The Pound of Flesh

It would have been cool to play with, but it was just so slow and chunky. As much as I love the retro interface, its performance mimicked a computer trying to divide by zero. I did hear some interesting things about its WYSIWYG HTML editor, but the fact that it produces HTML 4 makes me too hesitant to try it.

PaleMoon's GTK2 interface is pretty sharp. It would look even nicer once I migrate my Fedora-atomic install to Debian (I tire of dealing with boxing to install a package that isn't available as a flatpak). Surprisingly, it managed to only barely lag behind Librewolf and Floorp in terms of performance and HTML5 compatibility. I do like it, but it didn't have enough focus or assurance on privacy for me to pull the trigger. I still have it installed, though.

Both of these are relativelty recent Firefox forks. They both are slicked-up versions of Firefox but they are not necessarily privacy driven. That may not be a necessity for some folks (because you can definitely do some tweaking in about:config but one doesn't make super rational decisions at 1:30 AM).

Both tout sidebars and tree-style tabs to increase productivity. I failed to see how that kind of thing works. Perhaps I'm too used to the Gnome workflow of opening separate workspaces on my desktop to separate work, shopping, personal &c.

I do have to commend Floorp for offering a skin to mimic Firefox from the Windows 7 era's UI with rounded-corner tabs. That was a pleasant touch, and if I were not able to do my best to replicate it with some funky CSS in Librewolf's config, that would cinch Floorp for me.

Librewolf was the first I tried after getting bitten by the privacy bug. It feels exactly like vanilla Firefox, which was an easy transition for me. It is even snappier, too. I don't really have anything critical to say about it, other than yearning for Floorp's fleurian design-theme.

I've been a Gmail boy for as long as I've been around. To an adolescent, the desire for privacy protections sounds stupid if it means sacrificing functionality. I've always been a functionalist with regards to computer programs. What's better, Win7 or Win8? Should I use GDocs or Word? Or even later in my life, which distro/desktop environment/text editor/you name it will change my productivity? I suppose I've always been cognizant of the shortness of life. Why bother wasting time on something that's objectively less efficient? The efficiency paradox struck me hard when I was about ten years old and I've never been able to completely move past it.

Gmail, in terms of efficiency, is top-notch. Slick calendar integration, the whole drive suite, all of their services seem fantastic. All for the low-low-low price of free. But it took age and wisdom for me to fully understand the aphorism there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Advertisements are the cost. Your data is the cost. No one ever reads the terms and conditions. We all trusted them. Yet they never deserved our trust; their only goal is the bottom line.

Targeted advertisements seem fantastic to a ten-year-old. They'll show me even more cool stuff that I'll want? Awesome! But I did not know the implications of having the biggest advertisement agency collecting records of my childhood obsessions. I'm sure if someone were able to extract such data they'd be able to tell me more about what I liked as a child than I would be able to recall off-handedly.

As I took more philosophy courses in college and as my own beliefs became more nuanced, I came to the realization that willingly putting myself in the way of propaganda is far too great a cost for some slick emails and document editor. Letting myself be the test-subject in an advertising psychologist' experiment tarnishes my free will.

Free will is humanity's greatest gift. Had we not free will, we would be nothing more than robots.

Everything we choose to put our hearts on bends our will subtly. Thus it is important to guard the garden of our minds. And selling ad space in such a beautiful and complex garden doesn't sit right with me. Everything we listen to, everything we see, even though we may choose to discard its phantasm, still marks us somehow. We ought to fill ourselves with beauty, not with consumerism.

I don't think man was made to be a consumer. Sure, we consume, but that is not our identity. Yet even our vocabulary shifted from 'watching videos' and 'looking at posts' to 'consuming content'. Why would I participate in something which diminishes our humanity? Why would I continue to allow myself to fuel the fire of digital oppression?

I have concluded that using Google services willingly becomes an unconscious admission of rectitude of surveillance capitalism. That does not sit with me.

Thus, I am working on moving away from Google.

It will not be instantaneous. My GMail accounts are still up, for the time being. One day, though, they will not be.

Enough ranting. I'm a big Thunderbird fan, and have been even before my open-source days. It's a slick app that has a lot of functionality. Did I say I'm a functionalist? I could even be called a maximalist in that regard (despite my opposition to maximalism as a philosophy).

I searched for a few GMail alternatives with the requirement of privacy as well as IMAP support.

I’ve seen plenty of recommendations for the Proton suite, but seeing as the premium plan runs 10 bucks a month for:

• Mail (Need premium for IMAP compatibility with the Proton Bridge)
• Calendar
• Drive service –more on this one later
• VPN (this one looked nice, but IIRC VPNs are less necessary for home traffic if all my requests are HTTPS)
• Password Keeper
• And crypto wallet,

it was a mite expensive for my tastes who was only going to use the mail service and calendar and perhaps the VPN.

It seemed nice, and free is a bonus. I philosophically jive with their goals. But the emails are unencrypted on the server. Yikes.

It also had manual registration that was …closed for the weekend!?

I didn't bother trying it.

Posteo has all that I want from an email provider (encryption on-server, IMAP compatibility and privacy-focused). It's simple but effective.