What is your best browser of choice and why?

I noticed this article which noted people leaving Firefox because of a privacy setting: https://www.fastcompany.com/91167564/mozilla-wants-you-to-love-firefox-again

Considering all the change required was checking a box in Settings and the change itself is balanced and understandable-enough, I have to wonder what other browsers these people are going to if they were serious-enough about their privacy to have been using Firefox to begin with :stuck_out_tongue:

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This is true that firefox is really dieing and switching to a better browser maybe a option.
I am considering to find a non chromium base browser
Chromium is not bad but has a extremely large codebase and only one company control the most of the code base technically and this is really bad that no other engine exist.
My consideration are servo project which is rust written and evolving to be a full featured browser engine under linux foundation

Other id ladybird still it is written on c++ which i dont like but they recognise this and will consider switching to a better code.

This is so true - I’m wondering sometimes why all this Firefox forks pop up if you check how much developers are involved (few) you should questioning yourself how secure such a fork really is as FF codebase is quite large. The ideal would be an opensource browser founded by public resources and even web search should be in the hands of public institutions like Universites not by a single entity but that’s OT.

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Guys, we are ignoring the elephant in the room.
Today’s Internet is made for Google Chrome, pretty much like many years ago it was made for MS Internet Explorer.
So whatever other browser must be compatible with all those Web Sites and Services that are developed and tested for Chrome.
Firefox struggles both because of the codebase and because of this kind of “lock”. You go on Outlook and you are told some features aren’t supported. Google is more subtle but at the end it is the same, something doesn’t work or works with a inferior performance.

So now I read of “new browsers” and/or non-chromium.

Yes, it would be cool if somebody comes with a new Web engine and a new whole browser. Problem is even Microsoft ditched Explorer and made a “mod” of Chromium. Guess what the chances are that a single developer or a small team can come out with this “universe-creation-level-task”.

Forks make no sense for the same reason.

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honestly, I personally barely see that happen. I mean, okay, I don’t use Outlook, but I do use Google, and I generally visit the web a lot. Honestly, I can only remember one website where I had issues because of using Firefox. But even that website, I just use a mobile app for (that’s what it was developed for in the first place).

To be fair, LibreWolf is known to keep up rather rapidly with FF’s updates, and it’s just Firefox with some privacy-related settings enabled, I don’t think they change a single line of the actual code. Though for those willing to do a little bit of manual tweaking, I would recommend Arkenfox instead, which is not much more than a settings file that you apply onto your normal, up-to-date firefox (which also solves the issue of trusting LW maintainers). Mullvad and Tor browsers seem to be in a bit of a sticky situation regarding updates though.

Of course Firefox, it is always preinstalled and configured in Fedora, for me there is no need for any other browser. Also it have all the features and nice UI.

sadly, arkenfox’ latest release is v128, on aug 26. Now they might be actually busy or have other good reasons for this, I’m not here to complain. I’m just saying that, apparently, it can be quite delayed on updates. And with something like a browser, non-delayed updates are very important.

It doesn’t matter - arkenfox is not a browser, it’s just a file that modifies a bunch of firefox’s settings. As long as you keep firefox up to date, all is good. Occasionally they tweak arkenfox a bit to keep up with changes to firefox, but otherwise arkenfox doesnt need to be updated that frequently.

hmm, I mean… isn’t this like applying kernel patches from a few versions earlier to the latest kernel? I don’t know, sounds like there’s a chance for some things to break… I hope you’re correct though, but I’ll probably never feel sure about it

Not really. Arkenfox doesn’t modify FF’s code, it just changes some settings. You could get the same effect by going to about:config and manually flipping switches, it would just take a while.

oh ok… I wonder why it needs updates at all then hah.

Mine is vanilla Firefox because:

  • It’s open-source, free from Google’s decisions (except for the default search engine :P) and I can keep using MV2 extensions like uBlock Origin.
  • Highly customisable with CSS and JS.

That said, there are other browsers that I also like:

  • Floorp (second favourite)
  • Ungoogled Chromium
  • Thorium
  • Orion on iOS
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Firefox with one extension - uBlock Origin.

Runs great, works on all websites I go to.

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1- Brave (my default)
2- Vivaldi (preferred for customization, mail and feed)
3- Librewolf (for selected sites)

Sorry for the delay.

Current situation is we have only two main players in the browser market and one has got 90% user base.
There is not much an incentive to keep a sort of “neutrality” because any thing that gets implemented in Chrome becomes the “standard” for the Web and in the same time developers don’t need to test for anything but Chrome.

So for the first issue, it is Firefox that needs to follow Chrome by being “compatible” with whatever change they make, for the second issue when it doesn’t work, it is much easier to put an alert for the users saying “sorry, this feature isn’t supported for your browser” than to try to make it work with Firefox.
Obviously it is going to happen more with sites that rely heavily on javascript and provide features like videoconferencing, collaboration, editing, file hosting, ecommerce, etc, basically the “cloud services” from Google and alike.

It is an obvious death trap, we need a more complicated Web, browsers become more complicated, developing browsers becomes difficult, only big players can invest in developing browsers, in some time everybody quits or gets acquired and only one player remains. The same player who makes money with the said complicated Web for which you need the complicated browser.

I mainly use Firefox for its strong privacy protections and minimal data collection. I switch to Chrome about 10% of the time when a site works better there.

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