Technology@lemmy.worldbykirk781@discuss.tchncs.de
1 year

I've tried nearly every browser out there and these are my top 6 (none are Chrome)

www.zdnet.com English

The title is err, not correct because the top 2 alternatives Opera and Arc are based on Chromium engine. I have seen tons of people swear by Arc, but I am seriously asking (since as a Linux user I can’t use it), how much good can a browser be in this day and age if ultimately it’s ad blocking breaks and it will since Manifest v2 will go soon(unless Arc folks have a solution for it)

The rest alternatives are Firefox, Zen (FF fork but honestly Atleast this was something new I learned from this article) and Tor (which is weird since it is not meant for normal web browsing and using it will not only be slow but put additional strain on the nodes, correct me if I am wrong).

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    If you're finally ready to leave Chrome behind, these are my top recommendations and when to use them.
    • killeronthecorner@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 year

      I switched from Firefox to Floorp and haven’t looked back. Less bloated, same features, haven’t found an extension that isn’t compatible yet.

      Same with Fennec on Android.

      This article is pretty poor overall. Why recommend Arc, a browser that requires a user account to even open a webpage, and which the author himself said will probably be disappearing in the near future as part of their own product strategy?

      Lame clickbait aimed at nobody.

        • Clot@lemm.eeEnglish
          1 year

          For me, librewolf focuses too much on privacy sacrificing features, I personally dont like zen’s design. There’s others like waterfox but didnt tried them

        • killeronthecorner@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 year

          It sounded on base value like the least effort when switching from Firefox. It basically came down to Floorp and LW. I tried the former first and didn’t see a need to continue looking.

      • trueheresy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1 year

        This is interesting as I’ve not even heard of Floorp and alternatives have been such a hot topic the last month between manifest v3 and firefoxes updated terms fiasco.

        Can I ask, what for you had you opt for floorp vs the more commonly mentioned alternatives like Librewolf, Waterfox, etc.?

        • aquacat@pawb.socialEnglish
          1 year

          I at least switched to Floorp for more customization options and funny name, but back then Floorp also had vertical tabs and side-dock before any other Firefox fork (afaik).

        • killeronthecorner@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 year

          It sounded like the easiest migration from FF, and I tried it first out of the options I had lined up to consider (inc. LibreWolf). I expect LW is great too, but I’m time poor and until Floorp gives me a reason to switch, I’ll stick with it.

      • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
        1 year

        Have you tried Firedragon? Floorp-based but with some eye candy and privacy enhancements. (Linux only at the moment)

      • Clot@lemm.eeEnglish
        1 year

        Exactly the same. Floorp Fennec ftw

      • jef@lemm.eeEnglish
        1 year

        Floorp is a nightmare from my experience, I’ve tried it about 2 years ago, it was pretty cool but insanely buggy, I’ve been trying it maybe once every 2 months ever since and it hasn’t gotten better IMO, if you customize almost anything in the ui, things will break eventually, and I always get frequent freezes and crashes.

        At this point I just use Firefox with Betterfox user.JS and its been great, you get ff updates as fast as they come out since it’s not a frok, also has all bloat and telemetry disabled, whenever I try out another browser I just switch back to ff for one reason or another.

        • Bilb!@lem.monsterEnglish
          1 year

          I wonder if floorp has improved, because people are talking it up lately. My experience a few months ago was like yours, it was very buggy.

          • jef@lemm.eeEnglish
            1 year

            Last I’ve tried it was about a week ago, it was as I described. FYI I am on a mac, so Linux/windows might be less buggy, not sure.

        • killeronthecorner@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 year

          I haven’t had many bugs but I’m primarily using it on a MacBook, so maybe it’s more stable than on Linux? Though that in itself would also be a bother as I have a Linux desktop that I want to install on, so I’ll be looking out for these issues when I do.

        • _cryptagion [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comdeleted by creatorEnglish
          1 year

          I’ve been using it on Linux for months and have had zero issues. FIrefox, on the other hand, constantly crashes. When it even opens in the first place.

          • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
            1 year

            Thanks Fennec I use, I haven’t tried Mull yet. Sounds dumb but I’m constantly looking for Android FF forks so I can use them for other profiles. Really wish mobile FF would get proper profile support.

      • Darken@reddthat.comEnglish
        1 year

        This list to me feels like AI trying to average the commoner internet

        And the comments here really show it

      • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nzEnglish
        1 year

        I beg to differ, when Opera had its own engine and wasn’t Chinese owned - back in the early '00s.

        • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1 year

          Opera also was a good alternative on Symbian phones right or whatever OS Nokia used before they switched to Windows Phone, I think.

          • Rinox@feddit.itEnglish
            1 year

            Opera mini was also great when I had very little MBs of internet traffic in my plan. Nowadays I have pretty much infinite traffic, so I haven’t used it in ages

            • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
              1 year

              I think I remember Opera Mini’s layout though I didn’t much use it. It was a great alternative especially on mobile more than a decade back.

              But yes especially after changing ownership, switching browser engines and years down the line; things have changed.

              I think I gave their desktop variant a try sometime ago but didn’t find it compelling enough. I haven’t even used their Android fork. I keep using a Firefox fork only :p.

        • kobra@lemm.eeEnglish
          1 year

          this era of the internet was such a fun time.

          • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nzEnglish
            1 year

            I suspect that we may be looking back with rose tinted glasses, but the main stream internet is pretty crap atm

        • Damage@feddit.itEnglish
          1 year

          Opera was so good. Disable images, force custom CSS, gestures! Stuff no one else had at the time.

            • philpo@feddit.orgEnglish
              1 year

              And it has some options to interpret data following strict W3C standards. Which was incredibly helpful when learning, as it encouraged me (and a lot of others) to don’t go down the IE/Netscape and later Chrome “specialities” road. (Yes,I am that old…I still remember MS fucking FrontPage)

              • swelter_spark@reddthat.comEnglish
                1 year

                I remember that! Standards mode vs compatibility mode. That was a great feature, too. Opera was unique.

            • Damage@feddit.itEnglish
              1 year

              User agent spoofing, tabs back when nobody had them, sidebar…

          • WFH@lemm.eeEnglish
            1 year

            gestures!

            Still the reason that 20+ years later the second thing I install on any browser is a gestures extension (the first one is always uBlock Origin, obviously).

        • tomjuggler@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 year

          Yeah I was 100% Opera on desktop and mobile until they switched to chromium and broke everything from before. Still pissed about that, lost all my bookmarks and notes at one point.

      • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
        1 year

        As someone who used Opera 2002-2013 (Presto era), I quibble with the “always”.

        But I do not quibble with the “is”.

          • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
            1 year

            Yeah, me too. Never used it since.

            So I was glad when Opera co-founder von Tetzchner announced Vivaldi, and I did use it for a couple of years. But I don’t want to become dependent on something not completely FLOSS, so lately using mainly Firefox mods like Floorp, Zen and Firedragon.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              1 year

              My history w/ browsers:

              1. IE - everyone started here
              2. Firefox - switched once I heard about it
              3. Chrome - when it came out, it was fast, which was cool
              4. Opera - switched as soon as I heard about it; was about as fast as Chrome
              5. Firefox - switched when Opera became a Chromium browser

              Since I came from old IE days and started my career having to backport stuff to IE, I care a lot about engine competition, because IE owning everything made everything worse. So that’s still my #1 concern today, hence why I use Firefox.

              I do dabble with Firefox forks though. I use Fennec on my phone, am trying out Mullvad on my laptop, etc. But I’m going to stay within the Gecko-family of browsers until a viable alternative to Blink (Chrome’s engine) emerges (e.g. Servo or LadyBird).

        • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1 year

          Many sites have become worse. I think stuff like Cnet, PCMag (which still has a digital magazine I think)were much better in the previous era.

      • Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        1 year

        Yep. Dont use Opera. They are known for being an incredibly scummy company that has done illegal things. Im 98% sure opera gx is spyware

      • wedge@lemmy.oneEnglish
        1 year

        It was an excellent standalone install porn browser for a couple of decades. God seed Opera… God speed.

      • _cryptagion [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comdeleted by creatorEnglish
        1 year

        And funded by a right-wing billionaire who owns the largest corporate intelligence agency on the planet. Your data is not safe with Brave.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 year

          Except your data not being safe with Brave doesn’t depend on who owns it. It’s a technical conclusion that should follow from technical traits of a system. Those are such that using a modern web browser to do modern web things is not secure period.

      • douglasg14b@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1 year

        Always has been.

        Right beside the fact that their monetary model relies on user activity tracking. Yet they advertise privacy.

        A browser that had a seemingly unlimited budget for advertising before it even had users is suspicious as hell.

