Ask HN: Kicking off 2017, what’s your favourite browser?
I, for one, am always on a looking for new browsers to try out. Currently using Firefox (for FB, Linkedin and Gmail), Chrome for Youtube and Safari for everything else [2].
In addition to usual suspects such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera I’m listing here a few alternative browsers from previous HN discussions:
Blisk, a browser for web developers - https://blisk.io/
Ōryōki Web Browser - http://oryoki.io/
A smarter web browser - https://minbrowser.github.io/min/
Brave - a browser from the co-founder of Mozilla Brendan Eich - https://brave.com
Vivaldi by the co-founder Opera - https://vivaldi.com
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13327228
[2] I like to box different services in separate browsers for privacy and also running VPN and Cookie 5 (slightly paranoid like that).
67 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadIll occasionally use Chrome for its better support of Flash websites without having Flash installed.
^ If someone could make this, I'd be delighted!
Firefox for being fully open source with Mozilla as a non-profit behind it.
Firefox for having the awesomebar.
Chrome has some advantages: isolated tabs (one crashes or hangs and the rest can continue) and it feels quicker (not sure why, iirc they're similar in benchmarks). Firefox is also working towards isolated tabs, so that leaves speed, and Firefox is fast enough that I'm not annoyed by it. It might also be that Chrome feels quicker because I don't open fifty tabs in it (since I don't use it regularly) nor have a big history file or cookie jar.
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
When Chrome was released, they took parts of WebKit, parts of Gecko and released a closed browser. -_- It has been opened up since and there are fully OSS versions like Chromium, but since Google had been a big funder of Firefox for so long, a lot of FF people saw this as sort of a betrayal.
Personally, Chrome doesn't have a lot of the tools I need. When it came out, you couldn't make a plugin that created a sidebar without doing a lot of hacky stuff (is this still true?). Chrome also had limits on their API so you couldn't create as efficient adblockers (not sure if this is true anymore either).
Despite issues people have had with the Firefox UI and the Mozilla foundation itself, I still think Firefox is the better choice. I've been using the new multi-process feature of FF and it's considerably faster now as well.
-Firefox for privacy
-Tor Browser Bundle for enhanced privacy
-Brave for micropayments
-Vivaldi for customization/tweaks and reading the news
-Chrome because it's ultra fast
-Microsoft Edge just because I can
Unfortunately, since Arachne doesn't support any of the newer web standards, browsing the web with it has been getting increasingly broken. Another alternative that also runs under DOS is Dillo, which FreeDOS has a package for.
One essential component of any browser I use is the ad blocker. No blocker means no browser for me.
The only thing I dislike about it is, when the developer tools are open, everything on the screen flashes red when you click or mouse over it. That's my only complaint.
Some people also display little random images from that web server so they can see where the ads would have been on the page they're browsing.
If you don't mind ads being served by the site owners, you'll also be able to see these ads. If ads running on the same server this bothers you, you usually can't block them via DNS and so this is a limitation over something like uBlock Origin which can have rules for dom IDs on a page.
Using a proxy in your system settings together with e.g. Privoxy (which runs locally or remotely on e.g. a RPi) also works (but that is proxy-based filtering).
Both DNS-based and proxy-based filtering can be circumvented. I just use uBlock everywhere, and have been playing around with AdNauseam. These work well enough.
The only time those fail miserably is when a browser is being embedded in an application, like on Android and iOS apps. I tend to buy the premium version anyway if I really like an app (no subscriptions though!).
There are 2 ways to circumvent those apps with ads. 1) use web browser (w/uBlock) instead or 2) use a DNS-based filtering (such as a Pi-Hole). However the latter option requires network access to the DNS server of the Pi-Hole which isn't there when you're roaming (e.g. on 3G/4G or a foreign Wi-Fi network). A workaround to that is using a VPN to your RPi. For me, that is too much work (had a similar setup in past), and the upload speed on my home network isn't to write home about (YMMV). Btw, not sure if all of this can be worked with DNSCrypt since when you're roaming there's the vulnerability of DNS hijacking.
