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Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

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Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#81
post #5

Microsoft Edge. 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.

Edge and privacy oriented don't really go together, sadly.

Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#82
post #69
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Brave, with the Rewards junk, and it has maintained its speed that every other browser I've used loses as it fills up with caches, history, extensions, etc.

Do you actually make anything of value? 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?

The point of the Rewards system isn't to make users bank. It's to give users stuff they can give creators, so they don't get fucked as badly by the adblockalypse. Individual users aren't terribly valuable, ads make money due to sheer mass.

Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#83
post #17

There's none, to be quite honest. 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 t…

Would be wiser to use Brave and turn the crypto stuff off. Better privacy, though less UI fanciness.

The crypto stuff in Brave is opt-in to begin with.

Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#84
post #8

I'm in the odd position of recommending Microsoft Edge...

Tried it for a while back and it became sluggish. 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?

It's not. They do the usual of defaulting to a not privacy friendly search engine and having search suggestions on, but Edge's session id is hardware-based and persists across browser reboots. Their new tab page also connects to two million different things.

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").

Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#85

I'm in the odd position of recommending Microsoft Edge...

I haven’t kept up with Edge, is Microsoft adding all sorts of weird feature or are they just delivering a good browser without the bizar stuff Firefox, Chrome and Vivaldi seems to be collecting?

They're doing both. They do some amazing UI design that's normie friendly but powerful, but also have weird things like couponing and Pinterest integrations. Not nearly enough basic privacy features, though. Lack of end to end encrypted sync is yikes.

Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#86

Disclaimer: I have not yet tried this browser, so I am not sure if it will meet your performance needs. I think it is worth looking at though, since it is fully open source and community driven. Falcon GPLv3 URL: https://www.falkon.org/ source: https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon

I've used Falcom, not bad but missing so important features for me: dark mode, dark reader, ad block, video download

Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#89
post #17

There's none, to be quite honest. 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 t…

You may be interested in this analysis: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

Re: Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

#90

I feel like a lot of companies stopped testing for Firefox and those issues get attributed to Mozilla (not that some performance issues aren't their fault, but I've definitely encountered issues that get attributed to Mozilla but are failures to test for a different rendering engine). 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…

That said I have a synology NAS that's about 8 years old and still going strong. The dashboard no longer works in firefox's latest builds which is very unfortunate. Obviously it used to work fine
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