        I’ve never trusted brave.

      • natch@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1 year

        Honestly I wish Kagi would build their own full Firefox fork and maintain it independently. I already pay for search, I wouldn’t mind paying for my browser if it actually respected me!

      • naeap@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1 year

        Hm…not sure, if I want to support another Webkit browser

        We need more diversity in web engines

    • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.eeEnglish
      1 year

      Eww opera, at least it’s slightly better than opera gx

      Edit: TOR? I stopped treating this guy seriously once I read this. Nobody uses TOR for regular browsing. They’re full of shit.

      • Manalith@midwest.socialEnglish
        1 year

        I tried Opera GX because it advertised the ability limit RAM consumption, and then I found out that the lowest it could go was 1GB which was not as low as I wanted.

    • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 year

      Zen browser is really nice imo. The developers update it very frequently.

      One drawback is that it lacks widevine support, which means that things like netflix won’t work.

      • Propheticus@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1 year

        Zen looks nice and some of the UX concepts (workspaces, glance, split sidebar from vertical tabs) work well. The ‘fit & finish’ and the way changes are pushed (unilaterally? Unvalidated with endusers?) feels very much like a 1 man hobby project though.

        • jimi_henrik@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 year

          I agree, it also has some serious security issues: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927

          The developer’s comment reveals that it has been there since the inception of the project. And there are even more privacy / security issues mentioned in the comments.

          Unfortunately Zen browser gets a big fat no from me. 🫤

          • L_Acacia@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1 year

            It’s not a backdoor, it just enabled Firefox’s remote debugging tool by default, which is necessary if you want to modify the chrome of the browser on your own computer.

            At the time it was in one of its first alpha, sure it was naive to ship a browser with it enabled because it was convenient for development, but it was fixed 1 week after the issue was raised, and has been for months.

            They use the release candidate to test upcoming Firefox releases and see if it breaks anything, to be able to ship the update on the same day as FF (just like the majority of other forks do). None of the patches they make require extra telemetry except for their “mod” system. Most of the criticism Zen gets about “security” applies to every browser except librewolf and tor. Zen is as secure as firefox is.

            All this is coming from someone who doesn’t use Zen, as my workflow is constantly broken by their UI changes and bugs (which is the main problem with the browser).

            • SMillerNL@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1 year

              Most of the criticism Zen gets about “security” applies to every browser except librewolf and tor. Zen is as secure as firefox is.

              Most browsers don’t claim to be more privacy conscious than all the others and leave all the telemetry enabled when they do.

              • L_Acacia@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1 year

                Imo they are more privacy conscious than Firefox and most Chromium based browsers, and on par with Floorp/Waterfox with their provided defaults.

                If someone wants a good looking browser with vertical tab, while not having to debug privacy settings breaking site or having to write custom css to have the UI they like. Zen is my recommendation.

                The only telemetry they leave is the ones that provide features to their users. For example, they need to ping mozilla for addons update, firefox sync, update the tracker block list, …

                Although I agree with you that the privacy part of Zen the most beautiful, productive, and privacy-focused browser out there is clickbaity.

            • fernandofig@reddthat.comEnglish
              1 year

              Have you read the PR linked above? The submitter points out (when the maintainer starts getting defensive) that Zen has more social trackers whitelisted than Firefox (not even Librewolf). Which going only by that metric would put Zen as the least privacy-focused browser among the other forks, contradicting their own tagline.

            • jimi_henrik@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1 year

              It’s not a backdoor, it just enabled Firefox’s remote debugging tool by default

              Just? I’m sorry but that’s just a terrible mistake to make, especially for a browser that people use to surf the world wild web. I don’t know if you’ve ever used a remote debugger (I do), but depending on the debugger, it can be a very powerful tool, you can do a lot of things with it. I don’t think calling it a backdoor is a massive exaggeration. I don’t doubt the developer’s good intention, but this issue shouldn’t be dismissed as an insignificant issue.

              To add insult to the injury, it didn’t even prompt the user for it.

              Zen is as secure as firefox is.

              Unless you tweak the default Firefox settings in the code base, e.g. https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/blob/dev/src/browser/app/profile/zen-browser.js#L258 (allow unsigned extensions by default).

