I've been using Firefox for a while now, but I have some issues with it:<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>Any ideas? (Currently checking out Vivaldi, but read a lot about performance issues + I don't really like the default UI yet).
There's none, to be quite honest.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I use Edge, with custom scripts to turn off as much phoning home as possible, and it's still bad.
If your on the Mac maybe just use Safari. I got a new Mac and decided that I didn’t really wanted to bother installing to much stuff, so I skipped Firefox, among other things.<p>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.<p>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.
<a href="https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html" rel="nofollow">https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html</a><p>>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 <a href="https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git" rel="nofollow">https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git</a>) 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).
Microsoft Edge.<p>Chromium based, has vertical tabs (window border can be switched off too) via flags. Works great.<p>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.
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).<p>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.
So use Firefox where it works, and Chrome where Firefox doesn't work for you. There's a little Firefox extension called "Open with..." which makes it really quick and easy to open a tab or link with another browser.<p>If the problem is that you don't have enough memory to comfortably use two browsers at once, then... well, then that's your <i>real</i> problem. Get more more RAM.<p>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.
Firefox is my primary browser too and use Brave as the secondary, and thus far it's pretty much exactly like Chrome/Chromium.<p>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.
I used Pale Moon <a href="https://www.palemoon.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.palemoon.org/</a> for several years and it was OK. I went back to Firefox because of some compatibility issues. Firefox needs some configuration in Settings and about:config , for example I turn off media.autoplay, Pdfjs, webassembly, etc, but YMMV. about:config is not available in standard FF mobile, only in FF Nightly. uBlock Origin plugin is essential, and I use Noscript for safety and speed, also Privacy Badger, etc. FF became really annoying, yes, but at least it's still possible to configure it, unlike most other browsers.
I use Vivaldi, the performance issues are news to me and it seems pretty good. Though the latest update it keeps crashing when I open file selections, need to figure out what’s going on there. Before that it was very stable for me. I wouldn’t want to give up its tab management now though, especially its ability to do side by side/tiled groups.
I use Brave on both the Mac and on Android. The issues I see below relate mainly to their crypto sponsorships, and I don't care for that either, but it's pretty voluntary, isn't it?<p>The only issue I've seen that some sites can detect that they're an ad blocker and complain or refuse to work.
I don't know if you are on a Mac, but you could check out Orion, based on webkit but built in support for Chrome and Firefox-extensions:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799049</a>
I've been using Brave, but I shut off the Rewards junk.<p>Every option has serious trade-offs, so you're going to have to decide which are acceptable to you.
I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. Yes, Vivaldi. There are some folks here complaining it has a lot of bloat and while that's true, I don't care. I like it. Why?<p>* 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.<p>* The sidebar. Downloads, bookmarks, etc. are quickly available in a simple pull-out.<p>* Speed Dial. Sounded corny when I first installed Vivaldi, now I love it. YMMV.<p>* Tab Stacking. If you're like me and have lots of tabs open, this is a great feature.<p>* Notes. Tracking notes on a page is an awesome feature!<p>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.
On desktop, it's still Firefox as #1 for me, Edge as #2, and everything else is extremely distant 3rd, except things I might test out to see if they have a use for me.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>That said, I don't think these days I use anything that requires Chrome/Edge (thankfully). So I pretty much can avoid them completely.
I just downloaded Edge based on some replies in here (though Safari is my daily driver, Firefox is my dev browser, Brave is my usual video conferencing browser but is pretty terrible at it) and boy does it take a long time to turn off all the crapware that comes with it. And even when you do, it comes back ten minutes later. I'm super impressed that Microsoft have managed to faithfully recreate the Windows experience for Mac users who might be tempted to switch!
It looks like you'll have to find a browser that is based on WebKit or Blink and has a JavaScript engine comparable to V8 or Nitro.<p>Plugging this into something like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-based" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-ba...</a> yields a number of options depending on your OS like SRWare Iron or Otter Browser.
A while ago, I used to recommend Waterfox. Its mostly a dead project now & differing by a wide margin with Firefox upstream. Updates are few and rare.<p>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.<p>My SO uses Edge and she has been reasonably happy with it
FWIW I use google meet with Firefox all the time with no issues. The only annoying thing is that it won’t let you blur the background. (They allowed this feature on FF for one glorious week but then took it away)<p>Even my coworkers who use chrome prefer zoom though, so we’ve been switching more and more meetings to zoom.
I often see comments on HN complaining about Firefox being poorly supported by some sites. I honestly cannot remember the last time I experienced any support issues with it. Are these generally more niche sites and are we talking misaligned text or a completely broken page?
I can name four off the top of my head:<p><a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/</a><p><a href="https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/" rel="nofollow">https://librewolf-community.gitlab.io/</a><p><a href="https://www.palemoon.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.palemoon.org/</a><p><a href="https://www.comodo.com/home/browsers-toolbars/icedragon-browser.php" rel="nofollow">https://www.comodo.com/home/browsers-toolbars/icedragon-brow...</a>
Yeah this is why monopolies are bad. Your only real options are chromium based stuff, or safari. if you are going the chromium route, id go with ungoogled chromium: <a href="https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium</a> . Its really the only version of chromium I think is good, and its got the google tracking stuff removed for the most part.
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.<p>Falcon<p>GPLv3<p>URL: <a href="https://www.falkon.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.falkon.org/</a><p>source: <a href="https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon" rel="nofollow">https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon</a>
As much trouble firefox has because of the Mozilla board of directors, it is still the most reliable and secure. As an alternative in some cases you can use ungoogled-chromium <a href="https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/</a><p>Automatically translated.
Given that a browser is currently harder to implement than an operating system (or so goes the saying), there are a few options:<p>- 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 often cynical about why Google services don't work as well in Firefox as they do Google's own browser.<p>I'm of the opinion that blaming Firefox for this is the same as blaming Linux for hardware manufacturers not writing drivers for Linux.<p>If Google wanted its services working in Firefox then they would.
Regarding point 2, I always let them know (if I care enough). If I don't care, I don't visit their site - if they haven't bothered to make sure it works with FF, there are likely to have other problems.
Unfortunately almost every browser is using Blink (Chrome). If you don't want to contribute to Google's monopoly on browsers your only choices are Firefox, Safari or a browser that has like 5 users.
I've got my eye on the upcoming Orion Browser (macOS only). Built on Webkit, privacy focused.<p><a href="https://browser.kagi.com/" rel="nofollow">https://browser.kagi.com/</a>