“I LOVE ENGAGING WITH BRANDS”, 2026 edition

aaaaaand, i guess i can use this joke post to poll MLTSHP people:

what is your desktop and/or mobile browsing experience these days?

i guess it's come to front of mind setting up a new(-to-me) laptop lately and cleaning up configurations migrated from an ancient machine.

would love to know your preferred desktop and mobile browsers, your search engine prefs, readers/aggregators, extensions and hacks - all the good stuff that keeps your internet firehose palatable.

have at!

For extensions: Ublock Origin all day, and I've recently added this "Staight to Web" extension that forces Google to default to Web Results: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US... As the dev says "This won't improve search results, but should give you a better access to the information you are actually looking for, without being drowned in recommendations, AI generated content, etc." I'm happy with it so far.

@ufez i love uBlock Origin! it absolutely save my life.
and whoa, thank you for the google addon! this will make things so much easier when i use google.

@ufez Thx!

Pi-Hole all day, every day, three times every weekend. A part of this nutritious breakfast.

Firefox with uBlock Origin, Orion with uBlock Origin as backup. Orion is the Safari browser core modified to support both Chrome and Firefox extensions, is fully featured in its free mode; subscriptions only provide access to Kagi for bug reports and developer resources.

noai.duckduckgo.com as default search engine everywhere.

Greasemonkey (Javascript) and Stylish (CSS) plugins for tweaking individual websites to my will. They work in both FF and Orion. Greasemonkey scripts in FF don't always copy and paste cleanly into Orion, but otherwise things work mostly OK.

Can email you my blocklist resources if you'd like. A pastebomb here would not be nice.

Diving into the Greasemonkey scripts...

A bunch for handling Youtube:
* Adds "before:2999" to search queries because for some reason that prompts Youtube to stop inserting unrelated "recommendations" into search results.
* Removes "start_radio=1" from URLs to prevent autoplay.
* Redirects Youtube Shorts to Youtube video UI
* Strip Youtube tracker/referrer strings in links

Redirect Wikipedia mobile UI to desktop (for desktop browsers)

Insert links in Google and DDG to retry the current query in the other search engine.

Various tweaks to Bandcamp pages: Displays album's total playtime, makes the currently-playing track a little more noticeable.

@ardgedee this is great, thank you! TIL about pi-hole. i think i will try setting that up when i get home.

i've been finding myself using the no-ai DDG far more often at home and it has become my default in FF. orion sounds great and i may give it a try to see how i feel about it.

I run DIVERSION off a USB stick on my router (ASUS flashed with Merlin). That keeps our household and my workplace generally ad-free. Search results enshitification still needs improvement.

@samh nice! that sounds like such a clean setup for the whole house.

Desktop: uBlock Origin
iOS: Wipr 2 (I bought it during a sale)
Misc: been meaning to get around to setting up PiHole on my NAS

@spoetz ooh, Wipr 2 looks GREAT! thank you, i'd been looking for a good mobile blocker and this fits the bill perfectly.

Firefox with AI disabled except for local translate, and plugins: ghostery, privacy badger, and uBlock Origin. DDG for search.