I’ve switched to using the Duckduckgo web browser on my laptop and phone as it promises to reduce tracking and increase privacy.
Early thoughts are that I am indeed seeing a lot less adverts, pop-ups, and opt-in modals. The video player is great as most YouTube videos play on it no trouble with zero adverts. It’s only the occasional one that insists that it is played through YouTube.
There are a few bugs in it though. One annoying one is where you have two instances of the browser open on your computer with each displayed on a different screen. If you select a bookmark in one it sometimes opens in the other replacing what was already in that window. This is especially annoying if it was a YouTube video and you have to then go back to it and find out exactly where you were up to.
Overall though it works much better than Chrome’s incognito mode. You can still be tracked by each site you visit but you automatically reject the third-party tracking cookies and content.
I still keep Chrome around as there are a handful of sites that only seem to work properly with it. I also use Google search on occasion as DuckDuckGo search filters-out a lot of stuff that you may actually want.
Still, early days..
Tag: surfing
Aimlessly surfing
There’s a kind of procrastination art to aimlessly surfing; surfing with no goal in mind, just following links and recommendations, seeing what interests you.
You may come across useful nuggets of wisdom, products you never knew existed, entertaining websites, or cats doing something unremarkable. I’m not sold on the cats thing.
Nostalgia trips await, as does losing hours watching fail videos or people are amazing videos. I personally prefer the latter as I like to look for the good in humanity rather than consuming entertainment at the expense of others, but that’s just me.
Maybe you are into ASMR or ambience videos? Study with Merve or walk through the streets of New York or Tokyo at night in the rain or even a thunderstorm. Maybe even walk through the slums of the Philippines with Larry PH, or drift BMWs through Berlin.
The internet is a vast place.You can get lost just aimlessly surfing. Lost in content and time.
What will you find today?