This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Perfect time to check out AdGuard Home. Trivial to install locally. Probably took less than 3 minutes to install and get it operating. Hardest part was updating my router config. (Goddamn Google WiFi!)
Then you can focus on getting a better browser. Support libre software and check out LibreWolf.
Librewolf on desktop Mull on Android
I don't suggest Librewolf for the plebians though.
It comes with very aggressive anti-fingerprinting and privacy features.
For people in !technology@lemmy.world that's less of a problem but I wouldn't suggest it to my family members.
Mull is not maintained anymore. However there is a fork called IronFox.
Regular Android Firefox has Ublock origins as well.
Just in case you needed another reason not to use Edge.
Chrome* or Chromium based browsers*
Who fucking uses edge?
90% of people and corporations are either using Edge or Chrome and since there's essentially no difference between the two they are equally bad. We're back to a browser mono-culture, just like in the bad old days of Internet Explorer.
It's not that bad yet. FF works on pretty much any site that's not demonstrating some sort of bleeding edge fuckery. I haven't seen a "best viewed in Chrome" for a decade or two.
Hopefully this sort of enshittification will drive more people to use other browsers.
People actually use that thing?
Edge is actually pretty decent. Native vertical tabs, M365 SSO integration, native multiple profiles with quick switching, preinstalled on your work computer and will work with anything that "only works in chrome"
Obviously this is ignoring the obvious downsides such as assisting Microsoft's search, browser and platform monopolies, tracking data sent to Microsoft, etc. etc.
Fancy firefox-based browser along the lines of Arc?
Worth a look if you're a web power-user / developer sort of person
Zen's glance feature allows you to view links without actually opening them.
I do not like the wording of this because you are opening it
Ok maybe off topic, why does a web browser have to be one of the most complicated software artifacts on earth? So expensive to write and maintain that only a few orgs with huge developer resources can do it?
What would it look like to start from scratch with a massively simplified standard for specifying UIs, based on all we've learned since html/css was invented? A standard that a few developers could implement in a few weeks using off the shelf libraries. Rather than reimplement every bizarre historical detail in html/css, have a new UI layout system that's simple and consistent, and perhaps more powerful.
Basically browsers are big because they are operating systems for web hosted applications with huge attack surfaces and lots of legacy compatibility requirements amassed over 3 decades.
A rewrite isn't the answer. Putting limits on browser functionality is. JavaScript was the turning point IMHO.
