I'm trying to access a few regional streaming networks and sports archives that are geo-blocked in my country. I really want to avoid installing full desktop VPN clients because they heavily mess with my system configurations, drain my battery, and slow down my background downloads. Is there a simple, secure in-browser alternative that doesn't track my data?

I had the exact same frustration trying to watch regional football matches, and I completely switched to lightweight tools for that reason. From my experience, installing the ZoogVPN extension is the cleanest workaround because it acts as a dedicated vpn private browser solution. It routes your browser traffic through an encrypted tunnel without affecting the rest of your system. It's completely ad-free, runs smoothly on older hardware, and gives you 10GB of free data a month, which is more than enough for streaming.