Your browser is your gateway to the digital world. Why not make sure it’s a safe ride?

Privacy, Browsers, and You

Google and Ads

Forbes wrote an article talking about Google and the privacy disclosure around Chrome a while ago. All that is about the same, and they’re gearing up to disable adblocking capabilities. Makes sense, given that Google makes most of its money via ads.

Chrome has a lot of functionality, I’ll admit it. Having said that, Firefox has been pretty much universally better for my personal life, while Brave has been better for my work life.

Firefox for Personal

Firefox has container tabs, which allows you to keep your shopping totally isolated from your email and banking and all that. I won’t get into cookies and cross-site tracking, but basically, think of it as sites can see where you’ve been. Imagine a passport but for your time at the mall and getting judgmental looks at Target when they see you were just shopping at Walmart…now imagine having a unique passport for every store instead!

That’s what container tabs do: I have a unique container (passport) for Google products, another for banking, another for personal stuff, etc. For anyone who thinks incognito tabs do this and I’m advocating for snake oil here, you’re half right: incognito tabs are separated from your main window and any session data is removed from your machine once the window is closed, but any sites open in the same incognito session can still track you visiting the other. Container tabs are effectively incognito windows for each purpose/site you set them up for, as opposed to a single isolated session.

I would also highly recommend installing the Multi-Account Container Tabs extension to make the container tabs even more convenient – it lets you define your own containers and set certain pages to always open in a given container, reducing the potential for accidentally opening tabs in the wrong container (or not using a container at all).

I now have it set up so everything Google opens in a Google container no matter where it’s clicked from, and no other containers can get information from them that would otherwise be shared.

Firefox does require a little hardening and tweaking to make it secure, but once it’s there, it’s excellent.

What Can I Do About It?

So what’s next? I switched to Proton Mail (see my DeGoogle’ing my Life post for more details) a few years ago for everything “important” and haven’t looked back. A lot of this comes down to convenience/flexibility vs. privacy (yet again) and is well described by this post.

Personally, I like supporting services like Proton Mail, and I find the offering very worth it. Proton also offers a Calendar, Drive, and VPN included with the cost of its paid tiers. Google offers those services as well, but I find the Proton versions all to be snappier than Gmail is now. It’s like being transported back in time to the age of Google innovation, but with Proton instead, and with a focus on privacy and user rather than profit.

As for talking with family about this sort of thing, check out this fun post from Mozilla on having the “Tech Talk” with your loved ones!

Organizing Large Numbers of Tabs

Some browsers have a wonderful feature called Tab Groups (e.g. Firefox) that let you group tabs and collapse those groups. It makes organizing large sets of tabs super convenient.

For my work as an individual contributor, I didn’t need anything like this because my work was pretty focused and more in-depth. However, as an engineering manager, I was in sore need of tab organization since my work has become much broader and more breadth-focused. I have upwards of 30 tabs in at least 6 groups (basic tools, leadership/management, project work, my team-specific items, to read) at minimum that I switch between pretty regularly.

Being able to keep this information available and organized has been helpful to avoid things slipping between the cracks or letting something slip out of mind because it fell out of sight for too long.