Looking for an alternative to Firefox

I recently switched to ungoogled-chromium myself. The biggest problem for me was sync, but ultimately I found what I want by spreading the functions between components.

I don’t care about History and I prefer not to sync it, but bookmark is important to me. Luckily, xbrowsersync solve that handily, though I wish there is an easy way to sync it with my mobile browser.

I already use KDE Connect and Crono (a pushbullet alternative) so sending tabs aren’t an issue, and I recently made a second WhatsApp account to send stuff to myself easily (thanks to the new Multi-Device beta not needing phone to be on anymore).

The only uncovered case was just Extensions syncing but it’s not a bad opportunity to lean down on my extensions addiction anyways. I managed to cover Tab Syncing by just using a Bookmark All Tabs extension, and then opening it through xbrowsersync on mobile.

But since I’m free from many ties now, I decided to just go with Bromite (non-root) for my mobile browser. Tried out ungoogled-chromium on Android but Dark Web page didn’t work and I prefer something with adblock, so Bromite it is.

As much as I like Firefox, I realized that the main thing holding me onto it are just Container Tabs and Syncing, and with Chromium’s overall better performance and no longer tied to their sync, it’s just not worth it for me anymore. I’ll keep it installed as a secondary browser, but ungoogled-chromium cover my needs and will be my choice assuming nothing bad happens.

Same, and the standalone android app is… lacking. Resets the view every time I open something or switch apps, and is slow to launch.

Again, same.

Stable Firefox on Android not giving users access to about:config anymore was a dealbreaker. They put out a whitewashed steaming pile of software, and locked it down so people wouldn’t poke at it and brick their installs.

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Really? holy crap!
I am using Fennec wich is Android Firefox fork and it does let you access about:config.

Both Bromite and Fennec have f-droid builds. You just have to add the repo Urls.

Hi

Vivaldi is chrome based but is so psychotic about privacy you can’t even accidentally sign into google on it.

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just a PSA: fuck Brave, kill it with fire.

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I’ve used Fennec in the past, but I switched to Mull to cut out all the tracking:

However, it’s still an ordeal to get your favorite extensions/add-ons back. You have to create a mozilla account, create a custom addon collection, add all the extensions you want to that. Then enable the debugging options in the browser, and tell it to load the list of available add-ons from your custom collection. Then you can go into manage add-ons and install the extensions you want. Very user-friendly:

But once you go through all those steps, it does all work better than the old version of Firefox on Android. Add-ons now have their own menu where you can activate them, so more of the add-ons that work on the desktop version of Firefox now work on Android as well… For example, you can activate the element picker (eye-dropper icon) in uBlock to remove site annoyances. And in Image Video Block you can easily change the settings or whitelist/blacklist the site you’re currently on. A real shame Mozilla goes to such great lengths to prevent people from installing anything but their 12 approved add-ons.

My recommendation for useful add-ons:

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Thank you very much, never heard about Mull as I thought Fennec was the pinnacle of debloating, I will try it as well.

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You can and I did it countless of times for both Chrome and Brave.

I used to be a FF shill, but ended up being browser agnostic after all the politics happening at Moz://a HQ. On Linux, I use FF because it’s more convenient, on Windows I use Brave because it’s faster. I especially dislike the hot take on “we need more than deplatforming” (albeit Firefox wasn’t stranger to giving ads in the browser for a politician just for visiting his website once to check on something). I do hope the situation improves and Firefox developers and managers become more impartial, which they ought to be if they still want to claim they’re for a “free and open internet.”

I have used Falkon in the past. It wasn’t bad, but I found some incompatible sites (don’t remember which) and I just couldn’t live with just AdBlock, I have Firefox armed to the teeth with extensions.

Not a website, but I stumbled upon a router management interface (“fiberhome”) that would only load a blank page on Firefox, but work perfectly fine on Brave and Edge-chromium. Other than that, nothing (other than the fact that Youtube is slower on Firefox, but that is by design).

Oh, one thing I hate about Firefox on Android (and also Brave) is that I cannot seem to find the search function (ctrl+F) and for FF alone, that I can’t seem be able to enable Read Mode anymore on mobile. WTH? On Android, just like on Windows, Brave became my main browser. But I rarely use Windows or Android, I only used it because I didn’t have access to my Linux box. FF is technically still my main.

