I agree entirely, especially as modern systems massively ballooning the required knowledge and skill.

However, I do think there could’ve perhaps been a happy medium, where OS’s retained and continued to develop a simple, built in way to program easily and without setup to retain the spirit of what BASIC provided.

I guess I’m imagining a sort’ve evolved version of Hypercard, which seemed to be on the path of providing something like that.

The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call “programming for the rest of us”. HyperCard has made it possible for people to do things they wouldn’t have ever thought of doing in the past without a lot of heavy-duty programming. It’s let a lot of non-programmers, like me, into that loop.

David Lingwood, APDA

There seems to be Decker as a spiritual successor, which is pretty neat.

Yarr! 😉

From what I’ve gathered recently, the Mullvad browser left unmodified and combined with a VPN is one of the most private browsers you can use, short of using Tor.

Ribbit :)

I’m coming around to this conclusion, and updated the post to reflect that. For something as important as a browser, it’s a little concerning the Librewolf dev team is so short staffed, but they do seem to be holding their own. I hope they’re able to stick around long term.

That’s a well reasoned take, honestly.

As I investigate other options to LW, all of which also require a certain level of trust and/or diligence, ultimately I’m finding LW seems difficult to replace, as it does walk that line between ‘good enough’ security/privacy and convenience. The Phoenix project seems promising, but so far is only convenient on a few distros, leaving Windows users with LW, or perhaps Zen.

To clarify, the only relevancy PrivacyGuides has here is that their forum is where I found the link to the Arkenfox github issue, and how their arguments against Librewolf appeared to have been potentially validated by said github issue.

The main concern is that github issue, where one of the main developers of Arkenfox, from which Librefox is derived, claims:

LW since fxbrit left/died/who-knows has gone to shit - I worked with him behind the scenes to make the right choices and while he would do his own analysis, we always agreed, and his voice influenced them. Now they don’t know what they are doing, and in fact have compromised security and make really stupid decisions. Same goes for all the other forks - really dubious shit going

And directly after which a Librewolf team member then voices agreement that Librewolf’s quality control has degraded since the departure of fxbrit.

Now it could be that the Arkenfox dev is exaggerating, and tbh he comes off as a bit of a prick later in that github issue, but overall, I’d say it merits at least some concern (though perhaps less than I originally thought)

According to their intructions, it would seem it’s trivial to install and receive updates on the supported linux distros:

By default, Phoenix is installed & updated via your operating system’s package manager. This allows for fast, easy updates & fixes as needed, right with the rest of your system!

Windows isn’t support though, so it would be a far more manual process there.

Another user here mentioned the Phoenix project, which may be a good solution for us, as I share the same goals.

I haven’t looked into Zen, I’ll do a dive on that now.

In the past, consoles had the limitation of not being able to easily provide fixes to a game post release, which incentivized publishers to only release games that were thoroughly tested and relatively bug free.

Consoles also for a time had the advantage of physical media that you could share with your friends, and never have to worry about accounts or a game becoming unplayable.

They no longer have those advantages after hard drives and internet access became the norm, effectively putting them on a level playing field with PC’s, but now with the inherent disadvantage of being a locked down weak PC that can only play expensive games with a paid subscription to play them online.

Cheers for mentioning that, I hadn’t heard of Phoenix, but looks like an excellent alternative.

I haven’t given it any research since it’s chromium based.

Unfortunately, adding any addons to the Mullvad browser would defeat the purpose of using it somewhat, since it would defeat the anti-fingerprinting methods.

The Librewolf team member said they’re falling behind on keeping the arkenfox tweaks up to date even as they put out new releases. Perhaps they are able to keep up with Firefox security updates despite that, which I suppose would still make them a better option than vanilla Firefox, but it does give reason to keep a closer eye on them.

I believe Brave is better from a fingerprinting perspective, if only due to it being easier to blend in with compared to Cromite, though Cromite has far better security AFAIK.

I agree on Brave, and I also avoid it so as not to solidify the chromium browser dominance any further.

However, from all I have read, Firefox Mobile based browsers truly are less secure from a technological standpoint. I think for most people, Firefox Mobile is secure enough for it not to be enough of a deciding factor to use a chromium browser, but objectively it is worse. Mull was making the best of that despite the downsides, so hopefully the IronFox fork succeeds on mobile.

And despite their recommending Brave, I think the arguments against LibreWolf do have some merit.

Nice thing about Posteo, and which is AFAIK unique to them now, is they will never delete your account even if you stop paying. If you cease payments, they will let you log in and continue to receive email, but you cannot send emails until you pay again.

The only way your account gets deleted is if you manually delete it yourself.

Proton used to say your account would never be deleted from inactivity if you’d made at least one payment for premium service, but that policy was walked back last year I believe.

Disroot has an encrypted inbox available via an opt-in beta, so hopefully it becomes the default soon.

I believe they only allow you to use the official Tuta email client.

I don’t have a lot of experience with cloud storage, but Filen.io appears to have a good reputation. They offer a lifetime license as well in 100gb chunks (under starter packs), which is interesting, especially if your storage size needs aren’t great.

Wasn’t aware of that, thanks for the heads up.