No decent alternatives

Rather than retread what's already been written, I'll just link this (warning: inflammatory language):

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/ghost/browsers.html

I pretty much agree with everything the author says. There are reasons to avoid the major browser vendors, but the underdog Firefox is increasingly losing marketshare due to user-hostile missteps by upper management. However, since it's the best alternative currently, it's very difficult to switch to another browser without making some steep compromises. Forks exist, but they all suck in various ways, whether they're owned by an ad company (Waterfox), have toxic developers (Palemoon) or just plain redundant (Librefox). Even if you use a slimmer browser like Netsurf or qutebrowser, they're lacking on the adblocking/anti-tracking and extensions front. Being a Chromium based browser, qutebrowser does not support DNS-over-HTTPS out of the box (without some arcane command line flag that doesn't actually work properly) and the smaller browsers pale in comparison to UBlock Origin when it comes to blocking crap on the web. It almost seems like an all-or-nothing ordeal. Either your browser has to support so little features that tracking is somewhat impossible (text-based browsers) or you have to go all the way or accept some tracking (this is ignoring system level DNS based blocking, which does not fully address the issue). There's also just the issue with manpower. These projects are often led by only a couple of people, who cannot hope to compete with the resources of multi-billion dollar corporations. Even if we switch to forks, not much can be done by Google's capture of the web standards, so indirectly we're still succumbing to Google anyway.

Aside: I have 8 privacy addons on Firefox *and* DNS based blocking via dnscrypt-proxy and it's still not enough.

On the search engine front, these are what's recommended by privacyguides.org:

https://privacyguides.org/providers/search-engines/

I've already complained about DDG before, being proprietary and having a bloated website (2MB everytime I enter a search result, unacceptably slow). Searx is rather janky and you have to trust the logging policy of the instances. Startpage.com has been acquired by an ad/malware company, so the risk is just not acceptable. The other solutions again boil down to trust (but do you really have a choice?) and quality of search results. With the major search providers like Google and Bing having a monopoly, many providers just delegate to them. While these search enginers may move the privacy goalposts elsewhere (be tracked by someone else instead of Big Tech), these major providers will ultimately control what you get. There's been complaints over the years of the quality of Google's search results declining in quality and this is not a coincidence. They're designed to show you ads and blogspam rather than actual useful results and it's becoming harder and harder to find ordinary websites.

//portal.mozz.us/gemini/marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-crisis.gmi

I could go on about other software, but I think this should suffice for now. I'll close off by linking to a treatise on how much software sucks nowadays:

https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/