Bastian Gruber

How I browse the web in 2026

| 4 min read

This blog post should serve as a time capsule for my future self. How was it like serving the Internet in 2026? What is my set up, my most visitied bookmarks, websites I frequently go to? Let's find out.

Hardware excursion

For the very first time, I cleanly separated my work (MacBook Pro M3 Pro) and my private digital life (Framework AMD 13" with Arch + COSMIC). I deinstalled all work related apps and logins from my phone (iPhone 13 Pro Max). I use Firefox on all devices, Thunderbird on my Framework laptop (and use GMail via the browser on my work laptop). On my iPhone, I use the default Mail client. I also unplugged completely from Apple and hope to get a GrapheneOS native Android phone soon.

My (Firefox) extensions

Configuring uBlock Origin for maximum coverage

Open uBlock Origin settings (click the extension icon → three gear icon) and go to Filter lists. Make sure these are enabled:

Privacy section:

  • EasyPrivacy (replaces Privacy Badger)
  • AdGuard/uBO – URL Tracking Protection (replaces ClearURLs)

Ads section:

  • EasyList

uBlock Origin's built-in filters (enabled by default) handle YouTube ads specifically—no extra configuration needed.

Click "Update now" at the top, then "Apply changes".

Web Services I use

Go-to websites I often browse

  1. isthelclcpoolopen.ca - A dashboard I created for our local community pool.
  2. The Verge
  3. Are.na
  4. Popular Pinboard posts
  5. Lobsters
  6. HackerNews
  7. NewsMinimalist
  8. Letterbox

Flow

I often times open the browser mindlessly, click on the suggested shortcuts in Firefox of my last visited websites, and see what's new. Once a day or around 3 times a week, I check my RSS feed. I really enjoy going to the websites directly, and RSS seems to... clean and stripped down. But I also don't want to check 15 blogs manually every day, so it's good enough.

I save websites (articles really) to my Are.na account and promised myself to read it later. Which... I barely do. I started a TickTick list with an every day task to read at least 2 articles from my "Aha! Coding" channel. And I want to read more papers and watch tutorials this year. It's always a nice attempt, and once work is heating up, I read up on so many things I need at that moment, that I don't have much time or energy left to read "general purpose" content. But every time I come across a new problem, I find a saved article months later which would have helped me - at least partly - with that. So I want to make a new attempt of being religious about reading tech articles again.

HackerNews is still one of my most visited website. I barely read the comments anymore, maybe the first one. But it's a good hub to know what's generally going on in the wider industry. Same with Lobsters, but I enjoy going through the comments there, even of posts I am not interested in. Pinboard is another one where I go through the popular saved articles, but don't use the service myself anymore.

For meditation and introspection, I enjoy WakingUp. It's sometimes "too far out there", but it's less cluttered than the other suppose-to-be meditation apps. And I still need some prompts or guidance, especially during a hectic day with work, family, hobbies and friends.

For my ToDos: I actually managed to have 0 ToDo apps during most of 2025. They always stress me out seeing all the open things in my life I currently can't make progress on. Work is manged separete, and life is happening so much at the moment with kids and family, that the top 3-5 priority tasks are always obvious. But I also realized I am missing out on cleaning out my (digital) life and experimenting with project ideas or blog posts. It's good to have a place to store them again. I start to use TickTick. I wish OmniFocus, Things and TickTick would have a baby. But TickTick is the best multi-platform tool I found, and it's "good enough". I really miss going nerdy in OmniFocus, and I miss the sheer beauty and simplicity of Things. But oh well. Can't have it all it seems.

I mange my finances for the past 15 years with YNAB. It is slowly not the best tool anymore, and I want to try Monarch, but their Canadian bank account support doesn't seem to be working reliably. But hey, they actually have a dashboard for it!

Coding projects still live in GitHub, and it slowly time to self host my projects. I never really collaborate much on these projects, but just want to store them somewhere where I can run workers. I would miss the hosting static websites via GitHub pages, so I have to figure out how to do that.

A bigger part takes YouTube. I listen to DJ sets, follow a few channels and often times watch tutorials or talks on it. YouTube is I think the only service which I am very happy to pay money for. Now it's owned by Google and I am sure there are some shady things going on with pushing videos front and center. I disabled my watcb history, so I see a black blank page when I open the general website. I have three YouTube bookmarks:

  • Subscription view
  • "Watch it later" playlist
  • My own "Music" playlist

So I never browse YouTube mindlessly, and get no video recommendations (disabled also via one of the YouTube extensions).

That's it - that's my setup. I use Firefox Sync to have my account stored not only on my laptop, and as soon I setup Firefox somehwere else, all my extensions and bookmarks are back. And I trust Mozilla with my data (I work there and can talk to the folks and they are all great :)).

I don't expect that I change this setup very much in 2027 - the web feels much slower to change, but I still want to have this noted down somewhere.

Discussion on Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/awxarg/how_i_browse_web_2026

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