In my main Firefox profile, I use umatrix[1] to browse the WWW with all CSS and JS turned off by default, enabling them only when needed. Reader mode makes most articles readable with a single click.
Firefox's built-in privacy protection is also enabled.
If a website doesn't work with my settings, it takes about the same time to override the CSS/JS settings than the difference between an unblocked page load and a blocked page load. Pages load much faster in general, so it's a net gain in free time.
I also use Stylus[2] to turn off all CSS animation and add custom styling to websites.
I'n curious why you disable CSS, obviously I understand why you would want to turn of JS. Is this part of the override for Stylus to work? It didn't look like it from the link.
Some reasons:
- Ctrl-clicking to open tabs since I can then load them in the background (because I'm impatient, and because I don't want to get distracted by clicking into all the references in the main tab while reading.
- using tab tree extension I can then easily see what path lead to some interesting page I found
- by default, if you type ab address you already have open in another tab, Firefox will jump to that tab.
> Is this really a common way to use a browser?
Yep. Bot extremely common but I do it and a number of other HN-ers as well. Mozilla seems to be aware of it and seems to have it in their performance tests or something.