1. I need to switch to chrome for various products such as Google Meet (works on Firefox, but I ran into performance (call quality) issues).
2. I often find sites with bad support for Firefox, and I need to again open a second browser (usually Chrome) to check them out.
3. It seems that in the past... long time, they have a talent of making Firefox worst. I still like it if it wasn't for the other 2 issues, but who can tell in 1 year.
Due to the above I was looking for a browser (one, I don't like having multiple on my machine but not sure if the Google Meet performance upgrade is just in Chrome or Chromium) which is as fast as Firefox, has a nice UI and preferably a bit more privacy oriented (not much, just a bit more).
Any ideas? (Currently checking out Vivaldi, but read a lot about performance issues + I don't really like the default UI yet).
Chrome is spyware, Edge is spyware, Brave has too many crypto sponsor for my liking, Firefox is going off a cliff, Vivaldi is the definition of bloat.
The web browser ecosystem is frankly appalling, and it's so complicated it's impossible for new competitors to appear and improve the status quo. We just have to put up with it, and I am furious Mozilla, one of the shining beacons on that landscape, now is sitting idle redesigning the UI just to justify their existence.
I use Edge, with custom scripts to turn off as much phoning home as possible, and it's still bad.
You have to opt-in to Brave marketing like you mentioned. It allows people to earn BAT if they want to, so they can tip site owners. Better than ads right? The only other complaint is the home screen where you can buy crypto and they get an affiliate payout, which is how they make money. That can be disabled and have you seen the default home screen of Edge? Its news is just ads and paid campaigns.
Brave also supports more protocols like IPFS, Web torrent, and Tor, its telling other browsers don't.
The power of propaganda is strong. The GP uses Edge that he knows is spyware and doesn't even consider Brave because one little talking point that simply gets summed up as "crypto".
Sadly most of my favorite "tiny" browsers all have switched away from webkit and are either dead or an electron based UI now.
I'm concerned that libchromium is eating the world :-/
Safari has been great the last few months. Performance hasn’t been an issue, the only site which still drains the batteri is Imgur and besides obvious tracking, I haven’t encountered broken sites.
On the topic of tracking, I found that many of the sites that break in Firefox do so due to privacy features. The sites work in Chrome because Google doesn’t care to implement the same features.
>I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).
Chromium based, has vertical tabs (window border can be switched off too) via flags. Works great.
Vivaldi promised many things but its performance sucks indeed and I hate the fact that the browser has bullshit features like Phillips ligths controls or something.
Hah, it really does. Apparently Vivaldi can connect to your Philips Hue lights and change their colors based on the active tab’s webpage color.
I use Safari or Edge as a fallback if I run into issues. Google seems to spend a lot of time specifically optimizing their apps (gmail, meet) for Chrome... so I tend to keep Chrome around specifically for those cases. I still find that Edge and Safari have more issues than Firefox.
Do you think those optimizations are only in Chrome or also in Chromium? I'd expect only Chrome but...
If the problem is that you don't have enough memory to comfortably use two browsers at once, then... well, then that's your real problem. Get more more RAM.
As for Firefox, although I haven't always been happy with the changes Mozilla has forced on their users, overall it's still the best browser out there, and when it comes to giving you the tools to preserve your privacy specifically it's worlds ahead of the alternatives... although it does take some awareness and effort on part of the user but that's unavoidable nowadays.
Many bring up the cryptocurrency relation and I do get that (And other than the world-view differences, they've also had some mishaps like injecting referral codes to URLs, but hopefully they have learned from these). But given that both Google and Microsoft are interested in your personal data then Brave does seem to be a better choice than them.
The only issue I've seen that some sites can detect that they're an ad blocker and complain or refuse to work.
2. Use Edge for Meet or any other situation where Firefox fails.
Google Meet perf really is terrible though. Makes me wonder if the entire idea of in-browser video is misbegotten.
