I HATE BROWSERS! Seriously!

I am used to the following Workflow: I have a feedreader with lots and lots of feeds and I first filter them according to their titles. Everything that sounds interesting will be opened in a new tab. The tabs load, the PC fan spins, and after a while, everything is loaded.

This way, I can load pages before I read them. Loading modern webpages can take seconds, while switching tabs usually took less than a second, and I can do something different while the tabs are loading. Especially when I am in a train, I like to read tabs which have already a loaded website. I usually had a multi-line tab-bar for the about 500 tabs I kept open.

Then, furthermore, I use tabs as bookmarks. I don't really see the big difference – from a user perspective – between bookmarks and tabs. Why the distinction? Why can't I just organize my tabs in groups, which are directories of tabs?

Well, Firefox was never battery saving, but at least it had lots and lots of extensions like, for example, Tab Mix Plus and Tab Groups Manager. Well… Until Mozilla decided to drop support for them. Now, Firefox is just another browser, and especially, it is a browser which does not perform too well. It has an extension Tree Style Tabs which does a good job at organizing tabs.

Palemoon still supports old extensions. I used palemoon for some time. But I am sceptical whether Palemoon will stay tuned with newer web standards and security.

And anyway, both Firefox and Palemoon are rather slow and keep draining my battery.

The obvious alternative to both is Chrom{e,ium} – which performs good for the casual user I guess, but is just terrible at handling many tabs. The tabs will degenerate to small "spikes" when too many are loaded. There are extensions which at least try to be a substitute for tree style tabs, but currently, none of them worked flawlessly for me.

And there is another drawback: Another feature of Firefox is that I could switch to a Socks-Proxy during runtime. This is not possible with Chromium.

I haven't tried Opera for long – it used to be an alternative, but meanwhile it appears like just being a clone of Chrome.

Now I am back at Vivaldi. Which has reasonable tab management in the sense that it at least supports grouping. I configured XFCE to remove the title bars from my windows when they are maximized. Unfortunately, Vivaldi draws its own window borders. You can make it show native window borders, but there will still be a bar above the window when maximized, in which there is only the Vivaldi-Symbol. And when switching to a side-tab-bar, the pinned tabs are expanded. I have openned lots of messengers, so that becomes a problem. Anyway, at least these are just minor UI flaws.

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Politics/Law:

• An AI That Reads Privacy Policies So That You Don't Have To (via)
• Unerfreuliche Funde – "Ein Kollege hat […] in P2P Netzwerken Kinderpornografie entdeckt." – "Ich kann […] in solchen Fällen nicht empfehlen, […] sich […] ermittelbar zu machen." – Geiles Rechtssystem das wir da haben!

Popular Culture:

• Porn Sites Are Doing the Most Cryptocurrency Mining (via)

STEM/MINT:

• HTTP 0.2 (ie., HTTP 2.0 / 10)
• Obarun — ArchLinux without systemd (via)
• All command-line software which outputs text with ANSI color added should check for the presence of a NO_COLOR environment variable that, when present (regardless of its value), prevents the addition of ANSI color. (via)
• X's network transparency has wound up mostly being a failure (via)
• Processor bugs are everywhere (via)
• Construction begins on first manned Orion spacecraft
• Xerox Is No More

Zeroth World/SciFi becoming Reality:

• Children receive new ears grown from their own cells in world first (via)

Art (Comics etc.):

• Oven
• Disney

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Popular Culture:

• Die SPIEGEL AKADEMIE lehrt digitales Arbeiten Die Digitalisierung krempelt auch Ihren Job um? Sie wollen vom Wandel profitieren, statt ihm nur nachzulaufen? Sich fit für die Zukunft machen? Die neu gegründete SPIEGEL AKADEMIE hilft Ihnen

Nerd Culture:

• The Definitive Four Fours Answer Key
• Single Digit Representations of Natural Numbers

STEM/MINT:

• Video: Reading Silicon: How to Reverse Engineer Integrated Circuits
• texlive.js – A LaTeX Compiler for Javascript
• FreeTikZ
• Background reading on the reference counting vs tracing garbage collection debate

