This is a quick reboot of a post I wrote two years ago called Alternatives to Firefox on Manjaro Linux. The original post was written when it was disclosed Firefox had suffered multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. And at the time I was running an Arch derivative called Manjaro Linux on my 2015 MacBook Pro.

Today I want to share my two favorite browsers for Linux, which I recently installed on my 2019 MacBook Pro running Arch Linux. Rather than getting my browsers from the AUR these days I’m now installing with Flatpack for speed and simplicity. If you’re not familiar with Flatpack I encourage you to visit their website and read up as it can save you a lot of time no matter what distro you’re running.

So here they are. My two favorite alternatives to Firefox for Linux.

:: Node / Vue / ES6 / Fuse / Docker / CSS3 / Bash

After fighting with WordPress on my personal blog for 5 years starting back in 2008 I like many others switched to static. With Jekyll as my generator I found a lot to love over the years. After 3 years and an increasing amount of content I became familiar with Jekyll’s speed and scaling issues and ended up resorting to workarounds to avoid them, hurting my publishing cadence in the process.

Dissatisfied with Jekyll and after considerable product analysis I eventually discovered Hugo. Before switching I did a multi-year experiment with Hugo before deciding to jump ship for good. After Dark was the result.

Today we’re going to create a starter website using Yew for Rust. This should take you about 20-30 minutes depending on the speed of your Internet connection and computer. At the outset you will have a website so bleeding edge you didn’t even feel the cut. Kind of like how Node developers didn’t see Deno coming…

To get started install or upgrade Rust. If you don’t have Rust installed, you can install it from the stable channel using the following command:

After giving a talk once in Bali – where I showed how to use a $5 Vultr box and Redis with Load Impact to support up to 7000 concurrent WordPress users – I was asked to help turn some of the performance optimization work demoed into a WordPress plug-in.

It’s the first of it’s kind — and like no other performance plugin to precede it. Based on initial tests it speeds up the stock Twenty Seventeen theme about 300% and I suspect time will show even greater gains for other themes. It builds on top of a performance optimization technique called Fetch Injection, enabling external scripts to download asynchronously in parallel while preserving execution order.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you already know the guy behind WikiLeaks, who was living at an Ecuadorian embassy in London, was recently arrested and now facing extradition to the United States – the country I’m originally from – and the country which forces tax payers to fund the second-largest stockpile of nuclear weaponry ever created.

But perhaps you didn’t know that WikiLeaks was at one point hosted by Amazon. Yep, right up until political pressure caused them to take it down. Afterall, nothing says freedom like a fear of misbehavior in a country with the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. I suppose Julian Assange’s situation could be worse… Maybe, had he also been practicing Falun Gong in China. But I digress. And there’s no telling what’s going to happen.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine since it was introduced to me by a colleague in Chicago. This was before I was able to close my Google account but some time after losing hundreds of photos leaving Facebook. And though I was aware DuckDuckGo maintains a hidden service for Tor users it wasn’t until recently I felt confident enough with my OS security to safely use it.

Rather than just bookmarking and using the DDG onion site, however, I decided to leverage some of the nifty URL params they’ve made available. Following is a quick rundown of the URL params I’m using to customize my DDG search experience for use with Tor. In After Dark fashion I’ve decided to name them “DarkDuckGo”.

In March of 2017 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web posted a short article on The Guardian covering three things we need to do to save the Web.

To paraphrase, they are:

• Increase individual control over sharing of personal data
• Improve diversity in Social media and Search channels
• Create more transparency behind political advertising

The third of which is, in my opinion, really just an extension of the second, so let’s briefly cover the first two and what you can do as individuals to address Tim’s concerns right now. When you’re finished, you’ll have a deeper understanding of how to protect your privacy online.

Spike at Airbnb just mentioned during a live TechTalk webcast that the Rendr framework they built was open sourced earlier this month:  github.com/airbnb/rendr. The framework leverages Node.js and Backbone.js to allow full-stack JavaScript MVC using a common set of code–greatly improving time to content, improving crawability, and reduces overall application complexity.

During the talk, Meteor and Derby were mentioned, and Mojito *sigh*. And Stitch was also mentioned, as a part of the stack they’re using. So anyway, there you have it. The Holy Grail I talked about. It’s out, but admittedly, according to Spike, not quite finished. Caveat emptor.