1 ww toast, 1 cheddar chz egg, 1 trky bcn; tube o' corned beef hash .lt. canned
pulled the trigger on starting 1-year countdown to LJ account deletion
Since Alphabet's business evolution has driven them to ever more invasively profiling and tracking, and their Chrome arm is pretty much tailored to further enable all that - I decided to switch to Brave and see how well we get along with alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, and Brave's own search.
Then I learned Brave's CEO Brendan Eich was pressured out of Mozilla in 2014 when it came to light he'd contributed $1K to California's Prop 8 banning same-sex marriage. In 2020 he used the product's subreddit to circulate COVID disinfo and attack Dr. Fauci's integrity. And finally, we should be as leery of the "Basic Attention Token" cryptocurrency sidecar as we would of any other cryptobro scheme.
Opera's builtin VPN is interesting, but since Opera and Vivaldi are closed-souce, when you really do want the community to be able to audit your code because a lot of bug and security fixes happen that way ... well, getting away from Chrome is pretty much all about keeping profit-motivated creepers from profiling and tracking my every page-view so I'm not inclined to merely trade a big Alphabet looking over my shoulder for a smaller but still profit-driven Opera or Vivaldi. Ditto Edge, which merely trades Chrome's Alphabet-controlled tracking for Microsoft's.
So the likeliest alternative direction is Firefox and derivatives like Arc and Dia. Wandering further down that rabbit-hole brought me to LibreWolf (a lightweight, security-hardened Mozilla fork) and IronFox (Android-specific descendent of the Firefox-Fennec project).
* * *
So, here's a thing that I love that chromium browsers can do, but Mozilla derivs struggle with it:
When you first open the browser, open multiple pages; for example, your webmail, calendar, and to-do list.
After that, new windows (or tabs if you're one of those tabbed-browser people) open your fave search engine.
Chromiums have a tidy interface to supply an arbitrary number of "startup" pages. Moz-derivs, you have to stuff them all in one text box separated by the pipe ( | ) character.
Ctrl-N in either browser family opens a new tab; Firefox has a checkbox to open new tabs in a new window instead. If you tick that checkbox, then Ctrl+N opens a new window with ALL your startup URLs as tabs.
The next-best work-around is to dedicate a folder in the Bookmarks bar to "startup" urls,
and then you can right-click : Open All Bookmarks.
This adds one click on startup but preserves a sane new-window/new-tab behavior.
CA: While I was getting bookmarks and general behavior sorted out, I also figured out the Javascript to ditch the cheesy background-image using TamperMonkey. \o/