It has taken me about two months to drop Google as my search engine and web browser. The reason it's taken so long is the alternatives suuuck. Oh my god they suck.

I am now using DuckDuckGo as my search engine and the results are bafflingly stupid sometimes. You'll run a search and it chooses completely the wrong word in your query to focus on, and there doesn't seem to be a thing you can do about it. But I'm now just used to it?

I've switched browsers to Firefox because Google are limiting the extent that ublock can block ads, and this is the most difficult one. Stupid search results, I can live with, but Firefox is unbelievably annoying in some ways.

I do a lot of local web development, and I have dnsmasq running the localdev TLD. Both Chrome and Firefox do not like it when I go to clientname.localdev - both search that value in your default search engine. Both require you, first time, to enter http://clientname.localdev. Annoying. Firefox, however, requires you to enter http:// every time you type out a subfolder path on an existing fake domain for the first time, too. Google has figured it out but Firefox just cannot and it makes me scream every time I type out clientname.localdev/path/to/something and end up on a list of search results rather than my local version of that site. As I write this, it occurs to me that I could point one of my real domains to localhost and it might solve that problem, but I feel like I shouldn't have to do that!

That's the primary annoyance but there's loads of other slightly annoying things about Firefox that make me want to jump out of the window (we live in a bungalow). I think I'm now just used to being annoyed all the time.

Is this what it means to be a grumpy old man? I don't care for it.