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).
Great opportunity to mention Brave is owned by a dipshit right-wing homophobe.
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.
And funded by a right-wing billionaire who owns the largest corporate intelligence agency on the planet. Your data is not safe with Brave.
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.
You identify as a liberal politically, don’t you?
Firefox
Firefox
Firefox
Firefox derivatives
…- Opera
Aaaand tab closed.
This list to me feels like AI trying to average the commoner internet
And the comments here really show it
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.
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.
Some bullshit. If you want to lower raw then just close out your tabs
Its actually pretty important that some normal traffic does flow through tor. If you dont mind the speed then its perfectly okay* to do all your web browsing through tor
*there are some caveats here but its not about the network really
Of that list, Zen is the only one really worth considering. And then you have the “but the best one that supports widevine” issue.
Firefox is still great, and Tor Browser is fantastic.
I’m personally checking out Mullvad Browser.
Tor is good for onion sites, but do people use it for general web browsing? Wouldn’t it be super slow?
Yes, and you should too because more “natural” traffic helps protect people who need it (journalists, political dissidents, etc). For mostly text content, it’s fine.
Sure, if you want to wait 3 minutes for your all-text site to load.
It’s not that bad, it’s a handful of seconds.
Yes basically unusable in my experience.
Zen is also being developed by an asshole who doesn’t even understand the code he’s working on, by his own admission. I wonder if he’s fixed the backdoor he added to it yet.
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.
Why did you go with Floorp vs the other FF forks? Just curious.
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
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.
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.?
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).
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.
Have you tried Firedragon? Floorp-based but with some eye candy and privacy enhancements. (Linux only at the moment)
No but I like Floorp and I like eye candy, so I certainly will be!
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.
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.
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.
I’m using it on Linux and have had zero issues.
Well fingers crossed for me then as I don’t really want to spend the time to migrate again!
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.
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.
I was using the flatpak on Linux.
Exactly the same. Floorp Fennec ftw
Me using Firefox until Orion comes out:
Orion will be restricted to Apple ecosystems, no?
It currently is, but they are shipping a Linux version this year.
Hm…not sure, if I want to support another Webkit browser
We need more diversity in web engines
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!
mullvad’s browser is based on firefox.
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?
Anything Firefox based with uBlock origin. Don’t see a single ad or anything on mine.
I saw a thing for their newsletter and some related articles. But that’s it. uBlock Origin FTW.
Additionally I have noscript extension so no JavaScript running as well
I didn’t see Waterfox mentioned in the article or comments, so I’m giving it a shout out now. Firefox is still my #1 browser, which I have synced to all my critical accounts, and use very cautiously, only using a few trustwothy extensions. However, when I want to explore unfamiliar domains or experiment with lesser-known browser extensions, I’ve relied on the equally dependable Waterfox browser. It’s fast, free, and 99% the same as Firefox except it’s a completely different app so you can basically have 2 Firefoxes set up and customized for completely different roles. Between the two, I can keep Chrome frozen on my phone and off my desktop (although I have a portable Chromium on USB for emergencies).
You do know Firefox has profiles you can use to effectively make it two (or more) separate browsers?
Not shitting on Waterfox, just FYI.
I have Waterfox setup as an alternative browser but it does not have much stuff to differentiate itself from mainstream FF, as you said.
Opera is and always was trash.
I beg to differ, when Opera had its own engine and wasn’t Chinese owned - back in the early '00s.
Opera was so good. Disable images, force custom CSS, gestures! Stuff no one else had at the time.
And the ability to switch browser engines on the fly. That was a great feature.
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)
User agent spoofing, tabs back when nobody had them, sidebar…
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).
this era of the internet was such a fun time.
I suspect that we may be looking back with rose tinted glasses, but the main stream internet is pretty crap atm
Opera also was a good alternative on Symbian phones right or whatever OS Nokia used before they switched to Windows Phone, I think.
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
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.
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.
Opera Corp. is Norvegian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)
The browser was sold to Chinese investors though.
As someone who used Opera 2002-2013 (Presto era), I quibble with the “always”.
But I do not quibble with the “is”.
I loved opera back then.
Exactly. I loved Opera and bailed when they abandoned their engine.
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.
My history w/ browsers:
- IE - everyone started here
- Firefox - switched once I heard about it
- Chrome - when it came out, it was fast, which was cool
- Opera - switched as soon as I heard about it; was about as fast as Chrome
- 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).
Same for ZDNet.
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.
It was an excellent standalone install porn browser for a couple of decades. God seed Opera… God speed.
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
ZDnet 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
This is just a list of browsers with apparently good tab management.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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. 🫤
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).
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.
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 thereis clickbaity.
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.
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).
xpinstall.signature.required was set back to true, seems like complaining works well
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 yetAs 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“technical reasons”
Wasn’t this just about DRM?
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.
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.
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.
AdGuard does more than DNS blocking. It strips ads from the response content.
Haven’t seen a single YT ad
I only know the DNS blocking from them.
ETA: Not sure if their app does more.
It does.
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.
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
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?
Don’t take it to heart, bro. I saw people downwoting for an honest “thanks”. 😄
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.
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.
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.
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.
They’re “how dare you tout a chromium browser” votes. The FF circlejerk is and has been crazy for a while now
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.
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.
AdGuard (the app, not the extension or the DNS) should do it. I guess.
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.
