Security and Privacy Addons, How-to's and general Best practises to surf the WEB

[A]

I use FireFox:

• With third party cookies disabled.
• Adblock Plus, NoScript, Better Privacy, Beef Taco, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere.
• LastPass, XMarks and WOT.
  
• Cautious of clicking links and downloading ( especially cracked software )

How do you maintain sanity?

[anon]

• 95% of my browsing is done in private tabs.
• No preferred language for Web pages other than English is set.
• Passwords manager disabled (I use KeePass for tracker accounts and my brain for the rest).
• Third-party cookies, HTTP referers, geolocation, permanent storage and the application cache are disabled.
• Fanboy's Opera anti-tracking blocklist deals with ads and tracking cookies.
• Scroogle is used instead of Google for searching, and when I need any other of Google's services, I use them behind an elite proxy inside a private tab.
• Java and Flash are disabled by default, and only allowed for YouTube and Grooveshark, which are browsed in private tabs. NotScripts is also used to deal with unwanted JS code, in WL+SO mode.
• History is disabled, and images are set to "never" be checked for updates on the server.
• I use Acrylic DNS Proxy to permanently cache DNS requests across restarts, as well as the mm.cfg file (which allows you to control some hidden Flash global settings) with these two set:
  

  DisableDeviceFontEnumeration=1
  DisableSockets=1

• And common sense, obviously.

I use Opera and that's all I can remember right now. This thread contains a bunch of interesting tips, too.

[Expeto]

How do you maintain sanity?

Well, only proven way of maintaining the sanity in privacy matters, is not giving a fuck about your privacy

To damage your sanity further, visit the following links
http://samy.pl/evercookie/
http://privacy.net/analyze/ >> FST thread -> check for some extra tips
https://panopticlick.eff.org/

[A]

• 95% of my browsing is done in private tabs.
• No preferred language for Web pages other than English is set.
• Passwords manager disabled (I use KeePass for tracker accounts and my brain for the rest).
• Third-party cookies, HTTP referers, geolocation, permanent storage and the application cache are disabled.
• Fanboy's Opera anti-tracking blocklist deals with ads and tracking cookies.
• Scroogle is used instead of Google for searching, and when I need any other of Google's services, I use them behind an elite proxy inside a private tab.
• Java and Flash are disabled by default, and only allowed for YouTube and Grooveshark, which are browsed in private tabs. NotScripts is also used to deal with unwanted JS code, in WL+SO mode.
• History is disabled, and images are set to "never" be checked for updates on the server.
• I use Acrylic DNS Proxy to permanently cache DNS requests across restarts, as well as the mm.cfg file (which allows you to control some hidden Flash global settings) with these two set:
  

  DisableDeviceFontEnumeration=1
  DisableSockets=1

• And common sense, obviously.

I use Opera and that's all I can remember right now. This thread contains a bunch of interesting tips, too.

Expected an informative post from you and you deliver
Out of that, I am interested in knowing why you do this:

History is disabled, and images are set to "never" be checked for updates on the server.

And it always mystified me of you using opera instead of firefox. Firefox has always been the logical choice for me from its inception, with its huge plethora of addons and it being open source with a big community following. In short, I am amazed how you survived without those addons since Opera has just started implementing it.

How do you maintain sanity?

Well, only proven way of maintaining the sanity in privacy matters, is not giving a fuck about your privacy

To damage your sanity further, visit the following links
http://samy.pl/evercookie/
http://privacy.net/analyze/ >> FST thread -> check for some extra tips
https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Better informed than ignorant

[anon]

Out of that, I am interested in knowing why you do this:

Disabled history helps avoid the CSS hack, and long-term caching of images makes sites load much faster. If it appears the site has updated a resource in particular, I'll just force my browser to redownload it.

And it always mystified me of you using opera instead of firefox. Firefox has always been the logical choice for me from its inception, with its huge plethora of addons and it being open source with a big community following. In short, I am amazed how you survived without those addons since Opera has just started implementing it.

I was an IE and then Firefox user back in the day, until a friend recommended me to try Opera, and I did. I had a 1Mbit connection then, and the thing felt blazing fast compared to the other two. So I customized it a bit and kept on using that. These days I'm so used to its UI I'd have a really hard time switching to something else (and I've tried). So for good or bad, I'll keep on using Opera.

And I'll confess I was largely ignorant about this stuff in those years - the only measure I took from the ones I do now is disabling referers.