Upgraded from Safari to Orion and couldn’t be happier

Web browsing on my Apple devices has been awful, although pretty much everything else has been excellent. Now that I’ve replaced Safari with the Orion browser by Kagi, I have an excellent web browsing experience.

Why does Safari suck? Advertising.

Internet content paid for by advertising is a terrible business model.

For my home automation experiments, I bought a refurbished iPad. They are quite inexpensive as schools age out the older ones and replace them with new iPads. But a 2018 iPad is still a fine device in 2023, and I wanted something to work with HomeKit. The problem was, I’ve got this iPad just sitting there on my nightstand, and there would be times when I wanted to look something up on the Internet. I would give in to temptation, which was universally a mistake. Every time I used Safari to search the Internet it was a completely awful experience because Safari does not support uBlock Origin by Raymond Hill.

Over time, I developed an aversion to browsing the web on any Apple device. It was always bad.

A week ago, I learned about a web browser for Apple devices that can invoke Firefox extensions: Orion browser by Kagi.

Of course, the first thing I added to it was uBlock Origin.

And now I find that browsing the web on iPhone or iPad is pretty nice.

THANK YOU Kagi!

They also have a version for Mac OS, if that’s your thing. 🙂

The Rocket Mortgage web site is privacy hostile

If I have any sort of privacy controls enabled, the Rocket Mortgage web site does not work. They have some sort of cross-site scripting going on where they throw something at https://streaming.split.io/ (which is actually a ably.com )

Even when I tell Firefox to keep everything together in the same container, Rocket Mortgage fails it. My only choice to get it to work is to disable all privacy controls.

Thanks, Rocket Mortgage. I simply love you for pimping out my data to advertising johns. Not.

Mimecast web site LOL

At work, I’ve been tasked with finding the best e-discovery software for an Office 365 environment. I found one document that shows Mimecast, Smarsh, and Proofpoint in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant”.

Smarsh, my employer has looked at before, for mobile messaging.

Proofpoint, my employer currently uses, but for anti-spam / anti-virus and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) only.

Mimecast, I don’t know anything about. So I went to look at their web site.

L.O.L.

Guess what doesn’t load worth crap if you have an ad-blocker?

uBlock Origins tells me it has blocked 53 ads and privacy invasion tracking bugs. And because of that the render of the web page is horrific.

Way to make a terrible first impression, guys.