Cellular connectivity has provided impressive Internet growth in Africa over the past decade, but according to the ITU, in 2017, Africa only had 20% of the population using the Internet; a laggard compared to 40% in Asia & the Pacific and the 50% world average. We have connected the easy half of the population and connecting the next half of the world will require new innovative thinking.

In this talk, we investigate how eight popular browser extensions that focus on improving user privacy affect browser and system performance for the two desktop browsers with the highest market share, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and how they fare against no extensions. We evaluate if privacy-focused extensions may not only improve user privacy, but may also improve user experience based on intuitive metrics like websites' page-load times, number of fetched resources, as well as response sizes, which we measure from two vantage points, one in the United States and one in Germany. Furthermore, considering the ubiquity of mobile platforms, we explore how these extensions could affect battery runtime by leveraging CPU time as a proxy indicator. Our results contradict Google's recent claim that extensions inspect and block requests negatively affect browser performance. In fact, we show that a single privacy-focused extension can improve over no extensions on almost all metrics, and that even a combination of multiple privacy-focused extensions utilizing blocking request introspection may not negatively affect user experience.