i don’t rely on it for day-to-day use like i do with my iPhone and MacBook. i also have a magic keyboard for it, which has been super fun when utilizing the new windowed apps functionality. the most worth-while beta to install out of all of the betas that i technically *could* mess with is iPadOS.

i’m not gonna lie, though… i installed iPadOS 26 on my 5th generation iPad Pro (13-inch). you can say that i never learned (😭), but it just felt like the perfect device to install a beta on.

the lack of performance is definitely understandable for a type of software riddled with bugs and general anti-optimizations… and given that, i'm better off living vicariously through my favorite tech YouTubers and journalists.

this changed over time because, when i was a bit younger, i felt more inclined to run fresh installs of firmwares after testing betas and trying out jailbreaks. this inclination faded rapidly as i grew into an adult who just needs their phone to run and do its job.

i always used to run my phone on betas - developer or public, it didn't matter, i was there - and my phone ran hot way more than it needed to. not to mention the poor performance on more-than-capable hardware... it was just something that i couldn't bear running as i got older.

more about the folks who make vivaldi what it is: vivaldi.com/company/

chromium is something that i can personally trust, but it depends on whose hands it's in. i'd highly recommend giving vivaldi a try - you can easily import all of your browsing data - and see what you thin. besides my occasional dabbling, it has been my main driver for a while and i love it.

now with firefox's recent privacy term change, i've jumped ship (at least from mainline firefox, i still like zen and librewolf) and returned to chromium, but with vivaldi. it has all the functionality that you can want out of a browser and is super customizable.

also, there was tons of discussion some years back about brave's functions surrounding crypto and how they are seen as potentially untrustworthy (aka possible mining without user knowledge). that's what pushed me to firefox. folks scoured the source code and it screamed spyware.

it turns out that the website that discusses this is down. there is a thread on twitter that talks about it. x.com/bikatr7/stat...

imo, librewolf is as good as you can get when it comes to privacy + password management. mullvad is as close to tor as it gets (made in collaboration with tor).

i'm on vivaldi for the foreseeable future. chromium seems like a trustworthy-enough browser foundation, and the folks at vivaldi don't seem to be infesting it with shady configurations like brave does.

there's tons of collateral damage that comes into play when something as destructive as massive tariff increases is seriously implemented.