Software Spotlight: Firefox
Firefox is an amazing browser that is open-source, created by Mozilla. It is known for keeping user privacy, security, and personal data safe. There are other browsers that are set out to do this as well, but we believe Firefox is leading this charge, and it's also the default browser on most Linux distributions.
Mozilla's Firefox browser is renowned these days, but they honestly don't have has much of the market as they should. Most of the market is owned by Google's Chrome browser (yes this means Edge too), which is very unfortunate in our opinion. Google Chrome is full of ad-tracking technology that is meant to do one thing: vacuum as much user data as possible so that they can either use it for advertising themselves, or sell it to someone else. They have these types of tracking technology in every service they provide; they even scan your Gmail account. Since browser cookies are being phased out, they are even creating a new technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). If you're interested in learning whether your browser is using this technology, you can check at the EFF FLoC page.
Luckily for us Firefox users, we need not worry about FLoC or cross-site tracking (as much) because Mozilla is doing everything they can to stop tracking technologies, not make them more advanced. They are also the only browser to offer Multi-Account Containers , which are browser add-ons that allow you to create profiles for the sites you visit, assign them a color, and know for a fact that accounts between different containers can't glean information from each other. They also created an add-on called Facebook Containers which solely meant to stop Facebook from following you around the internet by spying on what you're doing in other browser tabs. Ultimately, we recommend against using social media (at least non-federated) as a whole, but we especially recommend deleting your accounts on services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit and others due to the many privacy issues they all have. If you're unaware of these issues, please do some searching on some of the subjects to learn about them. If you want something that is easily digestable and doesn't require you to go off into a rabbit-hole of research, we recommend watching the movie "The Social Dilemma" to get the basic idea.
Firefox also comes with built-in Enhanced Tracking Protection which helps protect against Social media trackers, cross-site tracking cookies, fingerprinters, cryptominers, and other tracking content.
Firefox is an amazing all-around browser, and it's the best (in our opinion) if you care at all about your privacy and security online!