Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?
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).
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.
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.
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).
Any ideas? (Currently checking out Vivaldi, but read a lot about performance issues + I don't really like the default UI yet).
99 comments
[ 61.8 ms ] story [ 351 ms ] threadJust 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?
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").
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.
Hah, it really does. Apparently Vivaldi can connect to your Philips Hue lights and change their colors based on the active tab’s webpage color.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/miscellaneous/philips-hue/
User should control the traffic if user cares. Relying on browser is naive to begin with.
Every option has serious trade-offs, so you're going to have to decide which are acceptable to you.
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?
https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
2. Use Edge for Meet or any other situation where Firefox fails.
Google Meet perf really is terrible though. Makes me wonder if the entire idea of in-browser video is misbegotten.
Slowly but surely, I've noticed my general exasperation with browser apps growing in the last few years. Between getting into mobile development, better sandboxing, easy app store-based distribution, much better isolation between apps, and learning C++ (from working in robotics) it feels it's time to get back to writing high-performance native code that doesn't involve the ridiculous tradeoffs the modern browser requires (latency, memory use, etc). I think this might be a trend we see more of in the next decade.
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 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.
Do you think those optimizations are only in Chrome or also in Chromium? I'd expect only Chrome but...
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.
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.
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.
My SO uses Edge and she has been reasonably happy with it
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 that landscape, now is sitting idle redesigning the UI just to justify their existence.
I use Edge, with custom scripts to turn off as much phoning home as possible, and it's still bad.
You have to opt-in to Brave marketing like you mentioned. It allows people to earn BAT if they want to, so they can tip site owners. Better than ads right? The only other complaint is the home screen where you can buy crypto and they get an affiliate payout, which is how they make money. That can be disabled and have you seen the default home screen of Edge? Its news is just ads and paid campaigns.
Brave also supports more protocols like IPFS, Web torrent, and Tor, its telling other browsers don't.
The power of propaganda is strong. The GP uses Edge that he knows is spyware and doesn't even consider Brave because one little talking point that simply gets summed up as "crypto".
I own cryptos, I like cryptos, but the team behind Brave has proven to be scammy and unethical.
I believe it was a mistake that it wasn't, and it was quickly made opt-in.
I think it's more scummy that Mozilla makes money from having Google as the default search engine, a still active campaign.
> Was the unethical business model to show custom ads in place of existing ones an accident?
As far as I know that's a lie, did they ever replace ads with blocked ads? Brave ads are text notifications, not banner ads.
> Or the crappy marketing campaign to lure content creators into their ecosystem by playing on ambiguous terms?
Nice word salad, doesn't mean much. Which marketing campaign, how are they luring, how are terms ambiguous, please expand.
> but the team behind Brave has proven to be scammy and unethical.
Yeah that's the punchline of the propaganda, but you should provide better reasoning if you want to convince anyone.
Your scale of ethics comparing browser companies is extremely inconsistent.
Sure it wasn't. And if you think having Mozilla getting paid for their default search worse than trying to profit off affiliate marketing, we really have different views on the world.
>As far as I know that's a lie, did they ever replace ads with blocked ads? Brave ads are text notifications, not banner ads.
That's still hypocrite. You block off every ads on the internet, but still display your own. Your business model is still based on the "watchtime" but you forbid actual content creators to benefit from it. It was the same thing with adblock plus. Having a stance against ads is one thing, relying on them while blocking the whole internet of their revenue is a dick move.
>Which marketing campaign, how are they luring, how are terms ambiguous, please expand.
They accept donations for creators without their consent. It is now clear on the module when a creator has no account yet to receive the tips but at launch it wasn't the case. They lured users into donating and used this money to contact creators and try to leverage the generosity of their community to bring them on board. That's quite a low growth hacking tactic.
Don't worry about my consistency, I think I'm alright.
Google paying Mozilla for search engine referrals is the definition of affiliate marketing. And you can choose to believe it was some plot to sneak through after they reversed it, it's unfounded. Mozilla still doesn't inform the user of their affiliate deal.
(edit: also listen to yourself, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783639)
> That's still hypocrite. You block off every ads on the internet, but still display your own. Your business model is still based on the "watchtime" but you forbid actual content creators to benefit from it. It was the same thing with adblock plus. Having a stance against ads is one thing, relying on them while blocking the whole internet of their revenue is a dick move.
