Intro

The modern web is horrible. Really. It was already for a while, but it becomes more and more horrible as time goes on.

Let me give you a quick example. Around 2014 I learnt to play the guitar. I did so "by myself", meaning with the help of YouTube tutorials and online "tabs" and "chords" sheets. For the non-guitarists: Those are basically a form of music notation that is dumbed down enough that the average guitarist can understand it. For the guitarists, that can sight-read: Who am I kidding, those don't exist. Anyways, one of the main sites that I used to access this form of dumbed down sheet music was Ultimate-Guitar.

It was great. On Ultimate-Guitar you could find tabs and chords for basically every song younger me could think of. Sure, there was some sort of "Pro Tabs" version for well-known songs, that wasn't free, but the community-made versions are perfectly fine most of the time. And importantly, all the quailty of life features were free, easily accessible and available even on the mobile app!

Fast-forward to today, when I open the Ultimate-Guitar homepage, I'm greeted with:

• A cookie popup, lying in my face that they "value [my] privacy".
• A window in the top right asking me if I'd like to login with my Google account.
• A banner at the top, reminding me of a "Sale", which is only available for the next 24 hours (as shown by the countdown, which resets after clearing the cookies).
• A "Shorts"-like video feed of people playing guitar.
• A list of popular songs featured in the center, which all link to the Pro+ tabs that need the subscription.

On mobile it is appearently even worse.

Sure, the option to just search a song via the search field, click one of the free listings with a good review score, and just use that still exists, but I think one can kind of understand my frustration here. I mean, this doesn't even take into account all the tracking my site is doing behind the scenes. Playing guitar can be an expensive hobby and you bet your data is worth a lot when you visit this site.

At this point you might say:

• "Oh well, a company has to make money somehow!"
• "They don't owe you anything! The community contributions know they don't contribute to charity!"
• "What surprises you here? This is just like any other site!"

And while the idealistic part of my brain wishes the world would be different, I mostly agree with this sentiment.

Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

Well, I do. But, in this guide I'll show you how you can actually become one of the players instead of being the ball that is kicked around the football field.

What Can I Do?

Let's analyze the situation. The website has some resource that you want from it. Maybe it is sheet music, maybe some funny meme or maybe a video. Maybe it is even a combination of things, like sheet music that is displayed in a way that makes it easy to follow, like on a website that automatically scrolls down the sheet music as you play along.

Before, we have only considered the ways the website wants us to access the resource. These ways usually are not in our best interest.

De-Shittifying a Website

So how do you de-shittify a website?

Well, let's start at the basics…

The Browser

The program that you actually use to access a website is called a browser. Choosing the right browser is of course a subjective decision. Based on statistics I feel confident in telling you: You are using the wrong one.

• Google Chrome is not your friend.
• Microsoft Edge is not your friend. (And also mostly just new paint applied to Google Chrome).
• Safari is not your friend.
• Mozilla Firefox can be bullied into being your friend.

There are more options available, but if you know of them, there's a good chance that you could've skipped this section in the first place. This is a rabbithole that I might go into in another post. If you just want a recommendation: Pick Firefox or a well-maintained derivative of it. Note that this recommendation also applies to phones (specifically Android, I don't know too much about the options on iOS).

"But I just like the interface of Chrome and hate Firefox's!"

Really? Well there's also Ungoogled Chromium, but you'll have a much better time with Firefox.

So what do I mean with bullying Firefox? Firefox is fine, but for various reasons it does have some default settings, that you might not agree with, such as using Google as your default search engine. You could of course change all these settings and I encourage you to do so!

A nice way I found for doing this, is the Firefox Profilemaker.

Extensions

So, now that you've chosen your browser, let's take a look at extensions. And here's were you're going to have issues, if you haven't switched from Google Chrome or worse are using Safari.

And here's the part where I need to warn you a little. The internet is a dangerous place and your browser is the main program you likely use to interact with it. Luckily, browsers have come a long way and are generally regarded as very secure pieces of software with lots of security measures and the browser vendors are regarded as trustworthy (at least in terms of not spreading malware intentionally).

