indie-web
Vivaldi browser
Around the turn of the millennium the browser wars were a thing. The first browser war saw Netscape Navigator unsuccessfully defend against the new Microsoft Internet Explorer. After a few years the remains of Netscape Navigator were forged into a new browser called Phoenix, soon renamed to Firebird, and finally to Firefox. I, however, stayed strongly in camp Opera during this time.
Opera was developed by a Norwegian company by the same name, and it was by far the most innovative browser of the time. They were the first ones to introduce tabs, a speed dial window, customizable shortcuts, quick search bar, and, my favorite, mouse gestures: to go back in the history, press and hold the right mouse button, swipe left, and release. Extremely simple and efficient, and there were gestures for all the other commands you could wish for, too. Opera also recognized the importance of a community and successfully ran the My Opera site for years.
My Opera was, unfortunately, shut down in 2014. Then, two years later in 2016, Opera was sold to China, and I stopped using it. In the same year, however, the former CEO of Opera Software released the first stable version of a new browser called Vivaldi.
Vivaldi is to me the spiritual successor of Opera. You get the familiar full customizability and a bunch of features out of the box that other browsers can only have as plugins, if even that. Notoriously, Google recently basically removed the extremely popular uBlock Origin ad blocker from their plugin store, obviously because showing ads to you is their primary business. 😬 Other than ad blocking and tracker blocking, Vivaldi has, for example, a feed reader, tiling & stacking of tabs, the aforementioned mouse gestures, themes, and much more.
I recently wrote about the Kagi Search, to which someone who read it could’ve wondered if I use the Chrome browser anyway, in which case my privacy wouldn’t be any more protected with Kagi than it is with Google. I do need Chrome for work, but at home I use Vivaldi and haven’t signed in to my Google account with it. I’m under no illusion that Google wouldn’t still be able to track me, but at least I don’t need to make it trivial to them.
If you’ve been looking for a browser that puts you in control, Vivaldi is worth a try. Get it from vivaldi.com to give it a spin!
Kagi Search
About three months ago I ditched Google as my primary search engine and started using Kagi instead – and haven’t looked back.
Kagi is a subscription based service: you get to test it for free for one hundred searches, and if you are satisfied, you can start with the 5 USD/month (+tax) plan that includes 300 searches. I’ve found that with my usage I can usually manage about 27 days, after which I can just renew the monthly subscription a bit early with a couple of clicks.
Why pay for your search engine, then, when Google is free? Well, the old saying goes that if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. In practice this means that you will be shown lots of ads and “sponsored links” – which are just ads by another name. It seems that companies often buy ads that target their competitors too, so if you’re looking for info about product X of company Y, then the first “search results” you get are actually about the competing product Z by company W. All this gets quite tiring in the long run. I also noticed that not only because of this but because of ChatGPT my Google searches had dropped dramatically. Google just didn’t have any pull anymore.
What’s Kagi doing better, then? For one, they don’t have ads, so they are not incentivized to serve any advertisers but you, the user. For a user there are some neat features, such as increasing or decreasing the priority of any sites in your search results, something that I have indeed missed in Google. Kagi also has a delightful Small Web initiative highlighting little personal sites that you couldn’t find with Google even by accident. Kagi also has an actual changelog – when have you ever seen a search engine, or any major web site for that, display one proudly? These little details make Kagi feel like it’s made by humans for humans. Kagi’s origin story is also worth reading.
I’d say there’s a growing sense that people are tired of being the product and of the general enshittification of the web. People want control over their own their data, they don’t want Meta, Google, or that dumpster fire X deciding what they may access and see. You constantly get to read about people and businesses that are locked out of their Instagram accounts for no apparent reason and there’s nothing they can do to appeal because it’s all handled by some faceless algorithms. That’s a contributing factor also to why I’m using the Micro.blog platform for hosting this blog and why I’m using Kagi: I want to support the smaller players that are still trying to Do The Right Thing.
Gemini protocol
The other day I was browsing some random Micro.blog blogs when I came across an interesting post about Gemini in the Hey Loura! blog. Gemini in this case does not refer to Google’s AI service but an application layer internet protocol developed quite recently, in 2019.
Gemini is kind of like HTTP but very, very simple. Gemini’s preferred document format is gemtext, which is almost a subset of Markdown: you get headers and lists (but no nested lists) and hyperlinks (that need to be on their own line). You also get quotes and preformatted text for presenting code, but that’s it. It does not support, for example, styles or inline images.
No normal browser supports Gemini. The “Geminispace” can, however, be accessed by a number of custom browsers that can use the gemini:// protocol. Anyone can host a Gemini “capsule” by themself, or use one of the free or paid services to do that.
Somehow I find the idea behind Gemini quite appealing: no ads; no big companies trying to hook you or exploit you; no competing for likes or subscriptions; quick loading times; pages where the content speaks for itself. Even the mobile versions of many web sites are rather heavy these days, which can be observed if you’ve ever tried to use the internet while traveling in a plane, but Gemini pages promise to be even more light-weight.
Learn more from the project’s web site at GeminiProtocol.net or from Wikipedia.