I've been using Firefox for 6+months now as my primary browser. Once used to the slightly different UI I've not noticed any difference in day to day browsing.
Only complaint - and this is my fault for enabling it and not a Firefox issue - is that if I used a container for Google, reCAPTCHAs are a huge huge huge pain in the arse now and take many attempts to pass. This is (I guess) because the Google cookie cannot track your general web usage (since your google cookie is in a container that only works on google domains, rather than general web properties) so it is harder to distinguish you from a bot. Also the dev tools are not as nice, but that is a niggle.
Search for the "Buster" plugin. It uses the sound captcha to automatize the process. Works great, though sometimes the sound option is "not available", but those are the least in my case.
Oh DDG gas been my primary search engine for ages now. Highly recommend DDG. No CAPTCHAS there - it is just on random other sites that use reCAPTCHA that are a pain now as I believe (I don't know for sure) that Google relies on your Google cookie(s) that they have associated with your account - if you have sandboxed Google then there is no "normal" browsing history to check so you look like a bot. Annoying, but not really a big deal.
I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?
> I don't think having proxied Google search results will solve the reCAPTCHA menace since you presumably won't get the Google cookie(s)? If Google still cookie you when using startpage then that kinda defeats the point surely?
Let me be clear. I'm not taking about SOCKS proxies. In this context I'm saying that both DDG and StartPage are acting as anonymizing proxies for Bing and Google.
Whatever DDG does to Bing, it makes it worse. I recently switched from DDG to Bing and the difference is colossal - 95% of the time it’s as good as Google.
Only complaint - and this is my fault for enabling it and not a Firefox issue - is that if I used a container for Google, reCAPTCHAs are a huge huge huge pain in the arse now and take many attempts to pass. This is (I guess) because the Google cookie cannot track your general web usage (since your google cookie is in a container that only works on google domains, rather than general web properties) so it is harder to distinguish you from a bot. Also the dev tools are not as nice, but that is a niggle.