WTF:

Zeroth World/SciFi becoming Reality:

• Abandoned Soviet Lightning Machine

Art (Comics etc.):

• Mathematical and Puzzle Fonts/Typefaces (via)
• Super-Dog
• Small For A Monster
• Later
• Late
• Think Positive
• Apparent Complexity

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Politics/Law:

• Verhandlungstermin: Verwendung von Vordrucken, die eine spezifisch weibliche Personenbezeichnung vorsehen »Die Klägerin verlangt von der Beklagten, im Geschäftsverkehr mit ihr Vordrucke zu verwenden, in denen sie als weibliche Person ("Kundin", "Kontoinhaberin", "Einzahlerin", "Sparerin") erscheint.«

Nerd Culture:

• OpenBraille DIY Embosser

STEM/MINT:

• PostMarketOS Saves Old Smartphones
• List Of JavaScript Crypto Libraries

WTF:

• https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/12/17/1813200/flat-earther-now-wants-to-launch-his-homemade-rocket-from-a-balloon

Art (Comics etc.):

• Hug Bot
• Next Year

Quotes:

• Hope is the first step… …on the road to disappointment

STEM/MINT:

• Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities Explained
• Fat fighting drug could let you lose weight without dieting – well, that has been promised often before.
• Does reference counting really use less memory than tracing garbage collection? and Does reference counting really use less memory than tracing garbage collection? Mathematica vs Swift vs OCaml vs F# on .NET and Mono

WTF:

• Wealthy Bristol residents cause uproar by installing 'anti-bird spikes' on trees (via)
• Großmutter verwechselt Majoran mit Marihuana und vergiftet ihre ganze Familie

Zeroth World/SciFi becoming Reality:

• Graphene "tattoos" measure plants' thirst – the cyborg plants are coming.

Art (Comics etc.):

• Will we ever colonize the Moon?
• New Year's Resolutions
• Friendshurpgk
• New Year New Frameworks
• Problem with the Code
• Conditioning

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Popular Culture:

• Vandals smash beehives, killing 500,000 bees

Nerd Culture:

• Why the International Space Station Is the Single Best Thing We Did

STEM/MINT:

• The Free Software movement is Barking up the wrong tree (via) – "This is very strange and goes against the very nature of software. Why do people put up with this? Because they are so poorly educated about computers that they cannot imagine anything different."
• Earth’s slowing rotation could cause huge earthquakes in 2018 (via)
• haroldbot (via) can do proofs with machine integers.
• AI Is Fueling Smarter Prosthetics Than Ever Before

WTF:

• Mann baut sich Porno-Raumschiff und stirbt

Art (Comics etc.):

• Christmas on Easter Island

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STEM/MINT:

• Virgin Hyperloop One sets new speed record
• Ketamine found to rapidly reduce suicidal thoughts and depression
• Turtles tested on a teeny treadmill – ok…
• DARPA backs development of "unhackable" Morpheus computer system – remember when the Titanic was unsinkable?
• Laser shoes get Parkinson's patients moving
• NASA Plans to Launch an Interstellar Mission to Alpha Centauri in 2069
• Scientists Have Developed Glass That Heals Itself When You Press It Together (via)
• Artificial Intelligence Used to Identify Bacteria Quickly and Accurately
• Sci-Hub Bounces from TLD to TLD
• SpaceX resupplies the ISS with recycled rocket and spacecraft for the first time

Art (Comics etc.):

• Late Shopping
• This Dad Takes His Sons' Drawings and Turns Them Into Anime

Quotes:

• If you work hard enough you can … …replace depression with exhaustion

Nerd Culture:

• Non-euclidean virtual reality

STEM/MINT:

• Vivaldi Arms onto Raspberry Pi (via)
• Scientists have created a silicon beating heart "However, it still has one problem: it currently lasts for about only 3,000 beats" (via)
• Microsoft’s Q# quantum programming language out now in preview (via)

WTF:

• the world’s first ‘smart condom’ (via)

Art (Comics etc.):

• Been There
• Depri Test
• Hollywoodized
• Snowflake