★★★★☆
Fun, absurd, and absurdly fun.
Yes, you play as a squirrel. And yes, you carry a gun. Or rather, you can find and use a variety of guns as you escape a secret research facility hidden below an ordinary suburb, climbing telephone poles, outrunning (and outgunning!) agents, charming residents – and occasionally holding them up to steal their acorns or cell phones. It’s a totally ridiculous platformer/shooter combo, which is what makes it work.
★★★☆☆
I was surprised to discover that iCab (“The Internet Taxi For Your Mac”) is still around! Way back when, it was an indie browser for macOS. These days the engine is WebKit, and it has a bunch of little usability tools, like pop-out windows that will show an outline of a page based on the headings, or a list of all the links on a page, etc.
It doesn’t support Chromium or Firefox extensions, but it has its own “modules” that can modify the page, or send it to a web application, or help you debug, or download the page as a PDF, etc. There are a few obsolete items in there like Google+ and StumbleUpon, which does make me wonder how current the rest are. I haven’t been able to get the save-to-Pocket module to work, for instance. But it does let you set up bookmarklets, which puts it ahead of NetSurf.
I’ve found that I like the idea of iCab better than I like actually using it. It’s not bad, it’s just OK. Then again, with so many other browsers trying to grab your attention and data, sometimes “just OK” is what you want!
Retro-computing enthusiasts, take note: Old versions for Macintosh System 7.5-9 and earlier versions of OSX are still available for download, though they’re no longer updated or supported.
★★☆☆☆
Because “Internet Explorer” had too much baggage, both in code and in branding.
The default home page is the most cluttered home page I have ever seen on a web browser. Definitely more than a default Firefox full of Pocket recommendations. Possibly including the bad old days of Netscape 4 and everything wanting to be a “portal.” And frankly, I’ve never had the page full of Pocket recs slow things down the way that Edge’s home (embedding MSN news) does. Fortunately it’s a single click to turn it off, but it’s a really bad first impression.
Edge syncs settings, bookmarks, addresses, and, well, as much as it can through a Microsoft account. And it really, really wants you to sign into a Microsoft account and use Copilot and so forth, even more than Chrome wants you to sign into a Google Account these days. (And that’s saying something.) It’s compatible with Chromium extensions, but would rather you install add-ons through its own store. Portable Web Apps (PWAs) install and run fine while online, but seem to have trouble with offline support.
Once you turn off all the Microsoft specials, it feels usable again – but then, it’s just another Chromium skin. Maybe you want to keep a few Microsoft features turned on? Integration with the Family Features or desktop search, maybe? And there are some things you can’t turn off completely.
Weirdly enough, there’s still an “IE Mode” available for compatibility in the Windows 11 version!
And yeah, I have to specify the Windows version again, because it’s available on macOS and…hilariously…on Linux too! You don’t have to run it through Wine for testing! (Though it’s Blink anyway). The Linux releases are still Intel/AMD-only for now, but Microsoft provides a Debian package, and there’s a Flatpak that wraps it for other distros!
★★★☆☆
Basic camera app with support for flash, timer and video. Saving EXIF metadata is optional, as is adding GPS location to it. Doesn’t have HDR, night sight or even panorama capability. Does OK in good lighting conditions. You can set the JPEG compression quality, which is nice, though even at 90% its images are slightly noisier than Google’s camera app on the same phone. Presumably it’s doing less post-processing. Still good for snapshots or iNaturalist observations.
★★★★☆
When you really want (or need) to stay private while using the web, Tor is the way to go.
Private windows in normal browsers only “hide” your activity from other websites and your history. VPNs only hide your activity from whoever’s providing your internet connection. Even blocking trackers (or all third party cookies) like LibreWolf and Brave or using Privacy Badger do only goes so far (though it’s certainly a good start). (Speaking of Brave, that browser’s “Tor mode” is less thorough than the real thing.)
The privacy does come at a cost, though:
OK, so it’s inconvenient for everyday browsing or shopping. But if you need to hide your tracks from a stalker or abuser, a harassment campaign, an abusive company with network access, an oppressive government agency, or just a nosy sysadmin, Tor can help you do that.
Tor can also get around network-level censorship to some extent, both with regular websites that might be blocked and by connecting to “onion” sites, websites hosted on the TOR network.
Even then, someone with access to your network traffic can still see that you are using Tor…just not what you’re doing with it. Snowflake and bridges are add-on layers designed to help disguise that further.
It’s built on Firefox, so [most of that review applies] as far as actually using it goes, both on desktop and Android. The hardening approach makes the experience a bit more like LibreWolf or IronFox. Sometimes you’ll get the wrong localization of a site depending on where the exit node ends up (like using a VPN, except with a VPN, you’re usually picking the exit yourself).
EFF has a guide to Tor as part of their Surveillance Self-Defense collection, and Tor’s own guide goes into more detail.
The browser is available on Windows, macOS, Linux (though not on ARM yet) and Android (you can add a repository to F-Droid). There’s no iOS version, but they recommend Onion Browser (iOS) and Orbot (not a browser, but proxies apps like a Tor VPN on both iOS and Android).