I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. It’s one big mass of opinion; swirling up hate, online abuse, depressing news and analysis. Twitter is where people go to promote their shit I have no interest in. It’s another site that tries to build a profile about you to advertise on your interests.
And I hate that I love it.
Not long ago I told myself “No more Twitter”. This was soon after I discovered Mastodon – an alternative to Twitter. Mastodon is ad-free and open-source. It’s many small communities with different personalities that join to make one network.
Mastodon is by no means perfect, but has a more respectable ethos. What Mastodon doesn’t have is mass adoption. It doesn’t have my friends. Only strangers. And so, I found myself returning to Twitter.
In a bid to make my Twitter experience more enjoyable, I needed to conduct a “spring clean”. This involved;
Making my account ‘Private’ 🔐
Reducing Following from 450+ to 210 😬
Reducing Followers from 1,500+ to 250 📉
After taking a look at who I was following, and who was following me, the amount of nonsense surprised me. Close to 1,000 of the accounts following me were either businesses, spam or inactive users. Another 200 more were complete strangers that I had never interacted with in my life.
It took a lot of clicking to whittle down so many users to so few. There were a few tough decisions in there too; will I offend this person if I unfollow them? This stranger looks kind, but do I want them following me? Oh, a well-known TV personality is following me! What?! Why?
Now my Twitter is ‘clean’, it feels like a fresh start.
If you’re keen to stay on social media, I recommend grabbing a cup of tea, popping on some background music, and conducting your own clean-up. It’s refreshing for your digital soul.
My obsession with the internet began long before I left the UK for colder climates. Upon starting my first job in 2001, I ran a gaming website and was geeking out to colleagues about Opera browser.
So, when my inbox lit up with a job offer from the Norwegian-based company, I packed my bags and never looked back. I didn’t know anything about Norway, but what I did know is that I would be joining a company of very talented people.
Over the next five years at Opera Software, I learnt so much about web browsers. One of the toughest decisions developers had to face was switching the code at the heart of the product. The rendering engine. It meant a move away from their own model to Blink, which powers Chromium – the basis of Google Chrome.
This was an important decision. From a business perspective, it was due to work out well for Opera. The company was able to get rid of a huge development cost and concentrate efforts on features.
When it came to other players in the browser space, there were a few different rendering engines:
Microsoft Internet Explorer used Trident Apple Safari used WebKit Mozilla Firefox used Gecko Google Chrome used Blink(based on WebKit) Opera used Presto
Although Opera Software were very proud of Presto, I could see the logic behind the decision at the time. Opera’s market share on desktop hovered at around 3%. Google’s strength online meant that Chrome‘s browser share grew fast. And Chrome used Blink – an open-source project that both companies could contribute to.
For website owners, this meant that Safari, Chrome, and Opera would render pages in a similar way. Less headaches all-round when it came to compatibility issues. A good thing, right?
Let’s fast-forward to 2019
The state of the browser industry looks quite different. Microsoft replaced Internet Explorer with Edge, and there is more competition than ever. At least on the surface.
Apple Safari Brave Google Chrome Microsoft Edge Mozilla Firefox Opera UC Browser Vivaldi Yandex
And now that same list, grouped by rendering engine with market share added:
As you can see; Blink/Chromium has the lions share.
Google’s Chromium project sparked an easy way to build a browser. The core components are now handled out-of-the-box, allowing companies to focus unique features. Or money-making opportunities.
All you need to know; Chrome is the green line.
Google Chrome is force-fed to users of any Google product. Any non-Chrome-based browser on a Google product results in a “worse experience”. Google websites optimise for Chromium and the masses rely on Google websites.
What is worse than making a website that doesn’t work the same in all browsers? Making changes to the browser to “fix” your broken websites.
And that’s the long-winded version of why I’ve turned to Mozilla Firefox.
Sat near the bottom of the browser usage tables with a weak market share, Mozilla holds strong values. The company is a non-profit foundation – relying on partner deals and user donations. They aren’t looking to collect and sell your data (unlike a lot of other companies).
Having competition in the market is healthy for everyone. Using less Google products is healthy for everyone.
I’d encourage you to give Firefox a try. Set it as your default browser for a few weeks and see how you get along. If not for “the good of the internet”, then because it’s currently rated “The best browser of 2019” by Top 10 Reviews.
After 80 hours of researching and testing, we found Mozilla Firefox is the best overall internet browser because of how fast pages load, how quickly it navigates to websites and, most importantly, how secure this browser is.
Google Chrome is also a very good browser with the same toolset as Firefox, and while it typically comes down to personal preference, Mozilla Firefox did do slightly better in our speed tests and proved to be much more secure than Google Chrome.
I try to use Google products rarely and this includes when searching the web. Over the years, I have jumped between a few alternatives; DuckDuckGo, Bing, and now Ecosia.
The real jump away from Google was when DuckDuckGo became a viable alternative that vowed to not track your activities around the web in order to make money. They offered something different, new and… better. It opened my eyes to trying new search engine experiences.
Ecosia, based out of Germany, are relatively new kids on the block. Their unique selling-point is that they promise to use the majority of the money they make to plant trees around the world.
Each month, in the hope of being open and transparent, Ecosia publish their financial reports so you can see exactly how much money they have made and where they spend it. If the reports are to believed, then they give around 80% of their profits to charitable and non-profit organisations around the world that plant trees.
The search results are based on Bing, so some data is transferred between Microsoft and Ecosia – but they respect the “Do Not Track” option in your browser, if you can work out how to activate that.
Using something other than Google isn’t for everyone. People seem to trust Google so much that they have an aversion to the alternatives. From what I have seen so far, Ecosia has a good, honest intention and I encourage you to give them a try.
