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Increasingly, I feel as if I am being pushed away from the browser. The local space, the window headers, the text editors, the ncurses programs, those that render under the control of the user, have taken on a comforting, friendly atmosphere. These are programs that exist to serve the user, that operate under the user's control, and do the user's bidding. Increasingly, I find that websites are fighting against the people who use them. Yes, I'm running adblock, no, I wouldn't like to be berated for not allowing cookies. They load strange styles, in strange fonts, take up obscene amounts of RAM, and scrape as much information as they can to be bundled up and sold to whoever is willing to pay. The assumption that the programmer knows more than the user is never more present than it is online, and it has never been more present than it is now. GNU utils are software, written by programmers, for people who appreciate and understand software. If any piece of software is behaving in a way I don't like, it's easy for me to change that behavior. I've written a small script that creates a text file for X to use as color variables for various programs, from the input of an image. This was a fun exercise, but in doing this the browser has become even more separated in my mind. The browser alone obeys its own rules, renders text its own way, selects its own jarring colors. The browser is an intruder in the space of the user, a stranger. The ability of the browser to connect us to others is invaluable, the "strangeness" of the browser is what gives it utility. However, we should be careful to accept that strangeness as truth, and ensure that the browser itself does not become that truth, and that the user, and the user space, does not become the interloper in our minds.