Hister: A free & self-hosted personal search engine

Adding an extra extension still adds some fingerprinting entropy, so “no need to worry” is too strong (we could also argue about supply chain security and trusting another extension etc). Yes, it’s true that JS enabled increases fingerprinting surface a lot, but that does not mean extra extensions stop mattering. Also, the “especially Firefox + any extension installed” part seems misleading as afaik current Firefox uses random moz-extension UUIDs for web-accessible resources specifically to reduce ordinary website fingerprinting of installed extensions.

On the other hand, I agree thatr disabling JS helps but it does not eliminate tracking, and extensions can still affect what servers or sites can see and collect.

Also I never said I was using Firefox.

Maybe I should rephrase my hastily written initial answer as: There is extra risk in using the extension as there is with any extension.

I didn’t mean this to offend you or anything, I still think the project is nice

asciimoo:

ph00lt0:

Please explain yourself here. It seems pretty obvious that DDG has better privacy practices.

It isn’t obvious for me at all. The only verifiable difference is that what they say sounds better from a privacy perspective.

Isn’t trust an integral part of the internet and IT in general though? Don’t I trust you and multiple other parties when installing the extension? And I’m not speaking about just trusting your code, I mean trusting the extension really is exactly the same code as in your repo etc.

Also since you’re the author of Searx too: Why should I use this then instead of Google?

In the end the internet is about a lot of trust imo.

Edit: stupid me linked the wrong Firefox article, should be corrected now