Read Paywalled Articles for free - at least some anyway

If you can afford, please pay! On the other hand, paying to read articles is expensive for you, here is an option (among many others, I’m sure) for you Install extension like Click to remove element from the Chrome Web Store. It works with others Chromium based browsers as well, like Edge, Vivaldi, Arc and many more 1 When you see a popup blocking the article, you can use extension like Click to remove element and remove the popup 😄

Vivaldi Browser

I switched to 1 Vivaldi browser after reading this post by Mike Kennedy To be fair, I had installed and tried Vivaldi a long time ago. But I think things got better this time around. I seem to have stuck with it for long time. One benefit of chromium based browsers (like Vivaldi) is that user has access to vast amount of extensions from Chrome Web store. 2 Just today, I explored two other “features” which I’m not sure how I feel about.

Switched to Arc

I wrote about Arc browser earlier here. At that time, I was still on macOS catalina, version of macOS not supported by many, including brew and Arch browser. Now that I have successfully upgraded - I was able to get Arc working on my personal machine as well. I did not wish to make this default on my work machine - wasn’t sure if it was supported (based on Chromium, so it should work, still if something does not work, getting support from IT won’t be easy.

→ The Arc Browser ∞

Finally, got the access to the Arc browser.

Quick overview of what it is.

It is build on top of Chromium browser engine. But adds difference experience altogether. Benefit of using Chromium is that most of the extensions that work with Google Chrome already work. In fact, one installs the extensions from Google Chrome webstore itself 😄

Most awesome feature that made me want to try it is that it will Auto-close inactive tabs after 12 hours (default - can be increased to 24 hours, 7 or 30 days)

They have and publicize the keyboard shortcuts. All browsers have keyboard shortcuts, but other the usual ones to open and close new window/tab, I hardly use any.

I also tried Notes that can be shared with anyone. I’m unlikely to use the share functionality. But the Easel - which allows drawing (and sharing) - seems interesting.

The concept of Little Arc is interesting. It is a smaller (hence Little) floating browser window.

They also have split view which I’m yet to explore. Seems useful when using bigger monitor.

If you want to try it yourself, here is an invite link

text mode browsing in Emacs

I’m leaning more and more towards text based workflow. Earlier I enabled twittering-mode in Doom Emacs, and tweeted from Emacs. How 🆒 is that. But that is when I realized that twitter has lots of URLs. If I visit a URL from my Twitter feed, it opens up in external browser by default. I have two problems with that. My flow gets disturbed. The browser already has gazillion links open. Once I go there, I get distracted.

Dooble Browser

I came across Dooble browser via one of the Hacker news post. The browser use Qt library and thus biased towards Linux. Or so I thought. There is a pre-built dmg file for macOS. It worked well in short test-run I did. I wish there was a way to set it as a default browser, so I could have tested it more thoroughly. FWIW, it did not register itself as a browser with macOS – which seems OS specific requirement.