Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 1

I use Windows, macOS, Linux and Android on a regular basis, and these are the web browsers I like better than Chrome, Edge and Safari. (I don’t have any iOS devices, so I can’t really speak to how well these run on there.)

Recommended

Vivaldi

I’ve been quite happy with Vivaldi for the past few years. It’s the spiritual successor to the original Opera browser, built on Chromium, and they’ve committed to not cluttering up your experience with “AI” (though you can clutter it up with power-user features if you want). Vivaldi runs on Windows, macOS and Linux (on both x86_64 and ARM) as well as Android and iOS. The Android version is noticeably faster than Firefox.

Orion

Orion Browser has been quite nice as well. It’s more advanced than Safari, and can run extensions made for Safari, Chrome or Firefox, but tries to keep a simpler, less cluttered design. Currently it’s only on macOS (and maybe iOS, I forget), but they’re working on a Linux version.

I should add that I don’t have a problem with Safari, I just usually want a bit more than it can provide, like the ability to sync with my non-Apple devices.

Firefox Variants: Waterfox and Zen

Mozilla…seems to be flailing about these days, chasing ad revenue and investor-friendly buzzwords. While I still like Firefox overall, I haven’t been happy with the direction it’s been going.

Waterfox has been solid: it’s basically Firefox minus Mozilla, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, as well as Android. The macOS version is universal, the Windows version is x86_64-native but runs well under emulation on ARM systems, and the Linux version is x86_64-only. The Android version is slower than Vivaldi, but it can run extensions.

I also like Zen Browser, which is trying to build “a calmer internet” experience. Zen is sort of like rebuilding Arc using Firefox instead of Chromium, and runs on all major desktop platforms.

Special Use Cases

Privacy

LibreWolf (desktop) and IronFox (Android) both use Firefox as a base and make a bunch of trade-offs to make it harder for sites to track you. Tor Browser is the gold standard, and bounces your traffic around the world to hide where you’re connecting from…but that also slows things down a lot.

Slow hardware

Falkon has a decent balance between capability and leanness. It mainly on Linux, but if you’re running on old or low spec hardware, Linux is going to run a lot better on it than Windows anyway. And then there’s the extremely minimalist Dillo, which doesn’t support JavaScript but is blazing fast at loading and displaying web pages.

Avoid

Edge tries very, very hard to lock you into Microsoft’s services as thoroughly as possible.

Chrome tries very, very hard to lock you into Google’s services as thoroughly as possible.

Brave has experimented with some interesting tech, but it’s wrapped up in the crypto/venture capital/exploitation side of Silicon Valley.

Opera seems to just be chasing buzzwords these days. I much prefer Vivaldi, which picked up where the old Opera left off.

Dia feels like a chatbot with a web browser bolted on, rather than the reverse. I haven’t tried OpenAI’s Atlas, but from what I’ve read, they dispensed with the web part as much as they could.

More

I’ve tried and reviewed a lot of web browsers over the past year, if you’re curious about what didn’t make my best / worst list here.

I like birds, but I’m not really a birder (checks page 135). Oh. Um. Yeah. Never mind.

*ahem*

It’s a delightful collection of comedic “definitions” of various terms one might encounter while watching birds or interacting with people who do. For instance “American Robin” refers to a machine that transforms worms into loud songs at 4AM right outside your window. Or identifying owls by their calls (the ones that sound like owls aren’t owls at all, they’re mourning doves.) It’s filled with the same style of humor and illustration that Rosemary Mosco brings to her occasional comic strip Bird and Moon, and worth keeping out after you’re done so you can always flip to a random page for a laugh.

The best piece of live-action Marvel I’ve seen in years, and the best Marvel TV since the first seasons of Daredevil and Jessica Jones.

The twists and turns, betrayals and tragedies grow organically through a (rightfully) mistrustful group that’s been forced to work together, first by Agatha’s bullying, then by necessity. The multiple variations on “The Ballad of the Witches’ Road” tie it all together, and it’s a gut punch when you finally learn where the song came from. And where the road came from, for that matter.

Agatha All Along is as effective as Poker Face and The Sixth Sense at showing you an accurate but incomplete view of what’s going on, letting you fill in or gloss over the gaps, and then flashing back later with more context that completely changes your understanding of what it meant. Especially in the episodes that focus on Patti LuPone’s character, who experiences her life out of sequence Billy Pilgrim-style, and on the teen who (for magical reasons) cannot be named, when you find out who he is and what was going on outside the illusions in the first episode. Lorna Wu’s 1970s rock version of the song is another great example: what she was trying to do with it, what happens with that goal, and the final twist of why it hadn’t worked.

The whole cast is solid, and Kathryn Hahn especially is fascinating to watch, giving Agatha a huge range. There are times when you feel sorry for her, there are times when you like her, and there are times when you want her to just die and go to hell already and give everyone else a break. I’d been apprehensive before picking up the first episode, since while I really liked her as “Agnes” in WandaVision, once she revealed herself she kind of turned into a one-note cackling Wicked Witch of the West(view). That’s shattered right from the start.

The series stands mostly on its own. You don’t need to have watched any other Marvel shows or films, and while it helps to have seen WandaVision, they recap the important parts. The season is a complete story, too, though there’s an epilogue that sets up a possible direction for a second season (which probably isn’t happening) with the surviving characters.

A rare find: A great adaptation of a great book.

Fred Fordham’s watercolor-style art is absolutely gorgeous. The adaptation plays to the medium’s strengths, allowing the visuals to tell the story when possible, keeping Ursula K. Le Guin’s prose when needed. Wide seascapes, rocky coasts, forested landscapes, people (not whitewashed!) and dragons…

There’s a preview featuring the first few pages and a few of the seascapes at Fordham’s website.

The printing is a bit dark for some scenes set at night or in dimly lit rooms (of which there are a lot, some pivotal). The first time through, I could barely see what was going on in the scene where Ged first summons the shadow in Ogion’s house. So you’ll want to read it by sunlight or with an actual reading lamp, not just ambient room lighting. (This isn’t a problem with the digital edition, though I suppose that might depend on your device’s display!)

I started using FeatherPad on a low-end Linux machine, and was impressed with its speed, stability, and a feature set with just enough to make it practical as my main text editor. (Search of course, but also syntax highlighting, sorting lines within a file, and quickly switching word-wrap on and off.) It’s more stable (and faster!) than GNOME Text Editor and more capable than Gedit. I’ve since set it as my default on my main Linux system.

There are a few things that still frustrate me. It doesn’t auto-switch between dark and light mode, for instance, and I switch between modes regularly depending on ambient lighting. Spell check is limited, and search is a bit jankier than I’d like. But it does the job, and does it fast, and I can always fire up another editor like Sublime Text when I do need something more elaborate.

Featherpad is available in most Linux distributions I’ve tried (including Fedora, Debian and Arch), but not on Alpine Linux unless you want to use the testing repo.