Don't let your browser distract you

The internet is distracting, but as you can guess not using the internet–as idealistic as it may sound–is probably not possible. So I’ll show you in the following my ways to make the browser–and with it the internet–experience much more comfortable and free(er) from distractions that would waste your precious time.

1. use an ad-blocker

Most sane people will probably already do this, just get uBlock origin (the post assumes that you use firefox) and not see advertisements anymore.

You can argue that not watching ads on the internet makes it worse because “creators” can’t earn money anymore if everybody uses it. But frankly they should not try to use every malicious practice one could make up then.

If they want to fingerprint me then I’ll find out how to e.g. donate to them in another way rather then just giving into loosing that part of my privacy.

2. make the worst a little bit better

Lately youtube frontends seem to not work as well as they used to, in them I could just go to the settings and say “don’t recommend me anything”, “don’t auto play” or “don’t show videos on the main page” and thus make them stress and distraction free. But since I got to use youtube occasionally now that got worse. But “luckily” because youtube is big enough there are extensions to help you filter out the bad aspects out of youtube too because youtube doesn’t offer that themselves.

Here I use the extension df youtube in which the “df” means “distraction free”, I have it at the “strongest” setting possible which means feeds, autoplay, playlists, sidebar, subscriptions, trending, related videos, comments, playlists, etc. are all turned off.

Which then means that if you need or want to watch a youtube video that you actually watch ONE youtube video instead of spending the afternoon there solely because you are constantly getting tempted with videos that you’ll probably actually like. The youtube algorithms are probably the best of their kind, I’m scared of them.

3. use multiple search engines

To continue the theme of “go where you want, don’t get distracted on the way” I’ll also recommend using different search engines for the pages that you query more often.

For you that may be arXiv, pubmed, wikipedia, startpage or github. All those allow you to add their search directly as search engine. For that you can just go to the website, e.g. arXiv, press on the search bar and an icon of arXiv should appear at the bottom with a little “+”, to add it to your list of search engines.

From then you can continue to your search settings and map it to e.g. the keyword “@ar” and then whenever you preface your normal search with an “@ar” it doesn’t go to startpage, google or anything else and instead just starts to query arxiv instead.

Not a big change, but definitely a nice quality of life one that can make your browsing more focused.

4. don’t let distractions be recomended

Lastly I’d also recommend changing some things on your about:config which you can find by just writing “about:config” in your search bar and pressing enter. The about:config is basically a huge file which has a lot of settings that are mostly hidden to the user, but some things there I found very beneficial to change for the topic of this post and others friends have recommended me to just make firefox look less cluttered and more organized.

Let me go over a few, telling you what they do.

The first ones you can guess pretty easily, they just don’t recommend you anything in your search bar.

That means that you need to be conscious of what you actually want to do. It not suggesting history means that you don’t get easily to a distraction you have visited before. It not recommending bookmarks means that you for once don’t get dependent on firefox, and for the other not get recommend any entertaining websites that you may have saved.

It continues with all those other suggestions too, I don’t want them myself, they have never recommended me things that have helped, but rather distracted.

Judge for yourself if they could help you.

The last row shows a browser.uidensity option, which when set on “1” just makes it look less cluttered can recommend that in general.

conclusion

There are many more things you can do to protect your time and yourself, but those are the main ones that have helped me, so I’ll recommend them.

Hope you’ve gotten some new knowledge, if you have questions just reach out.

Have a nice day.