Since my posts are “future tagged”, I had spent the better part of past month learning about the “DNS entries” and setting up my devices/systems to better reflect and control the background activity. It took me considerable time to figure out the new UI (ControlD) and recommend it for use to people I know.
The scourge of online tracking has ballooned. The other motivation was to better prepare for the upcoming ManifestV3 changes which relates to how browsers interact with extensions. The ad blocking extensions have increased in scope (and in “popularity”) which is now hurting the companies in a meaningful way. It is frightening to see numerous companies tracking users across browser sessions that it is impossible to eliminate digital fingerprinting. There’s an attempt, though, to reduce it.
Vivaldi remains the browser of choice only because of its customizability. Firefox is essential for “Gecko engine” but Mozilla as a company has pivoted away from its only pony to “diversify” its efforts towards AI (and populism). It has a reasonable revenue from rebranded Mullvad VPN (as a reseller) and other activities. Mozilla had dumped Thunderbird and Firefox is dying a slow hemorrhaging death. In the event of the great financial reset, donations will get impacted without a meaningful revenue stream. I set up many new workflows to achieve better efficiencies. Vivaldi excels in customizability; especially around single keyboard shortcuts. Set up one and you are good to go! This eases the information retrieval and avoids the issues with context-switching.
Therefore, a curiosity driven approach remains a valid concern. It is fun to learn something new in the process.
RadOncNotes 