[1] https://pi-hole.net
brave, trying it out cause i heard them in a podcast somewhere
There are some sore points revolving around the use of QtWebKit engine, but they're mostly workable. I set the user-agent to either FF or Chrome to get some sites to not redirect me to their compatibility site, and YouTube support isn't great (no fullscreen). I just set up a keybind to send the current url to youtube-dl/MPC-HC and it works fine.
[0] https://qutebrowser.org/index.html
Checking, it still doesn't seem to be in the Debian Stretch repositories (which is a major indicator of maturity and support to me). Is the project active or is it still a hobby project from one core developer?
There are recent releases but it's hard to tell how significant releases are when almost every change log line is something like "New :debug-log-filter command".
Well I suppose I'll have to check that one out. EDIT: Installed it, went to facebook, saw ads. Tried a google search, saw ads. Went to reddit, saw ads. Not sure what it's actually blocking.
Blisk looks interesting as well. (EDIT: Chromium re-wrap with device previews, bug reporting, and screen recording)
I tried and liked Vivaldi, but it's just repackaged chromium with a few extra features isn't it?
Firefox's devtools irritates me, and they have made some piss poor decisions, such as the switchover to geckodriver without it being stable for WebDriver support.
Safari is still lol, and has some awful UX, even on iOS. The browser is also home to some of the worst bugs I encounter on frontend these days. To its credit it does better on mobile for battery life & perf, but that's literally its only saving graces.
Edge is better than IE11, but still has its share of wtf bugs.
It seems in Goog's interest to mine browsers for as much as it can get out of the user: do we have any reason to think it's not happening?
The Ad Nauseam authors respond to "if Google has lost your trust, as it has ours" in their FAQ with suggestions [1]. It boils down to: swap back to Firefox, try Opera, or try one of the Chrome-based browsers not by Google. Well, Opera is dead to me (Vivaldi might be alive, but I don't like it when a company calls a proxy a VPN.)
Chrome's going beyond some standards as well. Firefox is introducing sandboxing and a Rust-based rendering engine to replace Gecko. For me, this means it is time to slowly move back to Firefox as main browser. At least I know with Mozilla extensions related to advertising won't be suddenly removed. Finally, I think it is important I give something back to Firefox. Either development or a donation. Perhaps just a donation to an organisation related to Mozilla, like EFF.
[1] https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/Install-AdNauseam-on...
1) there are only 5 entries in the adress bar dropdown box. Firefox shows ~10. This used to be configurable a few years ago but they removed that option 2) Chrome fully loads every tab on startup which is very annoying if you use a lot of tabs (I think there are plugins for this?)
I agree on it mostly landing on ecosystem integration. I recently went from Safari to Chrome simply due to switching (back, after a few years away) to Android.
The only differences I feel after the switch is that Chrome's password integration is much quirkier than Safari's, and even quirkier when syncing to phone. Another difference is of course that the tab bar looks different, but that's basically it. Things sync to Google instead of to Apple. Maybe if I checked, I'd notice poorer battery life, but with battery life in the 7-10 hour range, I'm good.
I sometimes fire up Chrome so I can use its perf tools in some places they are better than Firefox, but the browser generally irritates me. Safari's performance is so much better than the others that I'm comfortable using it day to say, even though I do have to stick to Chrome for WebRTC until that makes it I to Safari.
I'm a bit worried about Google's domination of the web (especially and not entirely related the rapidly escalating danger of AMP) and anything I can do to ensure the web remains an open and diverse platform is worth it.
I'm also rather bullish on Firefox, hence my staying at Mozilla after Persona's cancellation.
I occasionally use Chrome just for Google Maps, since they're considerably faster in Google's own web browser. Although really, I should try to use Open Street Maps more.
Edit: oh and as far as historical browsers, I really liked Galeon back in the day.