"Better" by DigDeeper
A better way?
The current situation cannot go on forever. Sites will be getting more complicated and more malicious - and eventually, it will be impossible to mitigate them. This happens mainly because of two diseases: soydevism and capitalism (though many other minor reasons exist). Soydevism happens when a webdev didn't learn the basics (HTML, CSS, etc) properly and instead relied on frameworks to create their website. Some programmers have said that these days, a junior dev doesn't even learn the basics, but only the high-level stuff. Soydevs are also known for making their websites dumping grounds for trash like reCaptcha, third party fonts, social media buttons, etc (probably because they don't know any better). Capitalism happens when people stop making sites for enjoyment or passion and instead focus primarily on money (this will necessarily happen in a world where money decides your level of power and is also required just to live). That is when people figure out they can throw in a bunch of ads, tracking scripts, sponsorships etc. to make their site profitable. It also explains filling their websites with 20 clickbait articles per day (more impressions for ads and data collected by scripts). Ars Technica is a great example of a site that combines soydevism and capitalism. Of course, big corporations have contributed to the problem, by creating increasingly complicated standards that only care about working in Chrome (and then people - like the Mullvad team - stop supporting any other browsers). The more these behaviors are normalized, the more of a junkyard the Web ends up being.
The better way is to stop supporting the bad practices. Move away from visiting places that hate you towards those that respect you. This means websites with no ads, exploitative captchas, analytics, or CDNs. Sites that work in all browsers, including 20 years old ones - instead of only the big corpo abominations. Sites that - even if they decide to include modern functionality - practice graceful degradation when doing so, so that they still work properly in older or mitigated browsers. Sites that put their hearts and souls into everything that's on them, instead of dumping it there just to have it. Then, if you have your own site, do link to the other good ones. Though uMatrix, I don't care about cookies, URL Rewriter, BCMA, etc. are great tools, I really wish we could realize that they are mostly bandages on a Web that is broken at the fundamental level - then we can decide to just give them up. Let's create an internet full of love by default :D.
