Firefox is maybe 80% of the way there. Just like in the IE Anitrust days, firefox suffers from sites that do not design with it in mind.
Still better than Google Creep. Change to a search engine that protects privacy too.
Still better than Google Creep. Change to a search engine that protects privacy too.
Flash? Now you have heavily javascripted "website".
Table layout? Now you have bootstrap and friends.
Progressive enhancement? Fuck that, we don't have time.
And 5 years from now people will rediscover those and accessibility. Then 5 years later another kind of hell will have appeared to replace this.
The only big change for the current wave is that everything is obfuscated so it's harder for a newcomer to learn by checking how people coded things.
By far the most annoying 'feature' (more of a consequence of the internet) is the way that you can't whitelist HTTPS sub-domains. (Makes AWS Console a pain.)
It took me a while of using DDG before I realized how much I had equated "good" with "looks like Google".
What finally hit me, hard, was that I switched the DDG theme to a color scheme designed to look like Google search results, and all of a sudden the results "felt better". Markedly better.
So, I started regularly comparing results, every time I found something that I felt I didn't get the results I expected for. I would search, and then search again with !g. And almost every time I ran into something that I didn't like the DDG results for, the Google results weren't actually any better. (The rare times they were, I reported that, and often it got fixed.)
This does not work for replacing "!spi" (image search on Startpage) though. Using "!si" does a search on a non-existent subdomain sportsillustrated.cnn.com.
just tried !spi and it works as image search :D
That’s the very reason I switched to ddg, but it bites me back everytime I try to catch up on stuff everybody already knows for days, and need to fallback to !g.
The DDG bang system is one of its best features in my mind. https://duckduckgo.com/bang
Might be time for another go?
I probably do less searching than I used to, but the bang system really helps me search other sites much more effectively. The more common bangs I use are !w for wikipedia, !so for stackoverflow, !imdb, !gh, !tpb, !bm for bing maps, !bi bing images.
For local businesses and really rare topics Google is better.
On the homepage, https://www.startpage.com/, at the bottom it lists the security part a bit more.
Other than the relevance and quality of search results, there are differences in features across these sites, like date range search, for example. Image search also seems to have more flexibility on Google. I haven't checked recently if reverse image search even exists on DDG or Startpage.