I want the premium vertical UI and ease of switching spaces in Arc but without the AI slop and venture-backed rhetoric about reinventing the browser.

The browser is fine. We need more companies that can fork the good parts of successful browser engines and remove the tracking and AI hype bloat. Those companies won’t make VC-level money but they could make decent year-over-year profit with a strong community following.

“I’m not affiliated with WP Engine” is this nerd generation’s “I’m 18 or older, let me in.”

I could navigate 8 different streaming services with unique catalogs and awful UIs just to find that my show isn’t available in Canada—not with a clear notification, but by empty search results where it’s supposed to be.

Or I could run a docker container that automatically searches everywhere for me and puts shows in my library minutes after their release.

For my uses it would be more convenient to pirate shows on the services I still pay for.

My experience matches yours. I don’t enjoy putting recapcha v3 on my sites but it takes contact form spam from 70-80 messages per day to 0-2.

I’d switch to other services if they could be as effective. If anybody has real-world experience with another option working I’d love to hear it.