Slowly but surely, I've noticed my general exasperation with browser apps growing in the last few years. Between getting into mobile development, better sandboxing, easy app store-based distribution, much better isolation between apps, and learning C++ (from working in robotics) it feels it's time to get back to writing high-performance native code that doesn't involve the ridiculous tradeoffs the modern browser requires (latency, memory use, etc). I think this might be a trend we see more of in the next decade.
Every option has serious trade-offs, so you're going to have to decide which are acceptable to you.
I ran Rewards for a long time and basically made almost zilch and wasn't sure if it was something on my end or?
Is there some trick that makes it worthwhile?
* Based on Chrome. Unfortunately there's a lot of truth to the statement that "Chrome is the new IE", from the standpoint that modern sites are optimized (and tested) to run on Chrome.
* The sidebar. Downloads, bookmarks, etc. are quickly available in a simple pull-out.
* Speed Dial. Sounded corny when I first installed Vivaldi, now I love it. YMMV.
* Tab Stacking. If you're like me and have lots of tabs open, this is a great feature.
* Notes. Tracking notes on a page is an awesome feature!
People say Vivaldi is slow, but I haven't noticed it being slow to render sites - it's slow to launch. How often do you launch your browser though? At least for me the browser is one of the few always-running programs I run. There is a performance issue I've noticed in making YT videos run full-screen - there's a very noticeable lag especially if you have several tabs open. So far that hasn't been enough to outweigh the positives.
Regarding the slowness, I don't experience it. I just checked, and I have 506 tabs opened.
I know the idea of "gaming browser" is instantly cringeworthy, but I actually like some things in Opera GX. Having a built-in bandwidth limiter is awesome when I'm downloading large files and don't want them to completely take over my bandwidth. There are some good ideas in lots of lesser-used browsers, like this, but I never see these features bubble up to the big ones like FF/Edge.
Ad-blocking (and browser capability which supports content blocking) is a high priority for me (no I will not debate this on moral/ethical grounds- I refuse to see ads, end of story).
So, Chrome's manifest v3 among other poor choices by Google mean I will 100% stay away from Chrome- and I only use Chrome-based browsers when I absolutely must.
That said, I don't think these days I use anything that requires Chrome/Edge (thankfully). So I pretty much can avoid them completely.
Plugging this into something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-ba... yields a number of options depending on your OS like SRWare Iron or Otter Browser.
I use Vivaldi at present. It is mostly fine. Plugins work fine & the web/mobile sync is decent. No crashes or memory overflow on either platform - using since 6 months approximately.
My SO uses Edge and she has been reasonably happy with it
Even my coworkers who use chrome prefer zoom though, so we’ve been switching more and more meetings to zoom.
Tried Zoom but eventually moved to Google Meet because it worked better. It could be WAY better but meh. And the difference between Meet on Firefox & Google Chrome is significant.
All this considering I'm running on a gigabit network. Not 100% sure about the partner.
Just checked it out, it seems fast. It seems decently private (as private as a corp can get lol).
Not sure about updates & performance about Google products. Do you have any clue if chromium includes the not-in-spec performance optimizations for Google Meet and such?
Microsoft does run its own sync infrastructure, but Edge doesn't provide end to end encryption for all classes of data.
If you want a privacy friendly Chromium fork, I'd go with Vivaldi or Brave. Both run their own sync infrastructure, and like Mozilla's theirs are end to end encrypted by default. They have their own built-in adblockers and prefer privacy-friendly search engines. Brave Shields even does the CNAME uncloaking that makes uBlock Origin better on Firefox. And it won't get fucked by Manifest v3.
I probably don't need to advertise the joys of adblock on mobile, or Brave having a funny little toggle called "Background video playback" (read: "Fuck YouTube").
Falcon
GPLv3
Automatically translated.
- forego the web, embrace other protocols. From what I understand this seems to be the reasoning behind Gemini. - forego parts of the web, for example by using browsers whit limited functionalities (Dillo, Lynx, etc.)
I'm of the opinion that blaming Firefox for this is the same as blaming Linux for hardware manufacturers not writing drivers for Linux.
If Google wanted its services working in Firefox then they would.
It's not the only problem, but I have to use the sites :)
In work, I use Chrome or Edge.
