Fascist technology. Fashtech. The guy behind it is special, and not a in good way. Keep scrolling until you hit the September follow-up at the bottom...
And the latest version allows you to block all AI features in the browser, which is a definite plus point for me. Of course, I'd rather not have the AI there in the first place...but at least the ability to block is better than having it forced on you whether you want it or not (I'm looking at you, Microsoft)
Google is hot garbage now-a-days. I've switched my search engine to noai.duckduckgo.com and, well, it's lackluster at best. It's not entirely their fault. Reddit has an exclusivity deal with Google and it's one of the last remaining places with human-generated content, SOE optimized AI slop dominates the charts. Maybe I've become crap at using search but you have to be _very_ specific and use the absolute correct wording otherwise you get nothing like what you're searching for. I'm going to stick with it for a while but honestly AI is looking and feeling more inevitable, this is anxiety inducing. I can feel my brain shrinking every time I use AI, I feel my agency, learning capability and critical thinking slipping away all while getting ridiculously angry at just how incompetent AI is.
For searching, I've switched over to search.brave.com. Result seems good enough, similar to Google for well known things. It does surface reddit posts. Unfortunately there's an AI summary at the top I'm not sure how to avoid other than scrolling past.
I don't know if it will remember your selection, but there is a settings menu top right corner of the home page that does have a handy AI toggle.
I've used duckduckgo for years now, the first 2-3 pages of results are fine, but after that it doesn't reflect country-specific stuff anymore and goes off track. That's usually enough to get what I need though.
I jumped from Google to Startpage a while back but got a bit bored so I'm currently on Qwant. I think Startpage just anonymises a Google search whereas Qwant has its own index.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/07/firefox-two-week-release-cycle https://www.theregister.com/softwar...-firefox-release-schedule-to-biweekly/5274423 Am i the only one that feels a release every 2 weeks is too often?
Aw, Seamonkey gives me the nostalgic vibes. I have been mainly using Edge (because I'm a lazy ass and that's what we used at work) but lately have been looking at Vivaldi and Firefox (again). It's tricky --I want to like Firefox, but I really like the deep levels of customisability of Vivaldi. Search engine is DuckDuckGo. I had no problems with Google initially --I knew them from the "don't be evil" days-- but there are too many sponsored links and too much AI to wade through.
Google search was once fast, had a clean and simple layout, and was extremely effective at finding information. Now it's festooned with ads disguised as results, links to outright scams in ads, and has been intentionally made worse, because the longer you spend searching for what you want the more opportunity there is to show you ads. Google Chrome was once fast, had a clean and simple layout, highly customisable, and extremely lightweight on resources. Now it downloads a 4GB local AI model whether you want it or not (which also re-downloads itself if you delete it from disk), and its plugin system has been intentionally crippled in order to prevent people from protecting themselves against highly invasive surveillance. Yeah, I remember when Google was "nice". But they stopped even pretending a very long time ago.
If you squint hard enough, it never went away What is now Firefox started life as a rewrite of the Netscape Navigator engine, after Netscape went *poof*.
See, I always learn something on here See I always learn something more on here. Is this something you use Gareth?
Not as a daily driver. I mentioned it upthread: it doesn't support all the things whizz-bang modern sites need. There's work ongoing to add what's missing, but it's a small project so slow going. I'm definitely keeping my eye on it, though!
