Anecdotal of course, but my flip phone has been great for mental ver a year, and my friend has had his for a couple, but ymmv

Magician (and the rest of the riftwar cycle) by Feist

I’ve head about private tackers forever, is it that much better than public? I have never really had an issue with public trackers ,but also never had an invite to a private one

Do you have the name for that fork?

Are you me? Firefox was always an option, but it definitely became slow maybe around 2010? I switched to chrome but came back to Firefox a few years ago also when chroms was first getting enshitified

You can enable the refresh gesture in the settings in Firefox