Web Browser General - Fuck Chromium. All my homies hate Chromium.

[Patrick Bait-man]

Thread for the discussion of web browsers. There are various split threads on browsers and this has been made to contain general browser discussion.

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The web browser market today is fucking awful. There are only 3 (mainly 2) major engines around with Chromium (from Google Chrome), Gecko (from Firefox), and WebKit (from Safari) with most modern browsers being built on Chromium; the spawn of the worst tech company in existence Google of whom is killing off Manifest V2 resulting in a mass genocide of ad-blockers across Chromium-based browsers.

Aside from browser engine dominance and the effects that come from it; many browsers today are bloated, run like shit, insist on collecting your data, and in some cases filled with faggotry. There's never been a worst time in the history of the Internet to be a web surfer.

I'm currently using Zen (Gecko), which is based off Arc (dead and gay), and it's the nicest browser I've used in years since Firefox turned to shit. It's speedy, private, has a lack of faggotry (that I know of, please God don't disappoint me), and the UI doesn't look like shit. It's also minimal (something I greatly appreciate in a browser today), with the ability to customize the UI to the point of having everything under hovering pop-out tabs for complete distraction-free browsing. I've also grown a liking to it's vertical tab implementation, something I had never used beforehand. Highly recommended to those looking to switch away from Firefox (if you're willing to try something different).

 

[Daddy's Angry Juice]

Oh my bad, i thought this was just for people who browsed the web, carry on.

 

[Executive Petrel]

AOL Desktop Gold

 

[LifeAlert]

I have been using Brave for years but I have become increasingly fed up with all the shit they've pulled over time, mostly stemming from their subservience to Chromium. Themes were broken for a while because Google broke them in Chromium and the lazy fucks couldn't just fix it or bring in the older working code themselves. If you listen to music in the browser there's a stupid volume stabilizer thing that pops up to the right of the address bar that you can't just turn off like a lot of other useless fucking bloat they add through FORCED updates. You have to fuck around in developer settings to turn off most of this shit and even that doesn't always work. And I've lost count of how many times I've had to look up where certain menus are in settings because they change them around so many fucking times.

The mobile version is even worse because you get no extensions at all and they keep shitting up the menus with options for bloatware like Leo AI. Oh yeah, and it's such a "privacy focused" browser that diagnostics and usage data are sent to Brave by default on all versions of the browser

People asking questions on their forums get ignored, given the runaround, and always end up having the thread locked with no solution. Now with this talk about Manifest V2 extensions being removed because Jewgle fucking says so, and the knowledge that Brave does not allow you to disable updates, the instant I log on and see uBlock is gone my ass is going straight to LibreWolf permanently

 

[Executive Petrel]

LibreWolf sounds like a furry artist from deviantart

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

>firefox doesn't support hdr on linux or windows, only macos
>chromium doesn't support hdr on linux
>firefox didn't support hevc decoding until the latest version, but it will only be on linux, not windows
>firefox has yet to mainstream jpegxl support even with their lack of hdr
>safari implemented jpegxl and made it standard for iphones, jpegxl issue for chromium is revived the same day

google is good btw. my life is improved by the existence of free google services which are made available by the ad revenue enabled by their efforts to expand the capabilities of websites to deliver engaging kawntent and serve ads.

I use thorium browser bc I am a furry against circumcision.

 

[Hellwalker]

Every web browser is gay. All one ever needs is a terminal and Lynx.

 

[Harvey Danger]

Brave works. It's not amazing, but it's fine.

All one ever needs is a terminal and Lynx.

Upgrade to Links, you damn hipster.

 

[SCV]

Poll is kinda shit because it's lacking palemoon. Is it a meme browser? Perhaps, but it has it's own rendering engine. If you're making a thread about how browsers suck and how this is causes by the lack of rendering engines it would behoove you to include it.

More on topic I use several browsers for multiple reasons including no one browser could handle the sheer girth of my tabs and more practically one browser for "respectable" browsing (bank, amazon, etc.) where I don't need ad nauseam. I will not provide specifics in an easily scrapable poll because I will not give you my information, live in the pod, or eat the bugs.

