Slimy lobbyist: Sure I’ll hold your robe and… whoops how did that big wad of cash get in there?

Firefox is alright, it served me adequately after Opera got sold off, but Vivaldi is so much better.

Even though it’s based on a fork of chromium Vivaldi has an extremely strong focus on innovation as well as privacy, they’ve commited themselves to working around Mv3 for instance and their in-built ad-blocker is absolutely top notch but you can also install uBlock Origin to work with it in tandem on their desktop browser if you want.

And even though it’s extremely feature rich, with speed dial, ad-blocker, password vault and side bar being some of their out of the box features all their power user functions are opt in through the settings where you can choose to stack your tabs vertically or enable mouse gestures (couldn’t live without these) and a whole bunch more, it really offers everything you could think of and probably a whole bunch more.

Vivaldi for instance. If you’re looking for innovation and an iron clad focus on privacy in a heavily modified chromium fork, you really can’t get any better.

Bonus points if you used Opera back in the day as it’s effectivley Opera 2.0.

Vivaldi is what you’re looking for, not sure about their ios support but I know it syncs between android and windows flawlessly and it has it’s own built in ad-blocker that you can also install ublock on top of on the desktop but I’ve never once gotten a popup on mobile just using their ad-blocker, and it blocks a bunch of ads too.

It is based on a chromium fork but they have an extremely strong focus on both privacy and innovation but it isn’t one of those browsers that have everything switched on from the get go, they have an amazing set of core features like speed dial (which I can’t live without), ad-blocker and a really handy sidebar that contains all the stuff that’s usually mooshed into the top bar, however their advanced settings are all opt in so make sure you have a good dig through the settings and turn stuff like mouse gestures on.

Except for Vivaldi, ever since the Mv3 news came out they’ve always said they’re going to go around it. Here for instance one of the developers talks about there intentions going forward.

Vivaldi too is technically Opera 2.0 as it was created by Jon von Tetzchner who was the co-creator of Opera, and Opera (until the chinese consortium sale that is, after von Tetzchner had left the company) was always synonymous with privacy and innovation.

So even though Vivaldi is a fork of Chromium I believe from everything I’ve read about the guy, Jon von Tetzchner is 100% commited to his principals. Like one of my favourite von Tetzchner stories is from when Opera 8 came out and he said if it got to a million downloads over a weekend he’d swim the Atlantic, so when Opera 8 smashed the million downloads instead of trying to welch out on the bet he followed through, didn’t make it very far but he still did it and I feel that says a lot about his character. Here’s the best article I could find about it as it was back in '05 and Opera seems to have nuked it’s old news articles.

The low cost of the subscription model can’t pay for all the content that is normally made by that industry

This is where economies of scale comes in though, especially in tech where you’re offering an ephemeral product. Even at say US$10 if you get a million subscribers (not too hard to do, netflix had many times that number at their peak) that’s US$10 million dollars. Which you would think should be more than enough to punch out a bunch of relatively low budget productions, pay your neccessaries and still leave you a good chunk of change I feel.

As you’re already familiar with chrome try Vivaldi, it’s built on a fork of the chrome engine so it will handle all Chrome’s bits and pieces but it was created by Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, who was one of the guys that built and founded Opera back in the day but jumped ship before it got sold out to a Chinese consortium, so not only does it come from the gold standard of pushing the browser envelope from Opera but also von Tetzchner’s vehement stance on privacy which has always been a huge part of his ethos.

So if you’re after a browser that comes stacked with features like speed dial, mouse gestures, password vault, collapsible side bar (so everything isn’t mooshed into the top bar) to name just a few (I’d literally be typing all day otherwise), as well as an iron clad focus on privacy that isn’t just for show (have a look into von Tetzchner and read some of his blogs and you’ll see) then I highly recommend Vivaldi.

Just seems like companies are making short sighted choices for cost reduction over thinking about the potential long-term repercussions for putting their intellectual property and untimely their fates, in the hands of third party.

Welcome to late stage capitalism baby! It’ll only be a short stay though because these assholes are going to implode the planet looking for their next quick buck.

I’m thinking I may have to. I’ve been watching some videos with the I Am Legion mod, which really improved the longevity of the first one for me, and it looks amazing.

It should be, I fully agree, unfortunately we live in a digital panopticon.

Eeeeh, I could but Techland has long been one of my favorite little studios so pirating one of their games just doesn’t feel right to me.

Also piratebay hasn’t been relevant in years and is most likely chock full of all kinds of nasty malware now, try 1337x instead. They’re probably the best of the lot now rarbg is no longer with us.

Dying Light, absolutely fantastic pakour zombie smasher with one of the best cities in gaming. Bought it originally (on a disc) many years ago and played it so much the disc died and I was inconsolable until Epic gave away the ultimate edition and I was finally able to play The Following DLC.

Now I go and look at Dying Light 2 on Steam and wish my stupid country wasn’t so damn expensive, even on sale at 50% off it still costs almost as much as a brand new AAA game in the states. Regional pricing my ass, we always get stung so hard for tech down here.

You would think that, but the big banks made out like absolutely crazy from the derivatives and then got to seize a whole swathe of land they then sold on for even more money or kept for themselves and used to artificially inflate the rental markets while at the same time curb stomping their competition thus giving them a much larger piece of the pie after everything shook out.

The real own goal here is the poor saps who thought they were getting a cheap mortgage until the interest rates started going up and up.