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).
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.
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.
Great opportunity to mention Brave is owned by a dipshit right-wing homophobe.
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?
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)
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.
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.