I've also been saying for years that firefox needs to die so something better can replace it. Mozilla sold out when they fired Brendan Eich and firefox went to shit when they changed to the fast versioning scheme to copy chrome. This has only become more and more apparent (we're now at mozilla CEO makes 6 million a year (oy vey!) while removing the clause about them not selling your data) but still the niggercattle refuse to move because they are niggercattle. People say google pays firefox to keep them from getting sued over anti-trust regulations but I think it's more like they pay them to exist so any efforts to make a better browser get sent into the moz://a cesspool to die.

Edit:

has a lack of faggotry (that I know of, please God don't disappoint me),

About that... The promo image on their homepage shows discord, reddit, google, and youtube. I'm not saying that's definitive but it is not good.

 

[Hamsteroid]

There is another browser on the way called Ladybird. It's still pre-alpha because they build the thing completely from scratch - including their own web engine. They are targeting summer 2026 for a first alpha version on Linux and macOS.

 

[Rango Dango]

I fucked up my firefox profile after reverting from arkenfox user.js script, so I tried librewolf, since it was being recommended everywhere, for some reason it was lagging and crashing and making my laptop's fans spin up, so i've tried floorp, no problems so far

 

[Wol]

On desktop, I've been using Firefox primarily since it isn't Chromium-based and because its releases, ESR and stable, have historically been in the Debian repositories for the time I've used Debian. Compared to the then past usage of Chrome, I liked or became used to the sort of light[er]weight feel to it, and I especially appreciated that it was largely open source and not developed by google.

I tried Brave, but I didn't like it as much, probably more on account of this sort of "feel" of Chromium within it. While the inbuilt adblock/uBO and TOR client were definite positives, I just didn't take to it and I never really used BAT for much even since I didn't really accumulate a lot with it.
I tried Librewolf during the last year (365 days) sometime after I had either realized or seen that Mozilla was going to be going downward in that sense of receding user rights for their software, creeping corporate stagnation, etcetera. I recalled it having most of everything in Firefox, but I initially used the independent, Opensuse hosted apt repository for the packages, which I recall had some server-side issues at some point which preventing me from retrieving updates. It was a blur, but I vaguely recall that I uninstalled Librewolf for that reason and maybe some others and still kept with Firefox.

For a bit, I have been using Firefox Nightly since it had basic JPEG-XL support enabled and I was curious about some features in development for a little bit including potential progress on full JPEG-XL support. Right now, I'm largely being kept on it because it has native tab grouping, and although that tab grouping has a few quirks and bugs right now (I managed to degroup all my tabs tonight), it is remarkably complete for the most part.

Funnily enough, I was browser touring and hopping just today when I saw this thread. I've been adapting copies of my current nightly profile to a few Gecko browsers/Firefox forks and I had some impressions:
I tried Floorp after seeing [an RSS preview of] the recent LWN article comparing Firefox forks since it was among those named. My initial impression is that I kind of like it as a fork, it has the Lepton theme as a built in option, which I like better than Proton, so cool UI/theming option there. I did realize that Floorp is, however, based upon the Firefox-ESR versions based on a look at the source repository. This is okay, but it does mean the development is going to be behind upstream for a bit, which of course comes into conflict with the JPEG-XL support and the native tab groups I depend upon.
From writing this post, I actually discovered that Librewolf has an extrepo entry in Debian. If it was in the installation instructions page for years, I somehow never recalled that being a method in the first place or its possible I may have disregarded it then; I just installed the extrepo repositories and along with it, Librewolf again. Retrying it again, I don't see many gripes or dealbreakers about it that I can't address in config. Librewolf apparently has the same JPEG-XL support as nightly for the moment, but once Firefox mainlines tab grouping and it makes its way downstream into Librewolf, I will probably be switching to it then.

At some point, I would like to see how Ladybird fares once it becomes tangibly usable, so I'm going to be on the lookout for progress on it when news slips by.

