I was a latecomer to the web compared to many tech nerds, having first encountered it at university. A tutor brought in his Mac, to which he connected a modem. It spent a short time making terrifying screeching noises, channeling ZX Spectrum games being loaded from tape while suggesting the very act of dialling in was tantamount to gadget torture. Then we were online. Things were simpler back then. Websites were basic. Many search engines were hand-crafted directories. I searched for my favourite band, Wire. That generic word returned a mere few dozen results. There was no AI rubbish – which brings me neatly to Quiche.
That’s Quiche with a capital Q, note. I’ve not gone a bit strange and suddenly started advocating for a French tart in the middle of a Stuff column. Quiche is a web browser. In fact, its full name, if you’re being all formal, is Quiche Browser. It’s a labour of love for a solo developer and available for free – although you can lob the creator a few bucks if you fancy keeping Quiche alive for the long term. And you should, because this web browser is opinionated in all the right ways.
Quiche Browser has always been minimal, thoughtful and refined. But it doesn’t decide on your behalf how you should use it. Instead, this browser goes out of its way to let you decide things like which buttons its toolbar should contain, unlike certain other iPhone Safaris – sorry, browsers – I could mention. Where Quiche does draw the line is enshittification. Its creator has clearly had enough of websites and search engines getting in their way and figures you probably have too.
AI don’t think so
This week, Quiche Browser struck its latest blow for a better internet by disabling AI search overviews. The developer says they waste space and time while burying links to human-created information beneath AI nonsense. If you enjoy Google suggesting glue can stop cheese sliding off pizza, you can switch the feature back on. But beyond Google’s bean counters, desperate to trap users in AI before Google’s beans run out, who’s honestly going to do that? (Quiche isn’t doing anything dodgy either – it simply redirects searches to ‘no AI’ results that search engines inconveniently hide.)
What’s interesting is how this tiny tweak makes Google feel like a good search engine again, even if we’re long past the company deciding “Don’t be evil” is a slogan worth binning. But Quiche Browser doesn’t stop there. Just as search improves when the junk is gone, so does the web at large. Quiche has a built-in annoyances blocker and a JavaScript kill switch to help there. These make many websites feel as snappy as they did back when that modem was busy terrifying everyone within earshot. Fab.
Which isn’t to say I want to turn the clock back. Today’s web is a vastly richer experience, packed with amazing apps and games that would have boggled the mind of 1990s me. An entire laptop ecosystem revolves around little more than a browser. But things could be better. They should be better. And if website owners won’t improve the browsing experience, and users won’t support the things they love rather than insisting everything online be free (thereby becoming the product sold to advertisers), I’m glad Quiche exists for my iPhone. Here’s hoping it soon makes the leap to the rest of Apple’s hardware too.
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