MacSurfer Is Back

"Your browser is not supported."

Okay then.

Works fine for me... it might be nice if you tell us what browser and version isn't working for you?

I wasn't aware of it before it...came back. Was it always like this? Because it looks like the perfect formula to be AI driven. All I see are a list of today's Apple headlines and a link to every Apple website covering the same story.

It looks pretty similar to what they were doing in 2011: https://web.archive.org/web/20110225080738/https://macsurfer.com/ but could easily be AI generated!

I'm not seeing any tracking / referring garbage on the links - a lot of which look like they're just being pulled directly from the rss feeds the sites are publishing.

Looks like a slightly different format than I remember - more topic-based, and obviously those topics are going to be dynamic based on the actual larger news trends.

It's a Firefox fork, but I don't see how it matters. It's a basic news site; it should work on Lynx.

Hopefully it's not AI, if so I'm happy to see them back. I first stumbled into MacSurfer (along with MacInTouch and O'Grady's PowerPage) long ago, sometime in the late 90s, using Netscape on a PowerCenter Mac clone, and I read them for years. The online Mac community has always been sharp, and fairly small. MacSurfer and similar sites remind me of the old days of the web, back when it was a collection of enthusiasts and hobbyists mostly, before the corporate world started to dominate web content and search results.

But the web is going through major changes, and it's a rough time for independent sites, between relentless algorithmic changes from Google, plus their AI Overviews which just scrape and regurgitate content without directing traffic to the origin site or article. Online businesses live and die by Google, and Google favors their fellow megacorps. As a result many smaller sites and businesses are shutting down, and we see this heavily in the Mac/Apple blog world too, as it has already taken out several prominent Apple sites from the community.

That is to say I think we'll see a lot of this going forward. There will be other popular Apple sites that shut down and gone for good. Some will get relaunched, hopefully successfully and by members of the Apple community, and not by AI slop, spammers, or scrapers, which unfortunately is what happens to many old domains and sites that go defunct.

I'm sure Michael will update things here as needed, but in case... Nick Heer (sorry, could not figure out how to supply a simple link):

"MxToolbox reveals a txt record on the domain for validating with Google apps, registered to BackBeat Media. BackBeat’s other properties include the Mac Observer, AppleInsider, and PowerPage. A review of historical MacSurfer txt records using SecurityTrails indicates the site has been with Backbeat Media since at least 2011, even though BackBeat’s site has not listed MacSurfer even when it was actively updated."

It's me! I'm behind it. Was a long time fan going back to early days. Missed it terribly and bought it from the founder couple years ago when it went stagnant. Slowly trying to Bring it back to life, restoring somethings the way they were, and trying to create new things. Happy to take suggestions.