              • L_Acacia@lemmy.mlEnglish
                1 year

                It was enabled due that zen was still a toy project and we needed people to easily open the debugger for easier bug fixing. This was due because zen was not in a daily drivable state and didn't gain any sort of popularity yet As the dev says in the PR almost nobody was using the browser at that point. To be able to interact with the debugging server you would need to have a port open on your firewall and router. And you would need to manually start the dev server. The problem in the PR is it was not prompting the user when launching the debug server and user could turn on the debugger without touching about:config flags.

                The second part is more questioning, though not exploitable without the user clicking 2 times on a security warnings. I just checked their github to see if there is an issue/pr on the subject and there is none. Might be worth making one.

      • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1 year

        I will give Zen browser a try. As for Netflix, I only used it for a one month since it’s quite expensive in my country and it crawled like anything on Firefox for Linux. I was getting consistent 720p video but not sure about full HD. Eventually I canceled it.

        • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
          1 year

          IIRC major streaming services like Netflix and Prime do not offer 1080p or 4k streams to Linux browsers, mainly for technical reasons. You have to use some tricks (special extensions or add-ons?) to get anything above 720p.

          • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1 year

            I think 4K is only available on Edge on Windows for Netflix. I never bothered with 4K since that’s above and beyond my device’s native resolution but I didn’t have too positive a experience with Netflix, IMO.

            I just want to watch something in full HD without intermittent streaming or buffering. Legal streaming services including Netflix treat one like a criminal by forcing them to watch in a Web browser with constant Internet connectivity forced upon them. I can use keyboard shortcuts to increase playback speed by 0.1x each time in mpv, does Netflix allow me to do the same? No, instead it gives me a dusty experience.

            • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
              1 year

              Back when I used to watch Netflix in a web browser, I had a browser extension that gave me lots of different capabilities, including all kinds of playback speeds.

              I can’t remember the name of the extension I used then, but I see there are still plenty of extensions available. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/search/?q=netflix

          • naeap@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            1 year

            “technical reasons”

            Wasn’t this just about DRM?

            • klu9@lemmy.caEnglish
              1 year

              IIRC it was something to do with the difficulty of getting the browser to use hardware acceleration/GPU in the countless variations of Linux, to the point where they don’t even bother trying because of the infinitesimally small market share of each distro.

              But I’m not 100% sure of that.

    • stochastictrebuchet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1 year

      I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.

      As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.

      • wingsfortheirsmiles@feddit.ukEnglish
        1 year

        I like Vivaldi but all the manifest V3 stuff just pushed me to Librewolf for everything whether it works or not, so maybe I should “thank” Google

      • L3ft_F13ld!@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1 year

        DNS blocking (such as AdGuard) doesn’t work for everything. Ad blocking extensions are the only way to block YouTube ads in your browser as far as I know.

      • stochastictrebuchet@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1 year

        Gotta say, it’s kind of a bummer to be downvoted for sharing my own experience. Are those ‘disagree’ or ‘doesn’t contribute to discussion’ votes?

        • lemmeBe@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1 year

          Don’t take it to heart, bro. I saw people downwoting for an honest “thanks”. 😄

        • Engywook@lemm.eeEnglish
          1 year

          I’ll link an unpopular opinion I posted yesterday: https://lemm.ee/post/59167603

          My own comment has been: “Don’t you dare to have opinions that don’t align with mainstream thinking here”.

          Here either you praise Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko or you are insulted and treated like a pest. And that’s a deterrent for me to even look at Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko. I prefer not to be part of that community.

          • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
            1 year

            And that’s a deterrent for me to even look at Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko. I prefer not to be part of that community.

            That’s a very childish mentality. You don’t have to be part of a community. It’s just a browser.

            • Engywook@lemm.eeEnglish
              1 year

              Let me rephrase it, then: I prefer not to give market share or voice to Mozilla and their shitty community. I consider FF a mediocre browser anyway.

              And I didn’t insult you, so you can shove that “childish” elsewhere.

              • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                1 year

                I didn’t see it as an insult… The mindset of, “I don’t like the people who like x, so I won’t even try x before trashing it,” is objectively childish.

        • morrowind@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1 year

          They’re “how dare you tout a chromium browser” votes. The FF circlejerk is and has been crazy for a while now

          • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
            1 year

            It’s not crazy. Google is doing the damndest to destroy the internet as we know it and using those browsers makes you complicit in that destruction.

      • ghost_towels@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1 year

        I’ll second Vivaldi! There’s no other browser with that kind of tab and workspace management. It’s how my brain works. The mobile app is great too with tab groups and the sync between the two is fast. I keep Librewolf on my laptop as well for the odd website that only likes FF.