 

[Hamsteroid]

I actually discovered that Librewolf has an extrepo entry in Debian. If it was in the installation instructions page for years, I somehow never recalled that being a method in the first place or its possible I may have disregarded it then

LibreWolf switched to extrepo sometime in the last six months or so, so it is relatively new.

 

[Patrick Bait-man]

I use thorium browser bc I am a furry against circumcision.

Link | Archive

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

Brave is my primary browser for both my laptop and phone, but I also use Konqueror Firefox, and Chromium once in a while. Brave has almost everything I need and it's very fast, and I never see an ad. None of the things that have annoyed other people have really affected me.

 

[Salaryman]

Librewolf it is

 

[Get the rope Macaulay!]

my favorite part of brave is how it can't spell check words and has the worst search in history. I've been hearing bing is good now, but google still is king for me and my searches, especially because Bing can't figure out an easy way to search in the past.

i remember last time this thread popped up people loved Chromium, now its the fire fox weirdos

It is pretty crazy how there are really only two web browsers, and literally no one using Edge.

but still the niggercattle refuse to move because they are niggercattle

or maybe its lack of good alternative

 

[Least Concern]

I'm currently using Zen (Gecko), which is based off Arc (dead and gay), and it's the nicest browser I've used in years since Firefox turned to shit. It's speedy, private, has a lack of faggotry (that I know of, please God don't disappoint me), and the UI doesn't look like shit. It's also minimal (something I greatly appreciate in a browser today), with the ability to customize the UI to the point of having everything under hovering pop-out tabs for complete distraction-free browsing. I've also grown a liking to it's vertical tab implementation, something I had never used beforehand. Highly recommended to those looking to switch away from Firefox (if you're willing to try something different).

Zen is nice, though the whole project smells a bit hipster-ish. I've been a huge fan of vertical tabs ever since discovering them in Opera - Presto Opera, the original one. It's far more practical to have a list of tabs you can scroll vertically and which are all the same size than a bunch of horizontal boxes which stretch and shrink and overlap and which you have to scroll vertically if it scrolls at all, as with traditional horizontal scrollbars. Floorp feels a bit silly on the whole, starting with the name, but its vertical tab implementation is also very useful. I highly suggest you see if whatever browser you choose to use has a vertical tabs implementation and give it a try. Unfortunately, my daily driver, Safari, does not, and I'm not able to give up its integration with the rest of macOS for that feature, as nice as it is. (For example, whenever a web site sends you a 2FA code via email or text, Safari will notice when that message arrives and can automatically fill in the code for you. This feature saves so much goddamn aggravation. it's wonderful.)

There is another browser on the way called Ladybird. It's still pre-alpha because they build the thing completely from scratch - including their own web engine. They are targeting summer 2026 for a first alpha version on Linux and macOS.

Ladybird is a very interesting project and one worth keeping an eye on. I really hope they can keep the momentum and enthusiasm they have for their project as it is sorely needed, though I don't expect it to be able to become a daily driver any time this decade - until and unless it can provide developer tools like those in the big 3 engines it won't be of much use to me personally. Ladybird itself is basically a fork of the built-in browser for SerenityOS, itself an interesting project - a guy trying to recover from drug addiction needed a project to keep himself busy, so he started writing an operating system from scratch, and the end result is something that Saint Terry might have made if he was just really autistic instead of schizophrenic.

It is pretty crazy how there are really only two web browsers, and literally no one using Edge.

I don't understand the hatred for Edge. It's basically Chrome from a company somewhat less interested in tracking every facet of your physical, mental, and spiritual existence, so I don't understand why Windows people are still installing Chrome instead. It's what I use on my Windows machine, only switching to Chrome (well, Ungoogled Chromium) if I suspect a bug is really unique to Google's specific browser (it happened once).

 

[Dagoth AMOGUS]

These are all pretty good suggestions. Gonna click watch on this thread. Thank you

 

[Patrick Bait-man]

Unfortunately, my daily driver, Safari, does not, and I'm not able to give up its integration with the rest of macOS for that feature, as nice as it is.

It does though.