💾 Archived View for cron4.fi › gemlog › surf.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 11:37:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
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If you haven't tried Surf, the minimalist web browser by Suckless, I recommend trying it out and using it for a while for all your browsing.
I'm not recommending it because it would be the best web browser out there. In fact, it's actually quite slow compared to other minimalist web browsers like qutebrowser, and it has a tendency to crash when loading heavy, bloated web pages. Just try going to Youtube or Gmail.
Instead, getting used to Surf is worthwhile because its limited feature set helps you unlearn some bad browsing habits.
Before I tried out Surf it wasn't unusual for me to have 10+ tabs open simultaneously. Now I manage fine most of the time with less than five tabs and I feel only more focused and productive because of it.
Surf helped me in this because, as you certainly know, it has no tabs. I had to be really mindful about my surfing, and I learned to leave unneccessary web pages behind, refind neccessary ones, and bookmark the frequently visited ones.
Surf also taught me to rely less on browser history. Before, when using Firefox, I used very often autocompletion based on history when revisiting pages. Surf, in contrast, has no permanent history by default. Thus I learned to always bookmark the sites I knew I'd need in the future.
Even though using Surf made me a better browser user, it hasn't been my go-to browser for a long time. It lacks features such as Firefox's link-find or Qutebrowsers even better 'f'-command that allows to click on links just by typing on the keyboard. As previously mentioned, Surf also has trouble loading bloated pages and loads pages in general slower than its alternatives.