What is your best browser of choice and why?

The Water Cooler
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Hey everyone,

I wanted to start a discussion about web browsers and find out which one you prefer to use as your go-to option. Nowadays, there are so many choices available, each with its own unique features and benefits. It can be quite overwhelming to decide which one suits our needs the best.

So, I’ll kick things off by sharing my favorite browser, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences as well!

For me it is firefox
Reason simple independent does not rely on big tech google. And does not collect a lot of info about browsing habits.so on and second best is brave as all patches are open source and outof the box have privacy and a good security block all tracking scripts so on just the crypto part which i don’t like much but that it ok as it is their business model.
Also they have some more technical stuff covered

What about guys.

  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Brave
  • Chrome
  • mullved browser
  • vivaldi
  • opera
  • edge
  • GNOME Web / Epiphany
  • librewolf or waterfox
  • Tor browser
  • Chromium /ungoogled chromium

0 voters

4 Likes
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I use Firefox primarily.

For a few reasons:

  • It isn’t based on chromium and I would like to try to avoid a future where Google has even more control of the internet
  • With the proper settings applied, it can support a private browsing experience
  • Even though there are derivative browsers which apply privacy controls out of the box, I prefer to get my browser patches as soon as they are available instead of waiting for a downstream product to integrate them.
9 Likes
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Hiya,

I primarily use Brave. Good privacy protections and cross platform.
Used Firefox for over 10 years but cookie consent pop-ups and other annoyances with it on iPhone and iPad made me leave it behind.

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Primary = Opera-stable
Secondary = Chromium

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This are going to be solved in 116 of firefox

1 Like
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Yeah on desktop only afaik (?) the but then there’s uBlock that handles all that. iPhone/iPad is obviously not a priority for Mozilla so I’m not holding my breath this will be implemented there any time soon.

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Iphone ipad uses webkit it is more gnome browser less firefox or brave

1 Like
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Yes. Your point? Others have the ability to make a browser with those limitations that has the features I need while Mozilla does not. So I don’t use Firefox.

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  • LibreWolf - better privacy
  • Firefox - backup option, works with everything
  • GNOME Web - I love tiny alternatives :slight_smile: and competition beyond “the first circle” (Safari, Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, Firefox, etc)
1 Like
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Have anyone used mulved browser for privacy instead of libre wolf which is just firefox without telemetry enabled mulled have many features for privacy anf full arkenfox patched and many more it is just tor browser without tor onion network.

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librewolf has many more changes than just telemetry disabled. There are many privacy enhancing settings applied by default.

3 Likes
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Firefox + Edge
I primarily use Firefox for its ESNI and DoH features. Firefox improved the settings for DoH in version 114, but unfortunately, ESNI still needs to be manually enabled in about:config :frowning: As for Edge, I use it mainly due to the new Bing and for browsing some websites that do not support non-Chromium browsers.

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Firefox for the following reasons:

  • Not made by data thirsty companies like google.
  • Not based on chromium (I like to help keep competition alive).
  • More customizable than chrome.
  • Will keep support for MV2 unlike chrome which will sooner or later drop it and weaken adblock.

I have chromium installed as fallback just in case a website is broken for Firefox only, and to be able to install PWA.

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I like Firefox. My first choice. I had Mosaic on a Mac way back in history. 'Nuff said. But I need Chrome for Duolingo, 'cause they think Firefox can’t use my microphone. It can, but they’re ignorant. I still have to try them with MS Edge which I have on Fedora in virtual machine. :slight_smile:

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I feel like I have a mess of browsers now for different reasons.

  • Work: Edge signed in to my company’s Azure AD so it syncs and allows me easily to access apps and handle the 2FA / Managed Client requirements
  • Personal - Fedora: Firefox with Firefox Sync so I can access all my Fedora related or Open Source work related items here.
  • Personal - Else: Safari (I am a macOS / iOS user by day just because my family is all in on iCloud / iMessage and lock in is a nightmare). But I can say Safari works best on my iPhone so I just accept it.

On my work Macbook and my iPhone, I have all three installed so I can jump between them easily too - but on my Fedora laptop, I just use Firefox.

I used to use Brave for Work/Personal but have been iffy because I had a bad time with Sync for a long time and I got convinced by Edge being really simple with my work things that the friction reduction was worth the switch.

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Librewolf

Librewolf is currently overhauling their RPM build system.

Their current repo ships a Browser built for f38, which also had strange “browser data disappears” bugs, unlike its own Flatpak, official binary, Fedora Firefox, Flathub Firefox.

Librewolf Flatpak

The Flatpak seems better somehow, but I dont know if their build system is better here. Probably, as they use the Freedesktop.org. not sure what version.

Compile Firefox, hardened_malloc

I compiled FF myself some time, when I used secureblue with LD_PRELOAD-ed hardened_malloc.

Firefox runs very well with hardened_malloc, did a lot of benchmarks and no crash.

Fedora Firefox now has the build variable “allow replace malloc” set, so if you LD_PRELOAD another memory allocator, it will use that.

Note that the LD_PRELOAD method in secureblue is a hack. The correct way is to compile glibc with hardened_malloc but who wants to compile glibc??

Also this Tor Browser thread goes about how different Firefoxes mozjemalloc is from upstream jemalloc.

A malloc may also increase Fingerprintability, but really, using different devices does that…

Vanadium

On the Smartphone, GrapheneOS is the most secure OS. And on GrapheneOS, Vanadium is the most secure browser.

On other OSses, Cromite is recommended, because Vanadium may have patches that break regular Android.

Nightlies

Checkout my repooo!

Some cool Flatpak maintainer builds Flatpaks for Firefox Nightly, ESR, Dev and Thunderbird Daily.

All use the official release binaries and thus have no other issues.

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btw i find this that chromium is not providing any sandboxing is it a major issue in flatpak

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I used chrome and chromium for a loong time. Then I noticed in chromium browsers there is no CA manager. I don’t think it was like that in the past. In the past I could access the CA store in chrome and remove a dubious CA (think Entrust)… According to this page :

​In Chrome 105, Chrome began a platform-by-platform transition from relying on the host operating system’s Root Store to its own on Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, Linux, and Android. This change makes Chrome more secure and promotes consistent user and developer experiences across platforms.

But the reality is that chrome/chromium does not have anymore this internal CA store. It seems to be using the underlying OS “trust list” both on fedora and windows… I don’t remember it being like that in the past. Firefox still uses the internal one, but I think something happened to chromium browsers recently… Could not find proper documentation on this issue on other web pages, even opened a google ticket that remained unanswered…

So this is why I voted Firefox…

1 Like
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I use Firefox:

  • It’s default in all mainstream Linux distros
  • It exists on Windows
  • They allow uBlock Origin everywhere (requirement for security)

Why not Chrome:

  • They don’t allow uBlock Origin on Android (I’m consistent with desktop/mobile browser)

Why not anything else:

  • They’re either forks of Chromium, outdated Firefox forks, and/or ran by more-questionable entities than Mozilla
  • Less-users = less-eyes = less secure. Browsing online isn’t some joke to be blindly trusting to toy browsers.

If Mozilla or Firefox give me a reason not to use it anymore, I’ll likely use Chromium or Edge.

3 Likes
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I use Firefox in Linux and Mac mostly because I have been using since it was Firebird and it works more or less fine (even some bugs takes 21 years to be fixed). But Android version is terrible yet sadly, so I cannot use on my phone.