Disjointed Thoughts on the Web

Dec 21, 2025

disjoint 1

The web has been a pain-in-the-ass to use for a bit now, i.e. Mozilla going through the eternal sellout grind and poor leadership changes, Chrome being Chrome, Ladybird being fascist and non-working on anything that isn't a Mac compared to Servo, the W3C supporting bad standards (i.e. anything XML-related, ActivityPub), etc.

Also any "anti-AI" measures that aren't Iocaine or Cloudflare suck, i.e. CloudFront(?), Vercel, Anubis, go-away, etc., considering that they're as easy to bypass as a single 4-foot wide gate on a sidewalk (specifically Anubis and go-away on their default configurations by just changing your user-agent). Performative actions that hurt legitimate users, a tale told many times, as old as time. Where you heard this before?

What all of these sparsely jointed things have in common is that they hinder user-experience more than they help it, mostly for the purpose of serving the sysadmin instead of conveniently serving both sides, and because they're only good ideas on paper... in a vacuum.

Also, did you know that for every time a website is needlessly redesigned, 1 kitten dies? Of course, this is primarily design by committee or being completely shit at your job compared to your progenitors. Ruby, SoundCloud, sincerely Nekoweb, nearly every Google product redesign recently, and also the Discord user-interface redesign which I'm not whining about today.

Every design concept thought up before by the more respectable, coalesced and gentrified into an exclusively flawed thing for the sake of being new and trendy instead of following a visually-appealing and sensible pattern. Of course, I don't think the web should stay "boring", though I am more inclined towards that with my ethos.

A Word on Artificial Intelligence

Art, audio, and video generation bad, text good if used for practical purposes. Please don't try to start an argument with me about this because it'll end up being about you defending your self-righteousness anyway.

The "Old Web" Movement

I do not respect this at all. This is mainly guided by misinformed nostalgia from zoomers and below who are particularly fed up with the internet in its current state—a view which I do not obviously share like the good contradictarist I am, but it is understandable regardless.

...but you should not make a personal website for the sake of "rebellion" or "getting away from [modern] social media", the latter you considerably cannot do, considering that for your site to be even remotely discoverable now, you have to use said social media and promote it beforehand, or use a wack website host with a wack community (which also counts as social media).

Of course, webrings exist which remedy this problem. I do not like webrings; I think there are too many of them and that they suffer from the same problems, but I'll leave it at that.

But you can (naturally) just start clicking on 88x31s and links willy-nilly to end up on a bunch of places. This remedies both problems, except that you might end up in a loop of the same people or start suffering the same problems as before... so I basically just lied.

oh jeez oh crud; web browsers

Chrome (sans Chromium) and Firefox have been going downhill, especially Firefox due to the aforementioned, and because it's a slow mess on the rendering side (though less so on the JS side, considering that its engine is used in gnome-shell). And thus, derivatives of these have been popping up lately. Vivaldi, Zen, and lastly Helium are what I will be briefly talking about for now as these are the ones I've tried.

Vivaldi

Despite me having previously used this for an extended period of time, I don't like it. It plasters "privacy" all over its brand to the point of semantic saturation, while partnering with Proton of all companies and having rather privacy-unpreserving features enabled by default. Its user interface is asinine at worst and obtuse at best, to the point where it almost feels like a troll.

Reciting the first sentence of jwz's law once more, it also has a mail client and an RSS reader, which would be better served by other programs that aren't your web browser (e.g. Evolution, Thunderbird). And for some reason it has a Mastodon instance you ideally shouldn't be using coz brand loyalty.

Zen

I tried this briefly. This isn't for me. Plus the numerous performance issues due to the gaudy UI.

Helium

This is the browser I'm currently using. I think it's pretty good, and I've had no issues with it so far. It doesn't get in your way to push a feature you don't really need, and it just works... which is what all computer programs should strive for as an ideal, but we're too far from god for that.

Please go try it.

Kagi

I don't like Kagi. I have no idea why you'd pay for a search engine, and the only thing I have an idea about it is hype. People like it because it supposedly brings them results without "slop" or "bullshit", and because it has vocally renounced AI many, many times despite the CEO (Vladimir Prevolac) having three LLMs (one pretending to be Steve Jobs) managing his life.

They also talk about the "small web" a lot despite them being a commercial company, preaching websites that individuals have made to "express themselves or share knowledge without seeking any financial gain"... ironic, considering that they have an API for this, but sure.

Paying for a search engine does not mean you automatically get a non-shittified product. At the end of the day, if you're selling a product commercially as a for-profit company, you will eventually have to enshittify or you'll go out of business, as a mass of users paying 10 bones a month isn't going to be enough to float your boat for an extended period of time.

I'd also like to argue that they're expanding too fast, considering that they have "assistants" and a physical hub for every Kagi sycophant, plus a web browser. Please just focus on your main product for now, jfc.

Though, circling on its "core values": yes, search should just give you a direct link/answer to the thing you're looking for. I believe it should actually work this way for once, but this is not the approach one should be taking by any means.

So, What Have We Learned?

nothing