Good maintained privacy Add-On/settings set that takes usability into account?

Posted by Foo Bar on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Foo Bar
Published on 2013-11-08T15:27:47Z Indexed on 2013/11/08 16:00 UTC
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For some weeks I've been trying to find a good set of Firefox Addons that give me a good portion of privacy/security without losing to much of usability. But I can't seem to find a nice combination of add-ons/settings that I'm happy with.

Here's what I tried, together with the pros and cons that I discovered:

  • HTTPS Everywhere: Has only pro's: just install and be happy (no interaction needed), loads known pages SLL-encrypted, is updated fairly often
  • NoScript - Fine, but needs a lot of fine-tuning, often maintained, mainly blocks all non-HTML/CSS Content, but the author sometimes seems to do "untrustworthy" decission
  • RequestPolicy - seems dead (last activity 6 months ago, has some annoying bugs, official support mail address is dead), but the purpose of this is really great: gives you full control over cross-site requests: blocks by default, let's you add sites to a whitelist, once this is done it works interaction-less in the background
  • AdBlock Edge: blocks specific cross-site requests from a pre-defined whitelist (can never be fully sure, need to trust others)
  • Disconnect: like AdBlock Edge, just looking different, has no interaction possibilities (can never be fully sure, need to trust others, can not interact even if I wanted to)
  • Firefox own Cookie Managment (block by default, whitelist specific sites), after building own whitelist it does it's work in the background and I have full control

All These addons together basically block everything unsecure. But there are a lot of redundancies: NoScript has a mixed-content blocker, but FF has it's own for a while now. Also the Cookie blocker from NoScript is reduntant to my FF-Cookie setting. NoScript also has an XSS-blocker, which is redundant to RequestPolicy. Disconnect and AdBlock are extremly redundant, but not fully. And there are some bugs (especially RequestPolicy). And RequestPolicy seems to be dead. All in all, this list is great but has these heavy drawbacks.

My favourite set would be "NoScript Light" (only script blocking, without all the additonal redundant-to-other-addons hick-hack it does) + HTTPS Everywhere + RequestPolicy-clone (maintained, less buggy), because RequestPolicy makes all other "site-blockers" obsolete (because it blocks everything by default and let's me create a whitelist). But since RequestPolicy is buggy and seems to be dead I have to fallback to AdBlock Edge and Disconnect, which don't block all and and need more maintaining (whitelist updates, trust-check).

Are there addons that fulfill my wishes?

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