Linking his the latest hate blogpost Every Web Browser Absolutely Sucks. – Luke Smith
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Hmm, thanks for that link. Trying out qutebrowser. Uses vi shortcut keys. How…qute.
But Mr. Smith is correct, it can be slow on some sites. Most notably so far level1techs.com, LOL.
I myself moved from qutebrowser back to firefox+tridactyl.
I couldn’t live without ublock.
Did you run across many incompatible websites with qutebrowser? What made you switch back?
It seems to play 4K video fine, but has some lag scrolling long, complex pages. Like this one. I think I’ll try the lounge thread, or the new acquisitions thread.
Not much, usually most annoyance comes from not detecting elements as they appear dynamically later in the view.
Also few minor issues when native chromium popups about allowing permissions were not showing (that’s fixed now for sure).
As I said the lack of ublock made me switch, the web is unuseable without it. And my personal launch scripts could be migrated easily to tridactyl as well.
Qutebrowser is still an amazing project, the developer is very kind and helpful. Sad the state of the web makes people to choose different browsers that can do adblock 2.0 element blocking.
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Why not just use Firefox, and just occasionally use Chrome (or Edge when on ARM) to access the websites that doesn’t play nicely with Firefox (mainly ebay for me)?
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Speaking of issues, can anyone provide me with some examples of sites that currently don’t work well with Firefox?
Been using it since forever, and there was only one time i encountered a site that didn’t work with it. A bug report and a few days later it was fixed.
My only grief with Firefox so far is that they have completely wrecked the mobile version of it. Had to stay on one that is a couple of years old by now.
On the big screen so far all the UI changes are configurable enough to be reshaped back to usable state.
Main reason i see to keep supporting Firefox is that it’s the only browser remaining with an independent layout engine. If it were to die, we will be back to IE6-like days of one-chromium-to-rule-them-all-arbitrarily. That is, of google being able to freely tweak the web standards by being a monopoly. Not good.
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The only sites that I run into that don’t work well are the sites riddled with Ads. Mainly new sites. Slashdot is one of them. IT is not FF’s fault in so much as they natively block invasive Ads and I have third-party cookies blocked.
If a site is too bad to browse, then I say eff it. On Mobile sometimes this can be fixed by putting the page into document mode. This is such a nice feature that I sometimes use it on the desktop too.
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I happily use Vivaldi which is cross-platform. Yes it is based on chrome but you can turn off most stuff AFAIK that phones home. Im not an expert though, so someone else here may have better info on it.
All browers are getting worse and worse over time.
At this point it’s just a matter of picking one that is the least bad for your needs.
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I feel that this is because the Internet is replacing the traditional use of an OS. The browser is becoming the OS and there is agreed upon standard besides boilerplate stuff. The Internet is becoming what we were told it was going to be at version 1.0 and now everyone is out to lay their stake in how the internet should be access. To me this is explains the big difference among the mobile experiences versus the experience with the mainstream OS experiences. The browsers really act different depending on how you are accessing the Internet.
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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:
- uBlock Origin (block ads, other annoyances)
- JavaScript Toggle (disable js on badly behaved sites)
- Image Video Block (block videos loading/playing)
- Cookie AutoDelete (no cookies except for sites you whitelist)
- Fennec TextWrap (eliminate most horizontal scrolling)
- Hide Fixed Elements (one-click to remove site nav-bars)
- Activate Reader View (force reader view… helps sometimes)
- Want My RSS (restore all RSS functionality)
- Old Reddit Redirect (the old, useful site layout)
- Redirect AMP to HTML (if you dislike Google taking over the web)
- Referer Modifier (gain some privacy, and fix broken sites)
- Scroll Everywhere (fix some broken sites)
- View Source (actual debugging on mobile)
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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.