I recommend Librewolf. It's a privacy focused fork of firefox. They apply their own patches to every new firefox release so you always have the newest features of firefox minus the bloat.
Comes preinstalled with ublock-origin, no Telemetry, no Mozilla VPN, no pocket, no prompts to create a mozilla account, no ads on the start page, default search engine is ddg and deletes all cookies (exept for whitelisted sites) on launch.
Didn't HEVC work by default for Years now?