Now extensions on the other hand are much less rigorously analyzed. They have the option to run on every site you visit and can send any information on that page back to whoever wrote that extension. This is basically a malware-coder's dream!

So what do I recommend? Don't install extensions? Yes, with a few exceptions. Notably, extensions that you install should be open source and widely used.

Here are my recommendations…

uBlock Origin

On the modern internet you need an AdBlocker and uBlock Origin is the best option. It exists for Firefox on Android as well. I don't really have more to say about that.

Importantly, uBlock Origin does not exist for Google Chrome anymore and is likely to be dropped on Microsoft Edge as well. Safari hasn't been supported for a while now.

Notably, these browsers aren't unsupported due to the uBlock Origin developers disliking them, but due to the browser vendors moving to a different extension format that does not allow the extension to function. There is uBlock Origin Lite available for these browsers, but unlike the Lite versions of snacks and drinks this is not just a downgrade in taste, but also functionality.

Consent-O-Matic

Did you see the cookie banner, when opening this site? No? But I thought the EU forced all websites to have one?!

Nope. This is a misconception many people seem to have, but you don't have to track your user using cookies. And if you don't track your users using cookies, you don't need to show them an annoying cookie banner.

So you hate the GDPR for introducing cookie banners as well?

No, I applaud the EU for introducing the GDPR. Websites that use dark patterns and not-actually-compliant cookie banners/popups are to blame. You can read more about it here.

I want to mention a positive example of how it should be done instead. The site geizhals.de, which lets you compare prices across various online sellers mostly for tech hardware, has a cookie popup like normal. While the regular popup is already quite usable with a simple decline all button, I don't even see that when using Firefox. This is because Firefox sends a Do-Not-Track (DNT) signal to the websites you visit with it and unlike basically every other site I've come across, geizhals.de notifies you that they honor the request not to be tracked and do not show you a cookie banner! How cool is that?! This is how it should've been mandated by the EU in the first place!

Anyways, there's actually a browser extension that can click the cookie banners for you, to get you a little closer to that reality! Consent-O-Matic automatically detects most cookie banners and clicks the most privacy-preserving options for you! This is especially helpful for those cookie popups that artificially loads forever whenever you don't just click accept, as the extension hides away the process of handling the popup so you can already start reading the page!

LibRedirect

To explain what LibRedirect does, you kind of need to know what alternative frontends are. So while the extension definitely belongs in this list, let's just move on to the next section to understand why.

Alternative Frontends

Sometimes ad-blocking and cookie banner handling is not enough. Sometimes the website is enshittified to a level that is just not bearable anymore. In that case you can check if there is an alternative frontend available for that site.

"What is an alternative frontend?" you might ask. Imagine instead of visiting the website yourself, you ask a friend to do it for you. The friend then notes down the information from the site that you actually want in a way that is actually pleasant to read and gives it back to you.

This is the idea behind an alternative frontend. There are many alternative frontends available for various different websites. LibRedirect automatically redirects you to alternative frontends for websites of your choice.

Here are some alternative frontends that are supported by LibRedirect:

Sounds awesome, right?! Well, there's a catch. The sites and services that you circumvent by using these alternative frontends are not a fan of this concept. You not visiting their website means they have less power in controlling your user experience and using you to their advantage. By design, alternative frontends send the requests to the original servers for you to protect your privacy. However this means that instances, so specific websites that host an alternative frontend, will send more requests to the original service the more people use it, ultimately resulting in the instance to be rate limited and effectively blocked. Alternatively some websites may actively try to detect alternative frontends to block them.

So alternative frontends are suffering from success… What can you do? Well, it is a little more involved, but you could try self-hosting alternative frontends that you'd like to use yourself! Most of them are rather easy to get running and you don't necessarily need to make them available for other people to use. Admittedly, this is kind of out-of-reach for most novice users.