That's a different accusation after you tried to state your lie. Brave has an opt-in text notification rewards program.
It's common to run ad blockers in other browsers because ads have become so intrusive. Yes you should subscribe, donate, etc. if you frequent a website, but you shouldn't have to view ads against your will.
Brave has that adblocking built in for the user foremost. The rewards network is to allow those who need to block ads to donate to the website owner instead. When you use FireFox and uBlock, you don't have the option if that site owner doesn't have a PayPal etc.
> They accept donations for creators without their consent. It is now clear on the module when a creator has no account yet to receive the tips but at launch it wasn't the case. They lured users into donating and used this money to contact creators and try to leverage the generosity of their community to bring them on board. That's quite a low growth hacking tactic.
> They accept donations for creators without their consent.
If they don't create a wallet and accept the funds are returned to the donor, Brave doesn't keep it.
When you hear hoofs, think horse, not Zebra. Where have you been the last decades on the internet to rather think it was a "mistake" that could have given them millions of $ instead of a shady move?
I didn't lie once, but I guess you're too worked up on the subject for some reason to see it clearly. By the way, who's using a word salad now? No matter in which order you put it, the system is there. They profit off ads by preventing everyone else do to it, even if they also are unintrusive. You can't seriously pretend to care about an ad-free internet when it's your business model...
The controversy with donations came when they shipped the feature. There was no mention at all that the creator or the website was not affiliated with Brave. Again, shady AF. The system is now way more transparent, but the facts are there. And I personally don't appreciate an op-out system where creators have to willingly deactivate the feature to not be associated with a third-party private entity collecting money in their name.
You aren't being genuine. Brave's rewards program is opt-in. The ad blocking is a common thing for a user to do. Brave is not replacing ads.
> The controversy with donations came when they shipped the feature. The system is now way more transparent, but the facts are there.
Yes that seems to be a pattern, momentary overblown outrage about "lack of information" so they have to clarify the facts against the propaganda.
How is a donation system controversial when the funds are returned to the donor if the recipient doesn't collect them?
The "controversy" is clearly artificial. It's this big emotional outrage that doesn't match the facts, followed by short talking points referencing the outrage.
edit: funny enough you defended Mozilla for this exact same affiliates program.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783639
Sadly most of my favorite "tiny" browsers all have switched away from webkit and are either dead or an electron based UI now.
I'm concerned that libchromium is eating the world :-/
Falcon
GPLv3
URL: https://www.falkon.org/
source: https://invent.kde.org/network/falkon
It's the ol' faithful Qupzilla, but rebranded to fall into the KDE umbrella. But as other KDE browsers (konqueror, rekonq...) it's dying a slow death only to fall in darkness.
URL: https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/
source: https://github.com/atlas-engineer/nyxt
license: BSD-3 & Creative Commons
Also, if you are an emacs fan:
https://ag91.github.io/blog/2021/06/08/emacs-nyxt-and-engine...
From their FAQ:
https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/faq
Nyxt is web engine agnostic. We utilize a minimal API to interface to any web engine. This makes us flexible and resilient to changes in the web landscape. Currently, we support WebKit and WebEngine (Blink).
So in theory, you could switch between web engines. I don't know if you can do that on demand or not. It does seem like a cool project, so I will likely try it out.
It's not the only problem, but I have to use the sites :)
Even my coworkers who use chrome prefer zoom though, so we’ve been switching more and more meetings to zoom.
Tried Zoom but eventually moved to Google Meet because it worked better. It could be WAY better but meh. And the difference between Meet on Firefox & Google Chrome is significant.
All this considering I'm running on a gigabit network. Not 100% sure about the partner.
>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 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) 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).
Plugging this into something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers#WebKit-ba... yields a number of options depending on your OS like SRWare Iron or Otter Browser.
If the problem is that you don't have enough memory to comfortably use two browsers at once, then... well, then that's your real problem. Get more more RAM.
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.
* 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.
* The sidebar. Downloads, bookmarks, etc. are quickly available in a simple pull-out.
* Speed Dial. Sounded corny when I first installed Vivaldi, now I love it. YMMV.
* Tab Stacking. If you're like me and have lots of tabs open, this is a great feature.
* Notes. Tracking notes on a page is an awesome feature!
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.
Regarding the slowness, I don't experience it. I just checked, and I have 506 tabs opened.