This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I switched from Firefox to Floorp and haven't looked back. Less bloated, same features, haven't found an extension that isn't compatible yet.
Same with Fennec on Android.
This article is pretty poor overall. Why recommend Arc, a browser that requires a user account to even open a webpage, and which the author himself said will probably be disappearing in the near future as part of their own product strategy?
Lame clickbait aimed at nobody.
Why did you go with Floorp vs the other FF forks? Just curious.
For me, librewolf focuses too much on privacy sacrificing features, I personally dont like zen's design. There's others like waterfox but didnt tried them
This is interesting as I've not even heard of Floorp and alternatives have been such a hot topic the last month between manifest v3 and firefoxes updated terms fiasco.
Can I ask, what for you had you opt for floorp vs the more commonly mentioned alternatives like Librewolf, Waterfox, etc.?
I at least switched to Floorp for more customization options and funny name, but back then Floorp also had vertical tabs and side-dock before any other Firefox fork (afaik).
Have you tried Firedragon? Floorp-based but with some eye candy and privacy enhancements. (Linux only at the moment)
- Opera
Aaaand tab closed.
This list to me feels like AI trying to average the commoner internet
And the comments here really show it
Opera is and always was trash.
I beg to differ, when Opera had its own engine and wasn't Chinese owned - back in the early '00s.
Opera also was a good alternative on Symbian phones right or whatever OS Nokia used before they switched to Windows Phone, I think.
this era of the internet was such a fun time.
I suspect that we may be looking back with rose tinted glasses, but the main stream internet is pretty crap atm
Opera was so good. Disable images, force custom CSS, gestures! Stuff no one else had at the time.
Yeah I was 100% Opera on desktop and mobile until they switched to chromium and broke everything from before. Still pissed about that, lost all my bookmarks and notes at one point.
As someone who used Opera 2002-2013 (Presto era), I quibble with the "always".
But I do not quibble with the "is".
I loved opera back then.
Same for ZDNet.
Many sites have become worse. I think stuff like Cnet, PCMag (which still has a digital magazine I think)were much better in the previous era.
Yep. Dont use Opera. They are known for being an incredibly scummy company that has done illegal things. Im 98% sure opera gx is spyware
Great opportunity to mention Brave is owned by a dipshit right-wing homophobe.
And funded by a right-wing billionaire who owns the largest corporate intelligence agency on the planet. Your data is not safe with Brave.
Always has been.
Right beside the fact that their monetary model relies on user activity tracking. Yet they advertise privacy.
A browser that had a seemingly unlimited budget for advertising before it even had users is suspicious as hell.
I've never trusted brave.
Me using Firefox until Orion comes out:
Honestly I wish Kagi would build their own full Firefox fork and maintain it independently. I already pay for search, I wouldn't mind paying for my browser if it actually respected me!
mullvad's browser is based on firefox.
ZDnet 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
Eww opera, at least it's slightly better than opera gx
Edit: TOR? I stopped treating this guy seriously once I read this. Nobody uses TOR for regular browsing. They're full of shit.
Zen browser is really nice imo. The developers update it very frequently.
One drawback is that it lacks widevine support, which means that things like netflix won’t work.
Zen looks nice and some of the UX concepts (workspaces, glance, split sidebar from vertical tabs) work well. The 'fit & finish' and the way changes are pushed (unilaterally? Unvalidated with endusers?) feels very much like a 1 man hobby project though.
I agree, it also has some serious security issues: https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927
The developer's comment reveals that it has been there since the inception of the project. And there are even more privacy / security issues mentioned in the comments.
Unfortunately Zen browser gets a big fat no from me. 🫤
It's not a backdoor, it just enabled Firefox's remote debugging tool by default, which is necessary if you want to modify the chrome of the browser on your own computer.
At the time it was in one of its first alpha, sure it was naive to ship a browser with it enabled because it was convenient for development, but it was fixed 1 week after the issue was raised, and has been for months.
They use the release candidate to test upcoming Firefox releases and see if it breaks anything, to be able to ship the update on the same day as FF (just like the majority of other forks do). None of the patches they make require extra telemetry except for their "mod" system. Most of the criticism Zen gets about "security" applies to every browser except librewolf and tor. Zen is as secure as firefox is.
All this is coming from someone who doesn't use Zen, as my workflow is constantly broken by their UI changes and bugs (which is the main problem with the browser).
Most of the criticism Zen gets about "security" applies to every browser except librewolf and tor. Zen is as secure as firefox is.
Most browsers don’t claim to be more privacy conscious than all the others and leave all the telemetry enabled when they do.
I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.
As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.
I like Vivaldi but all the manifest V3 stuff just pushed me to Librewolf for everything whether it works or not, so maybe I should "thank" Google
DNS blocking (such as AdGuard) doesn't work for everything. Ad blocking extensions are the only way to block YouTube ads in your browser as far as I know.
Ironically, I could not reach the end of the list because the fucking ads kept reloading the page and scrolling me to the top. Anyone know which of these 6 would block that?
Anything Firefox based with uBlock origin. Don't see a single ad or anything on mine.
Firefox
Firefox
Firefox
Firefox derivatives
...
Of that list, Zen is the only one really worth considering. And then you have the “but the best one that supports widevine” issue.
Chrome !=Chromium. The tite is correct.
Google could close the Chromium source at any time. There might be promises and provisions that they'll never do that, but if they do, who has the money to sue them? And who, of those, can't be bought?
"So what, people can run with the last good codebase!"
Sure, until there's a critical bug that Google don't publish which then cripples Chromium until the maintainers figure it out, or else Google (deliberately or otherwise) take web standards down an unexpected path requiring massive changes, also making life hard for the fork maintainers.
And don't say "that'll never happen". Need I gesture broadly at the state of the world?