      • VeloRama@feddit.orgEnglish
        1 year

        Vivaldi is great, but because of manifest v3 i’m looking for alternatives. Firefox is not an alternative for me because of the privacy stuff they changed recently.

      • Engywook@lemm.eeEnglish
        1 year

        AdGuard (the app, not the extension or the DNS) should do it. I guess.

      • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1 year

        I gave Vivaldi a try way back in its early days when I was on Windows. IIRC, it was bundled with lots of features even then and I think, for some weird reason, had Philips Hue Lighting support integrated (unless I am really confusing it with something other, this is multiple years old experience of mine).

        I used it as my main browser for Atleast couple of months then.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 year

      Ironically, I could not reach the end of the list because the fucking ads kept reloading the page and scrolling me to the top. Anyone know which of these 6 would block that?

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.caEnglish
      1 year

      Of that list, Zen is the only one really worth considering. And then you have the “but the best one that supports widevine” issue.

      • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1 year

        Firefox can do so too with TST or one of the other extensions in the store. Sometimes(atleast for me), they introduce slightly more lag when opening the browser but otherwise, they can do much of the job. I use Tree Style Tabs even though I might not be a power user of it (read:not actively using every nitty gritty of the extension).

        • RexWrexWrecks@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1 year

          I agree. I’m a pretty happy Firefox user. I am not a power-user of tabs anyway, I try to keep my open tabs to a minimum.

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
        1 year

        Google could close the Chromium source at any time. There might be promises and provisions that they’ll never do that, but if they do, who has the money to sue them? And who, of those, can’t be bought?

        “So what, people can run with the last good codebase!”

        Sure, until there’s a critical bug that Google don’t publish which then cripples Chromium until the maintainers figure it out, or else Google (deliberately or otherwise) take web standards down an unexpected path requiring massive changes, also making life hard for the fork maintainers.

        And don’t say “that’ll never happen”. Need I gesture broadly at the state of the world?

        • Engywook@lemm.eeEnglish
          1 year

          Whatever. Chromium is not Chrome, at the moment, so the title is correct. What may happen in 2,5 or 10 years from now is largely irrelevant at this time.

          Nobody is going to ditch their favourite browser (or any other tool) because of the rants of some random netizen/website.

        • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
          1 year

          Strawman.

          Your argument is that Chrome and Chromium are bad

          The discussion being had is that Chrome != Chromium

          • palordrolap@fedia.io
            1 year

            My roof and my walls are not the same thing, but if demolish my walls, will my roof hover there magically?

            • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
              1 year

              I really don’t know what’s so difficult about this. It does’t matter what happens to the walls or roof, the fact remains that they’re not the same thing. I mean unless you take your roof off and make it a wall and vise versa, then yes!

    • Lasagna@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1 year

      Arc is very nice for my workflow, quite a different take on what a browser can be. But I’d say you’re not missing out too much as it’s, unfortunately, no longer in active development.

      They still update chromium regularly, but they’re no longer working on functionality or bug fixes because it’s “done” or something. 🤷‍♂️

      • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1 year

        I am surprised they abandoned it. It was originally launched as a macOS variant only, correct? And Mac users praised it a lot, on the Web. I thought with that level of traction they will keep going.

        In contrast, there are projects that have a much lower user base though vocal (read: Pale Moon) and despite struggling with half of the available modern Web pages, those projects still keep going.

        • Lasagna@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1 year

          Yeah I was surprised as well, but apparently they’re working in a new browser.

          It’s an interesting approach where you can take all the learnings from the first product and then put it into a follow-up product.

          I hope they’re continuing the ARC direction, just not based on Chromium. But I’m afraid they’re going all in on some sort of AI browser…

          • Thekingoflorda@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1 year

            Afaik they are going headfirst into the AI craze, which I imagine won’t improve the experience, and will probably cost money to use.

            • f314@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1 year

              TBF the AI features in Arc are actually pretty good! Just quality of life-stuff like renaming downloads and getting summary previews when hovering search results. I have a suspicion they’ll push it farther with Dia, though…

          • Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1 year

            Look they just don’t actually know how to make money out of it.

            My intuition is that they should simply charge $3-5 per month and most users would probably choose it over every else if they prioritize privacy as a part of the sub. But I guess they are too afraid to charge for a browser.