Knowing some folks that work on "major-browser-vendor" security in the era of Mythos-found-and-exploited vulnerabilities everywhere, the thought of running completely random untrusted Javascript on my machine has freaked me out to the point that I run NoScript on all of my machines now.
I've found NoScript actually very usable, as long as you allow yourself to be fairly liberal in marking domains "trusted." I only truly routinely visit a core 10-20 domains that require Javascript, and they're from "reputable" organizations (my bank, employer, etc.) so those all get marked "trusted" quickly and I don't worry about them going forward.
In the "long tail" of random things I click on from HN links, seeing a "You need to enable Javascript to view this app" message is actually a fairly good signal that I don't want to view that app (though you might be surprised how many websites are browsable comfortably---or even more comfortably!---without JS enabled).
One thing I wish NoScript supported was the ability to mark a domain as a "trusted page domain" in the sense of: "HTML served from this domain can load scripts from any domain" (rather than trust being assigned to the domain serving the script itself). Perhaps it has this feature and I just haven't found it.
I do the same exact thing, except I disable JavaScript for all sites by default in uBlock Origin.
Same experience as you, also: many sites actually work well enough without JavaScript, and the ones that do require it to display anything make me pause and ask if I truly want to give that site the privilege of running code on my computer. Majority of the time the answer is no.
> also: many sites actually work well enough without JavaScript
Some work better without JS. The most common are information-based sites with a paywall or signup or whatever. The JS loads some huge wall over the content. Bonus, no cookie popups or another annoyances, and most ads are loaded with JS. Popups are getting ridiculous.
I have a handy little script called `chrome-new` which I use whenever I want to browse one of those few sites that struggles with Firefox. It just starts a clean Chromium with a throw-away profile, then deletes it when I close the browser.
My practical approach is to have a microvm for firefox and a bubblewrap “jail” for a firefox instance that runs on the host. Of course, the config options mentioned here are good too.
I don't understand why author complains about Firefox performance. I use it everyday on laptop and mobile and I don't see the difference to the Chrome or Brave when I visit all my regular sites and all other I find on HN.
She has to play HTML 5 games or something to observe such difference
For Firefox I recommend Cookie AutoDelete 3.8.2 addon. It is possible to configure it to erase all storage (cookies, indexeddb, localSorage and others) after chosen time (default 15s) after changing/leaving domain. It has many other useful options.
Another good addon is ClearURLs 1.27.3 which clears suspicious parameters of query strings on everything what's loaded by page. It sometimes break sites.
Mullvad Browser[1] is an example of just that, ready to go for people in the real world who don't have the time or inclination to mess around with random extensions and `about:config` hacking.
Also surprised the blog author made zero mention of the importance of keeping your OS up to date. Its all very well having a patched and hardened browser but not if you're running it on a vulnerable OS.
For a while, I used a firefox extension called "Temporary Containers" which would, as the name implies, create a temporary container for each site you visit. Combined with specifying some custom rules for ones you want to open in a specific container, that was a very convenient setup. But the extension at some point corrupted my firefox profile and has been unmaintained for a while so I didn't try again. I am not sure what happened and it may have been the combination of extensions that was the cause of that. Sadly, the author passed away, if I remember correctly, and it's been difficult to find maintainers for the project so I gave up on that.
You can still install that extension but from the reported issues the functionality and bugs were increasing with every new firefox version. And obviously that setup only helped with the cookie aspects and not necessarily any security issues from javascript and so on.
I would disable javascript JIT, pdf renderer, graphical acceleration, svg...
And use chromium based browser (I preffer Brave Origin). Using firefox for "secure browsing" does not make much sense in 2026! Mozilla has different priorities! Firefox development is under financed for several years now, and Firefox has weaker security model!
Aren't we in an era when you literally can build your own browser with everything just you need?
I have no knowledge in browsers developement. But in my field it became often easier to make your own tool\app then trying to use third party and make it work for you
We're exactly in that era of insanity that someone will use agent drivel development to cobble together a browser from existing browser sources in exchange for thousands of dollars of compute. Will it be standards conformant? No. Will it have security issues? Yes.
I mean you might be able to if you squint hard enough but the experience of using it would be absolitely piss poor so no. Realistically speaking AI is not even nearly that good yet and buildong a browser is an absolutely huge undertaking
I've found NoScript actually very usable, as long as you allow yourself to be fairly liberal in marking domains "trusted." I only truly routinely visit a core 10-20 domains that require Javascript, and they're from "reputable" organizations (my bank, employer, etc.) so those all get marked "trusted" quickly and I don't worry about them going forward.
In the "long tail" of random things I click on from HN links, seeing a "You need to enable Javascript to view this app" message is actually a fairly good signal that I don't want to view that app (though you might be surprised how many websites are browsable comfortably---or even more comfortably!---without JS enabled).
One thing I wish NoScript supported was the ability to mark a domain as a "trusted page domain" in the sense of: "HTML served from this domain can load scripts from any domain" (rather than trust being assigned to the domain serving the script itself). Perhaps it has this feature and I just haven't found it.
https://noscript.net/
Same experience as you, also: many sites actually work well enough without JavaScript, and the ones that do require it to display anything make me pause and ask if I truly want to give that site the privilege of running code on my computer. Majority of the time the answer is no.
Some work better without JS. The most common are information-based sites with a paywall or signup or whatever. The JS loads some huge wall over the content. Bonus, no cookie popups or another annoyances, and most ads are loaded with JS. Popups are getting ridiculous.
https://xkcd.com/1200/
Another good addon is ClearURLs 1.27.3 which clears suspicious parameters of query strings on everything what's loaded by page. It sometimes break sites.
Mullvad Browser[1] is an example of just that, ready to go for people in the real world who don't have the time or inclination to mess around with random extensions and `about:config` hacking.
Also surprised the blog author made zero mention of the importance of keeping your OS up to date. Its all very well having a patched and hardened browser but not if you're running it on a vulnerable OS.
[1] https://mullvad.net/en/browser
You can still install that extension but from the reported issues the functionality and bugs were increasing with every new firefox version. And obviously that setup only helped with the cookie aspects and not necessarily any security issues from javascript and so on.
This makes you identifiable across containers and subverts the whole idea.
So don't use sync.
And use chromium based browser (I preffer Brave Origin). Using firefox for "secure browsing" does not make much sense in 2026! Mozilla has different priorities! Firefox development is under financed for several years now, and Firefox has weaker security model!