And no, DDG is not a friend. Besides having their own LLM-bot, they also still have microsoft ads fuckery going on.

At some point with this level of purity testing, you will just be hurting yourself, and making the people around you annoyed though.

You basically want companies to exist while not being profitable for idealistic reasons.

You’ll say you don’t of course, but the collection of people like you all have similar but different enough red flags that the end result is that you who care idealistically end up having basically 0 effect on the market except making any company that tries to appeal to you walk on egg shells to the point they fail or give up and go for a broader audience.

I mean, I personally wouldn’t mind paying 50 bucks a year for a proper open source, well maintained browser, but that will never happen because the type of person like me, also is probably pretty nitpicky, and tends to have ridiculous things they consider as red flags even if they could just ignore a feature or disable it, and that would mean there is no common paid browser possible.

We are then back to there being free browsers that have many reasons to be hated but that the common person is fine enough with.