💾 Archived View for xiu.smol.pub › 2022-09-01-browsers-life-choices captured on 2023-01-29 at 15:41:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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For the last few days, I've been trying out three new web browsers — amfora (cli), bombadillo (cli) and Min (gui) — and have become very heartened at how simple and fast they are.
No joke, when I alt-tab from anything to Firefox these days, there's a 1-2 second delay before the application loads up. Until last week I'd convinced myself I made the right choice switching from Chrome to FF, but I'm getting the sense that the Big 5 browsers might all be kinda same-same but different.
Maybe it's the same story with the Big 5 anything anywhere — social platforms, tech companies, creative agencies, SMEs. When you're competing for widespread adoption, there are certain sacrifices you have make in order to maintain a competitive advantage. And competitive business culture means you make it. And those sacrifices just happen to include speed, simplicity and performance... and maybe sometimes privacy, freedom and humanity too.
I do see Firefox as a step up from Chrome because privacy, degoogle, "un-BUMMER" and all that. And so far, I've had a more stable experience from doing this as compared to the later stages of my Chrome use. But I'm fidgety now and think it might be time to switch again.
It's not that I want my apps to load up faster, it's that when compared to Min and the command-line stuff I've been playing with lately, my battery-hungry Firefox gives me a heavier feeling to use.
It's the same heavy feeling I get when I realise I've hoarded 300GB of old photos, documents and other files I probably don't need. The same feeling I used to get when my home was full of clutter. I don't like that feeling. Some clutter gives me comfort, yes, but the rest is...
Well, I don't know what it is, but for now I hypothesise it's evidence of a neuroses conditioned into me by consumer culture. It's the 100 Band-Aids pasted over the tiny papercut of FOMO "just in case" I need it later.
As much as I'd like to just rip them all off, I reckon I'll just quietly change my system default browser and contemplate my life choices.
Bombadillo browser (for gopher and gemini)
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