I became fully aware of this when a few months ago, my Xiaomi smart TV turned on by itself and displayed an AD to subscribe to Netflix (I did have the Netflix app installed because I had an account a while ago, but I had already unsubscribed, I simply forgot to uninstall the app).
Needless to say, from that moment onwards, no wifi and no ethernet for the TV. I got an Xbox with Kodi connected to it. I am not saying the Xbox is immune to data harvesting (probably they collect a fair bit), but feels less intrusive and obnoxious than the whole package of the smart TV.
So the ideal browser is a concept that is every day more and more elusive.
For my private use, I am using an older Mac with some memory consumption issues, so until I upgrade, I am using safari because it's the most lightweight, and while the extension support is the smallest of all, at least for very major things you are still covered.
For work, the Mac I am using is way more powerful, and yet I find strange issues. Vivaldi dies if I open more than 60-70 tabs at once but it doesn't even really matter, because all the Chromium based browsers that have said "don't worry, we will keep maintaining Manifest V2" feel like they are on a "danger zone" to me.
And then, I try to use Firefox and while the extension support is the most complete, many times I am finding unresponsive pages (usually tools like Google Meet, which I need to use because of work) or even worse: profile files get messed up and I start getting an error "There was an error, that's all we know" every time I try to log into any service using Google SSO.
So to summarize, at this rate I will have to migrate to Qutebrowser... or Lynx.
SongTradr recently acquired 7digital. They plan to put the Bandcamp catalogue in there, so my biggest fear is that they get rid of Bandcamp as a separate product and just force everyone to use 7digital.
That would make sense, considering they fired most writers (which is one of the things that was making Bandcamp special) and would confirm that everyone who said "The buyer doesn't understand what they are buying" were 100% correct. For them, Bandcamp was some sort of "itunes store for weird music".
If the artist is unhappy with what they get in streaming, they usually withdraw their catalogue and offer their music via some alternative path (bandcamp, etc...) I don't think it's up to the users to decide how do artists want to be compensated.
A totally different story is: "I pirate because I can and because I want", but do not try to pass pirating as some sort of utopian "information wants to be free" BS
Needless to say, from that moment onwards, no wifi and no ethernet for the TV. I got an Xbox with Kodi connected to it. I am not saying the Xbox is immune to data harvesting (probably they collect a fair bit), but feels less intrusive and obnoxious than the whole package of the smart TV.