Ask Paul: November 4 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It’s been a frustrating morning of technical issues, so let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with some great reader questions.

Note: Speaking of which, we had some issues with this week’s Ask Paul forum post, which prevented some people from posting questions. Sorry about that, but this is a weird ongoing issue that may/may not only be tied to Ask Paul posts for some reason. We’re looking into it. --Paul
NextDNS  update
Anlong08 asks:

Sorry to hear about your dog's passing.  We went through the death of a beloved dog 2 years ago and it's miserable.

Thanks. This one hit me harder than I expected.

For the question. How has your Next DNS experience been going? I was surprised at how often catalog.gamepass.com quires, but was confused that I didn't see a firehose of quires overall in the logs.  I'm chalking that up to using privacy focused browsers.  I did have to turn it off to get comments to work on thurrott though.

For now, nothing has changed: I’m using NextDNS successfully on my mobile devices and love it. I’ve had no issues (at least not that I’ve noticed) with sites not working etc. Everything is good. What I’m not doing is using it on my PCs or network-wide via my router. And … that may change. I’m on the cusp of updating our home network from the Wi-Fi 5-based Google Wifi mesh network we currently use, and will move to something Wi-Fi 6E-based, probably the Google Nest Wifi Pro because of the pricing. When that happens, I’ll see whether it’s possible to just put NextDNS on the router and have it work on all devices automatically. And if that does work, I’ll need to figure out how to work around it on PCs for the reason you mentioned: it blocks OpenWeb (our comments system provider) by default.

But that, as they say, is a problem for another day. I’m watching out for Black Friday and other sales before I take the plunge. (Supposedly, some Google Wifi users are seeing a 30 percent off offer in the Home app, for example, and I keep checking but am not getting this offer.)
Firefox vs. Brave
rbwatson0 asks:

What are your opinions of the pros and cons between Firefox and Brave? I have tried both, and find that there are certain things I like and dislike about each. Firefox seems to be slower at rendering pages, especially on mobile (Android), but I think that Brave’s sync feature is way to clumsy for use between devices. I know you are using Brave – at least, at the moment. Any other tips, hacks or gotchas with either of them?

My heart is with Mozilla and Firefox, but as I opined years ago, they have boxed themselves into a corner by refusing to adopt Chromium. I know this is controversial, and I know some of you don’t like this opinion, but standardizing on the web rendering engine is both right and correct, if that makes sense, because it makes life easier for web developers and has/will result in better web experiences. By continuing to use its own out-of...