Post #2132946

2026-05-07 03:35 UTC

Sorry Google. It's not me, it's you. Yeah, you've made the go-to web browser for years now, but I'll have to take my chances elsewhere. When you tried to installing a 4GB AI model on my machine without asking me, I had to finally draw the line. So tonight I'm 100% chrome free for the first time in years. Let's see what it does to my laptop battery life :) #enshitification

Replies (5)

@kaifi@pitha.social 2026-05-07 06:50

@benpate@mastodon.social congratulations ben! it's about time you checked out other browsers! zen is definitely amazing!!

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@mahadevank@mastodon.social 2026-05-07 09:01

@benpate@mastodon.social Zen and Helium are my favorite browsers now

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@nuwagaba2@mastodon.social 2026-05-07 11:23

@benpate@mastodon.social Besides chrome, which other browser do you use?

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@adrian_k@mastodon.scot 2026-05-07 11:29

@benpate@mastodon.social Just for info, I sometimes use the PortableApps version of Google Chrome (some sites won't work without it, but I also used to custom code websites, and I needed to test they rendered OK on all the major browsers). Like most of the software I use, it is stored on a Veracrypt-encrypted file on a USB stick, so it's only 'vulnerable' when the file is mounted. I've checked, I've not suffered from this 4GB download. https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/google_chrome_portable

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@johnlogic@sfba.social 2026-05-07 14:34

@benpate@mastodon.social Also watch out for web sites that hog resources inexplicably; a notable offender is LinkedIn (especially since Microsoft bought it and made it horrible). With Firefox, I often kill its processes that misbehave. (Firefox also makes it easy to see which tabs "crash" and just reload tabs as desired.) Here's an older version of the script I use: https://sfba.social/@johnlogic/115232688857376778 (I have since added some floating point calculations for reporting.)

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