My practical approach to surfing the web safely

The web is a dangerous place. While the modern browser security architecture protects against many threats, security vulnerabilities are found and fixed every day. Through security exploits, malicious websites can read user data and execute arbitrary code on the user’s machine. But there are more mundane threats. Ads and trackers invade our privacy, track us across sites and send our browsing history to tech oligarchs. On many sites, cookie notices, popups, “AI chatbots” and “accessibility overlays” get in the way of reading the actual content. Megabytes of third-party content slow down the loading performance. The execution of third-party scripts keeps the processor busy and drains the battery. Threat modeling There are many approaches to safe and private browsing depending on the threats and attacks you need to protect yourself against. One extreme is an unmodified Chrome or Edge browser. It shows all ads, loads all trackers, allows all cookies, incorporates GenAI chatbots,…