Having "Fun" with alternative browsers

Now, I don't really have a practical need for any other web browser aside from Firefox. It serves me well, loading web pages, letting me search things, look for media, all general browser things. Good stuff.

One problem: It looks too modern.

I'm messing around with theming my PC, and I recently found out about this thing called "Chicago95". It's a project that's designed to make the XFCE desktop environment on Linux resemble the Windows 9x style. Think Windows 95, 98, all that good stuff.

Does a good job at it too, replacing the taskbar, window themes, icons, system sounds, etc, with era appropriate equivalents. Even changes the boot and shutdown splashcreens to that of Windows 95 specifically, and comes with some nice wallpapers.

The only exception to this rule is Firefox, as it does not fit the general theme. Oh well, no big deal, other things such as Discord and Steam don't either, and most websites aren't gonna fit, so it's a minor issue.

With that said, I did wanna try some other browsers at some point anyway and this was a good excuse to start, so I decided to start out with Palemoon, as it seems to resemble a more retro browser. I give it an install and booted it up.

First impressions? Great. Fits the theme I want relatively well. It looks a little Windows XPish for my taste, but whatever. Could look at it as the days when web browsers still supported those versions of Windows, but were on the way out.

Things fall apart when I find out that there's no decent ad blocker. There's good general filters, but nothing that just works right out the box.

There was hope however, a "Legacy" version of uBlock is around, and it seems to work with Palemoon! A few problems with that, though. The GitHub page for it doesn't load right under Palemoon. The general page loads, but the download button doesn't show up, perpetually stuck loading. I was able to copy the link from Firefox and paste it into Palemoon, however.

Now, this worked a charm. Ads are blocked, it's great. One problem though, it's based on uBlock Origin version 1.16.30, which from what I can tell, was released on May, 2018. This thing is 4 years old by this point. I'm not a security expert by any means, but I don't think it's a good idea to run anything that's 4 years out of date on the web.

I'm gonna keep it around as a novelty, look into the actual security of the thing. If it's actually perfectly safe, I'll use it as a secondary browser for social media and such, but until then, I'll just poke around in websites that are verified safe to browse.