I wrote a fairly long comment touching on why most browser and extension privacy features are just theatre and in reality tend to reduce privacy:
reddit.com/r/GrapheneOS/c
Services like Panopticlick are also incredibly misleading. Their approach is flawed and the data is tainted.
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Also gave a shout out to Apple for shipping some genuinely useful privacy features in Safari. There are not many attempts at browser privacy features that I can say that about. It's nearly all privacy theatre. Safari does that too, but they shipped a few genuinely good features.
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In general, extensions reduce privacy. Changing site-visible settings reduces privacy. Deviating from standard content filtering lists reduces privacy. If you use uBlock Origin and you deviate from the standard filters, that can be detected. Sites can enumerate what is blocked.
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I disagree with this take. There is "the site" and there is all the 3rd parties "invited" by "the site". Not connecting to the 3rd parties will significantly lower the data mined & sent to countless 3rd parties -- no way this is a reduction of privacy.
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That's a misinterpretation of what I said. I called it a useful, opportunistic privacy improvement falling into the same school as antivirus of enumerating badness. It's not a fundamental privacy improvement. Ultimately, it doesn't really work, and just targets low-hanging fruit.
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However, it generally contributes to fingerprinting, which makes it harder to provide actual fundamental privacy improvements. If it's broadly used (i.e. the default) and has a standard list that's not configurable, it's providing the opportunistic benefits without the damage.
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I'm not interested in an arms war against the lowest common denominator of tracking but rather achieving real, fundamental privacy improvements. The Tor Browser approach is the one that's workable and there's a reason it doesn't bother with trying to block things case by case.
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Third party tracking doesn't need to involve third party assets in the browser and often doesn't. As I said, this is low-hanging fruit, and most is aimed at gathering aggregate data rather than actually tracking people. It doesn't try to avoid blocking. It's the least scary part.