Oh, and this too. What about “free and open internet” when they don’t allow you to choose what your browser does? On mobile, it basically treats the user like a brainlet, just like proprietary browsers are doing.

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Oh that’s neat. I’ve been using a older version for personal browsing.

Run the Nightly Build or at least the Developer build then? I run Nightly everywhere.

Why would I need to use alpha software just to get access to stuff that are normally available on the desktop? Also, I don’t use my phone that much to justify that.

And back in ~2016-2017 (or so I recall), I used to run Firefox Nightly all the way from version 54 to 59 on my work PC. I didn’t have any issues with it to be honest, but the constant updates and having to restart my tabs is what killed it for me (and yes, I make use of “restore tabs” when opening a lot, the problem is the reloading time of 20+ tabs that I actually need and use). I would probably not be as affected by restarting the browser on Android, but I did have a few times when I updated Brave and forgot I still had stuff open in private browsing and it closed my tabs, I don’t want to imagine that on the frequency of Firefox Nightly updates (I have a short memory span, I see updates, I click update without much consideration for what I am updating - also, Android is stupid because it forces a program to restart after an update, on Linux it still works for quite a while, until all the tabs crash and can’t reload until I restart the browser).

I am not debating that. Just offering a solution, if you want it, that is how you do it.

@imrazor did you already tried a couple of other browsers?
And how are your experiences sofar?

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Only one so far, qutebrowser. So far I’m quite satisfied. Well, mostly.

There are two chief problems I’ve found with it. The Windows (not MacOS or Linux) version crashes when loading Youtube.com but only when you’re logged into it. The other problem is performance. It’s not very fast. But most of my systems are on the newish side and rather beefy, so that’s not a big deal either.

I’ve tested against several websites I frequent, and so far have only found one niggling issue. It doesn’t like displaying certain videos, which is almost certainly due to them being some oddball proprietary codec. I’ve even used it on some legacy sites geared towards older versions of IE and it seemed to render those w/o issue.

Using it is way different than most browsers. It is not lying when it says that it uses vi keys for navigation (Shift-H to go back, Shift-D to close a tab, etc.) I’ve used vi many times before, but have not dived into it’s capabilities so it’s a bit of a learning curve for me.

Unfortunately I do not know how to verify that it is not tracking me, and have to rely on the testimony of those in these thread and some of the links that have been provided. I’m still struggling with the adblocker. AFAICT ad blocking is enabled in the config file, but I’m still seeing a seemingly normal amount of ads (but no popups or popunders.) Despite this I’m still pretty happy with it.

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It’s probably widevine.

There are extensions in Firefox for that, but I’ve only used them a little, browsing requires a lot of point and click (or tab-ing 100s of times).

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Not really. I think you mean with sync (which is not the same as local backups) and even then you lose some stuff. The local profile of FF stores everything on your computer and you can simply copy it to a usb stick and continue exactly where you left off, with all your add-ons, saved passwords, certificates, cookies, everything. Try doing that with a Chromium browser and you will not be able to transfer every single thing. This is why you have a 100% functional portable version of FF and not of Chromium browsers. For some sync is more than enough however, but for me this is one of the things keeps me on FF.

I never used sync. What I did was copy the %appdata%\Google and %localappdata%\Google profiles on another PC in the same location and everything was identical, including extensions, settings, history, bookmarks etc. The same for Brave (just %localappdata%\BraveSoftware). That is on Windows. In Linux I believe it is in ~/.local, but I could be wrong, in Linux I only copied ~/.mozilla and ~/.thunderbird.

In any case, moving FF from Windows to Linux was a bit of a pain, because it wouldn’t accept all the files from the windows profile (because of paths and other stuff formatted for Windows). I believe I have a bookmark of the stuff you actually need to backup from the FF profile in my browser on my Pi, which I can’t access at this point. If you remind me in 1-2 months, I’ll probably find that link.

Another browser that is free and open-source is Lynx. This very lightweight browser displays websites just as well as ten years ago. Really good for anyone who wants to enjoy the same browsing experience no matter what’s en vogue right now. A staple in my browser collection.

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If you like Lynx, you may probably enjoy surf browser.

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You should probably mention that it is a command line browser.

As an aside, Lynx can have some varying colour configurations on certain distros. The default configuration on OpenSUSE was sufficiently annoying that I resorted to running it in -nocolor mode after I could not get it to consistently set properly via config files.

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