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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2580 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been using Brave on and off for years now. It started as an FU to the cancellers and a gesture of support for Brendan Eich, and continued as an FU for Big Tech, but in the end I settled on some fork of Firefox (I think some extension I was using wasn't fully working on Chrome based browsers). I would still fire it up every once in a while (the privacy-heavy fork of Firefox wasn't agreeing with a whole bunch of web-apps like Zoom, Teams, or Slack), and recently, after an update, I see them announcing "vertical tabs". I'm sure it's not their idea, browsers are pretty ridiculously customizable at this point, so someone must have done something like that before, and if not, the layout is reminiscent of GMail. In any case, I freakin' love it! If you compulsively open new tabs, this unclutters the screen to a ridiculous degree. This might be just in my head, but it also feels like it's running smoother than the other browsers I have.

Pretty wild to watch it go from "poor man's Chrome" to something that can stand on it's own.

It's sad that one must use forks of Firefox to get the customization that used to be Firefox's selling point. It seems all they're interested in doing is focusing on privacy and otherwise competing to be Chrome in terms of UX. The enshittification of the web in the last decade isn't enough, so we have to endure shit browsers too?

I settled on Vivaldi. It's a proprietary Chrome-based browser that's sort of a descendant of Opera. It's very customizable, but development is slow. It's frustrating that it suffers from a lot of bugs, but I was simply even more frustrated with Firefox.

I'm trying vivaldi and like it: haven't even needed any addons yet, it's that customizable. But it's got an annoying bug where the browser crashes if you move your mouse too fast in the main menu. It's tolerable because you don't need the menu for much, but wow that's dumb.

It's sad that one must use forks of Firefox to get the customization that used to be Firefox's selling point.

Funnily enough Brave is actually a fork of Chrome. I think with FF you get enough customization that you can actually achieve more or less the same effect, they just don't offer it out of the box. In any case it's pretty telling there doesn't seem to be much happening with it. More surprising is Chrome feels pretty stagnant as well, though maybe there's a whole bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff there that I'm just not seeing.

I think with FF you get enough customization that you can actually achieve more or less the same effect, they just don't offer it out of the box.

Yes, but it requires CSS tweaks which, if you aren't fluent in that language, can take several hours to troubleshoot when an update screws everything up. And in my experience that happened several times a year. Eventually I just stopped updating it, which isn't a good idea for security reasons.

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