Web Wanderings: Jan 5-11, 2026

Rather than post individually about interesting articles, sites, apps and so on, I thought I'd collate them into a single post over a given week. To kick this series off, here are a few things I found interesting over the past week while wandering the web.

• It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons. An absolutely brilliant article on the user interface design mess in MacOS Tahoe, and how it breaks long-standing design guidelines. The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe is another hatchet job. I ain’t upgrading!

• Microsoft have renamed Office to "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app". This isn't a parody. Maybe I'm getting old but I think this is the most numbnuts product decision I've ever heard of.

• I came across yet another Chromium-based browser, Helium – a “private, fast, and honest web browser” according to GitHub (it's open source).
  
  I've been trying to use Safari for the past year or two and I've now pretty much given up on the Mac because of bugs and performance issues (and this is without upgrading to Tahoe which, I’m told, makes it even worse). I tried Orion but it felt like a worse Safari. I've always liked the experience of Chrome, but the Google spyware version gives me the heebies. I've tried Arc (⚰️), Brave and others, but the minimalism of Helium is more what I'm after. First impressions are great, I'll see how it goes.
• MTV Rewind is simply wonderful. A retro time machine of over 30,000 videos across the MTV decades. Strong Poolsuite vibes.
• Mole is a terminal-based, open source app for cleaning up your Mac. Handy and seems effective.
• Inside the sub-zero lair of the world's most powerful computer. Google‘s Willow looks like something from the 1960s but it‘s a Nobel prize winning quantum computer. Read this to learn about the future.
• Just Cancel allows you to upload a couple of months of bank statements and it will tell you how much dough you’re dropping on subscriptions each month that you probably forgot about. You can run it locally as a Claude Code skill for utmost privacy.
• Google AI + Boston Dynamics robotics "to Bring Foundational Intelligence to Humanoid Robots". Terrifying and exciting at the same time. I'm increasingly confident that I'll have my own C3PO before I pop my clogs.

Until next time.