Firefox is the best compromise. It comes with its own hassles, though... Remembering what one changed, manually installing extensions, and what not. Rinse and repeat for every new install. What I’ve ended up with, which I can highly recommend for anyone who’s not satisfied with just Firefox or ungoogled-chromium, is to make a self-compiled bundle with all customizations prepared out-of-the-box. I am certain I’ve already effectively saved time through this. This is a lot more natural if you’re using a distro where this is normal and there are already build setups provided (Arch/NixOS/Gentoo) or you’re already used to this. A great starting point for those on Arch is to clone this AUR PKGBUILD [0] (which also documents and sidesteps the somewhat daunting setting up of a proper FF dev environment) and customize it accordingly. At minimum you probably want to change the search engine and bundled extensions. You could even self-host the fxa stack and switch over from accounts.mozilla.org if you want sync capabilities without leaking data to third parties. I went as far as self-building and self-hosting all my add-ons as well (which just requires a place to put the XPI files), removing any in-extension calling home and banners, changing some icons to fall in line with my color scheme etc. You could do the same with in googled-chromium if that’s your preference. In either case, both u-c and Librewolf are patch sets on top of upstream chromium/FF, so staying up to date with security updates shouldn’t be an issue. [0]: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=firedragon https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=fired...