I am confused, the suggestion was to use an E Ink device for reading, not to buy a dozen (or presumably eleven if you already have a phone) different gadgets.

That is an interesting and novel idea you have there. Kudos for coming up with that line of thinking, yourself. It might not have much merit in the practical world, but it is catchy, and I bet you could get a lot of people blindly repeating it as though it were a proven fact, based on that.

Bullshit. The World Wide Web ran just fine for over a decade without excruciating ads everywhere. And yes, if you were to ask me which version of the Web I would take, the free but relatively low-key, or the highly commodified wasteland of Capitalism run amok, then of course I would take the old WWW back. I would gladly see this whole JavaScript, Flash riddled shallow 'social' monster that it has become, vanish without a trace.

If running with AdBlock contributes in some small way to the decline of the materialistic money grubbing component of the Web that I despise, well that is all the more reason to run it. And Gladly.

You should be relying upon bandwidth throttling features to do that for you, not the inefficiency of your tech. Speed is vital in this market because speed reduces the chances of causing data conflicts. Slow and steady background uploads increase risk of conflicts as the average user doesn't pay attention to upload/download status before shutting down a machine or resuming work. Faster transfer reduce problematic "lazy" sync usage at a statistical scale.

Yeah, I tend to switch around plug-ins, as Google changes things to mess up downloaders, downloaders adapt, but not at an equal rate. Right now this one seems to be working (so long as 720p is fine):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Indeed, I'm not running Flash either. I don't even have it installed. That is why I mentioned using a download utility to acquire videos from websites rather than viewing them in page.

Only a small minority of sites flat out won't work without scripting. Just cruise past those idiot webmasters (they were probably making Flash only sites back in the day) and find an analogous site, there are usually many.

Then there are some that bitch if you have it off, like YouTube (they cannot track you as well without it, which is why they whine). But they are still functional. I can make full use of YouTube without scripting, with a Flash downloader. I get better performance than with their shitty streaming thing, anyway.

And always send feedback if a company or individual is clearly clueless over how scripting should be optional to the functioning of a site. If you never write in, they will never know their site is broken in a secured environment.

Actually, speaking globally the average person with access to technology does pirate media and software. They might not be using Bittorrent, but the guy that burned the 500 Best Software DVD likely is. The average person is buying it from a street vendor. So with distribution as with the initial crack, it only takes a few people to facilitate, or "mainstream", if you wish, piracy.

Sweet! Thanks, I'll check it out.

It looks nice, but unfortunately it is Windows-only from what I've seen? I need Linux/Mac compatibility.

Isn't that basically what I said? I think you're misreading me. SeaMonkey is an evolution from Mozilla as Firefox is, they are two separate forks from the same source, but SeaMonkey retains the core Mozilla design in its browser component (not to mention the suite aspect) whereas Firefox has gone consumer-oriented. However both started out from Mozilla, so saying that SeaMonkey is more like how Firefox used to be is not inaccurate.

Yeah, it still includes everything the old Mozilla suite did, though you can largely ignore all of that. I don't use ChatZilla and all that. The only important thing to me is that the browser component is sufficiently configurable and efficient. Firefox had the right idea to begin with, way back when, but in my opinion it has gone too far along the path of simplification and just seems to be trying to play catch up with a false target these days. I stopped using it several years ago when it was clear that the vision for Firefox wasn't in line with what I wanted out of a browser.

Opera died in the sense that it is no longer a leader in browser technology, as it has been for well over a decade, and is just skinning the Chromium project now. Out of context, that's okay, there have been plenty of skinning projects over the years that have been worth merit, but its the equivalent of say, Mozilla just giving up and using the IE engine and building a shell around it. They have ditched all of their code, from what I can tell, and unless you are keen on Chromium in general, I don't really see why you would be inclined to use the newer Opera versions over grabbing the latest Chromium build.

Opera before the transition vs. now simply is not comparable on any grounds. I used Opera for years, it was my favourite browser even though it didn't have the extension library that FF did, in large part because it natively did what it needed to do without extensions, and I liked their M2 client as well, which was one of the few e-mail clients that captured some of what Gmail got right. But, all of that is gone now. 100%, gone.

Perhaps some day they will rebuild some of their legacy, but I'm not crossing my fingers, especially with the misguided notions about bookmarks being worthless and so on.

In the past few years I've taken to just not even using a stylesheet when I browse. This isn't always easy to do in the browser, but some extensions can help. Web Developer extension can assign a keyboard shortcut so that if the design is super offensive I can just go back to something that uses a font size and window width I prefer. It often means scrolling past a header area rife with bullet lists, but that's an acceptable compromise for me.

Unfortunately some sites do not even gracefully degrade to simple display such as that, as they have a bunch of dumb Javascript stuff that is hidden by default, like "Page didn't load successfully" messages and progress spinners doing nothing. Ha. Yeah, it is getting to the point where browsing the web is like reading a crappy grocery stand magazine. I find myself doing less and less of it as well.

Maybe all of us that care should just move back to Gopher. :)

Have a look at SeaMonkey. It is the way Firefox used to be before it all started to go to shit when Chrome came out. It is as far as I know, the last real browser being maintained, since Opera died.

You get extension compatibility with FF, too.