As last year, I spent Christmas day this year by myself in my RetCom (retirement community) apartment. It was a peaceful time. Being that a week later, it would be another new year, I contemplated what I would like to see this coming year look like. I am a planner to my soul, but for this day I was in the dream mode rather than the planning mode. I will let you know a little more about that in a future post. But, for this post, I want to tell you the second thing I did that day, and it was safari. No, not the African kind, but the browser kind.

But, before I tell you more about that, I have to do some pre-explainin to do. I have used several different browsers over the years. The first was likely Microsoft Explorer. I hung onto that one for quite a while until it no longer served my needs. I then moved on to Firefox. It was good, but wasn’t compatible with my blogging website. About a year ago, I found Microsoft Edge. It suited my needs until I came to realize that it is more of an advertising tool than a browser. If you put Edge and Google together, you have a full-blown advertising experience. It seems that everything I would “google” lately, the first two pages are sites that want to sell me something. I gave up network TV and went to streaming to get away from all the ads, so I was not ready for the Google/Edge experience.

It’s getting ridiculous how ads are dominating our computer screens lately. The above image is becoming almost typical of what you see when trying to keep up on the daily news. 90% of the screen is ads and only a sliver shown in the yellow marked area is the new article itself. To me, that is quite annoying! I know Microsoft and Google need all the money they can get. After all, it takes almost a week of their CEO’s pay to equal what I made in thirty years. Edge is all about advertising and Google is there to make that happen.

With that in mind, I decided to look at the Safari browser one more time. I have always been a little uncomfortable with Safari, especially the lack of icons on the top bar. I won’t bore you with the details, but I am now using Safari as my default browser, along with DuckDuckGo as my searching engine. Neither of these two choices are particularly interested in selling me anything, so my browsing and searching is much more pleasant now. If you want the boring details about these choices, let me know, and I will put up a page on RJsCorner going into the details.

I am an Apple guy to my soul, except maybe AppleTV, which is about to remove its “Up Next” feature. More on that soon. So, now that Safari is my go-to browser, I feel more at peace than I have for a long time. 🙃

Are you happy with your present browser? If not, why?