Ok, probably a bit of hyperbole here, but it’s seriously bugging me. I’ve now been on a 3 or 4 year Browser Hunt and one seems to be worse than the next.
But since only complaining doesnt help, i’d like to maybe get your suggestion for what the “best” Browser to use.
My Criteria:
Vertical Tabs (Native or Extension, but ideally hides the original tabs)
At least an Ad-Blocker and Bitwarden or Keepass Integration (Native or Extension)
The least amount of Corporate tie-in/Tracking possible
Windows Support
And all of that with great performance please.
Some of my Experiences so far:
Chrome: Great Browser, but Google, so, nope.
Firefox: Mozilla’s direction for Firefox just isn’t what it used to be. Also, every release seems to get slower and slower
Brave: There was some at least questionable stuff going on in the beginning. Might be remedied, but i won’t try that again. I’m just not certain what’s going on in the background there.
Vivaldi: My personal UI King. Customization out the wazoo. But it’s slooooow. Pages take seconds until they start loading and anything above 20 Tabs get’s more or less unusable (with 32G of Ram…)
Opera GX: Works well, but the UI is… different. Opera also has the tendency to come with a million features i don’t need or want.
Edge(ium): I really enjoy the new Edge. It’s great. But trading Google for Microsoft isn’t exactly what i’m looking for.
Librewolf: Looks like a great Project so far. Having to manage Updates myself is a bit of a downer and in the end, they also depend on Mozillas direction for Firefox.
Ungoogled-Chromium: Testing the now. Looks Ok. Installing Extensions is a bit of a hassle, but bitwarden, keypass and ublock luckily all have their Extension up on Github. Vertical Tabs in any Chrome Browser are a sh*tshow.
So yeah. I’ve tried a LOT of Browsers. Ideally, i’d take the new Edge (chromium engine, vertical tabs) but without Microsoft. Since that won’t happen, what’s your opinion? What Browser is the best option at the moment?
Browsers like everything seem to be funneling down to the few or the one. Tech and its vulnerabilities put software online out of many’s security knowledge base to make solid software.
Firefox seem close to your asks. I do believe there was either a extension for vertical tabs or About setting in chrome to get vertical tabs.
Keeping on top of internet facing software is a dien breed. Look at OS’s and browsers in the next 5-7 years. They will all want to lock down.
Yeah I don’t agree with this either. I run it on both Windows and Linux, and Firefox seems to be getting faster over time, not slower.
However, I run it with either zero extensions or NoScript. I’ve read that the extension API does slow it down and that increases with more extensions. Maybe if you’re adding a bunch of things to get what you want, that could be the cause.
Yes. In fact, sideberry is my favorite Vertical Tab implementation period. It’s a really great extension and infinitly customizable.
In general this is my experience. I feel like a lot of sites do optimize for Chrome though and this leads to some issues in Firefox. One example is the Browser Console for Nutanix. There’s some weired Keyboard stuff going on that leads to Letters being swapped. Certainly not Firefox’s Problem per-se, but it leads to several sites basically requiring Chrome to work as intended.
Other than that, i’d say i run pretty light on extensions. uBlock, a Password Manager and Sideberry for Vertical Tabs. That’s about it.
Maybe i’m just imagining stuff and Firefox is equal to chrome in terms of Performance. Websites just seem to feel “smoother” and faster in chromium Browsers to me. But really, this could just be placebo.
I might have to invest some time this weekend to do a proper Performance analysis and get down to the bottom of this. I’d really like to stick to Firefox as it does basically everything i need/want.
I use Firefox as my main and Vivaldi as the backup. It turns out that Firefox has some incompatibilities with sites, as the Chrome engine is the testing point for developers. For example, if you go to AMD’s direct shop, it doesn’t load images nor you can complete an order, as the order form breaks.
After many years of testing and developing (I have my own extensions for FF), I ended up using two to cover all my needs. FF comes first, mostly because it is open source and mobile version where I can sync tabs, send tabs, share history, bookmarks etc.
At the end, you have to decide which one is best for your needs and either accept the fact that there is no perfect, or make your own
I never really understood the point of noscript since any modern reactive web page just renders the javascript into static html ahead of time so the few bits of js that you turn off are just the tracking.
So unless you browse script-kiddy websites for fun I don’t see the benefit.
It certainly made for a bigger PITA to me than it was worth. Privacy badger and ublock are just about all I care to use. Also “I dont care about cookies” because of those obnoxious banners… thanks EU.
I have been running the developer edition of Firefox as an alternate browser to safari on my Mac. Based purely on my extensive n=1 study, it is faster than its orange counterpart.
the venn diagram of people who understand the negatives of using chrome and people who care is too tiny a user base that even if all of them banded together under one browser it wouldnt be enough users to get investment to fund development.
Lots of JS makes requests too though, which can still do shenanigans plus slows things down. With NoScript + uBlock Origin on Firefox and then PiHole + Unbound DNS, the web is nice and snappy.
JS is designed to be non-blocking in the event loop and network requests are asynchronous.
The only time JS slows pages down is when dynamic content that needs to painted is waiting on certain resources or you are directly manipulating the DOM. These days any framework worth its salt uses the concept of a virtual-DOM. This can be either a sloppy design or a slow connection. I.E, don’t paint until all the pictures have been downloaded is the dumbest shit that you can find on some PHP sites still.
If you want to learn more check out the promise API.
Pretty much everyone worth their salt does code-splitting and async chunk loading.
Waiting on JS usually isn’t the bottleneck for most sites, it is the images or the ridiculous amount of fonts/ligatures that pages try to suck in from CDN’s.
The JS that is the ‘meat and potatoes’ of a website is at most a megabyte or two but you typically see is around 600 kilobytes.
When people make well-developed websites IMO.
See also downloading the entire JQuery lib for a couple functions or all of lodash for handful of functions of the entire cache of Fontawesome icons because they are lazy and don’t want to cherrypick the actual ones they need.
Laziness is such a problem it was easier to create CDN’s to cache this stuff instead of developers learning how to just use what they actually need.
I think i’m the most “user” user here, since 2017 or so i’m running Vivaldi primarily.
While some little things annoy me (like the janky animations, which are being improved), the experience has been incredibly positive, in fact i’ve tried coming back to Firefox and missed the extra features a lot.
For performance, i’ve had some issues at the earlier days, but nowadays its smooth as silk, even on my gutless work machine (i5 2310 + 8gb + dramless SSD) i can leave it open the entire day with 20 or so tabs without issue.
Frankly it has perhaps too many features, but you can simply ignore if you’re not interested in using them.
I also tried using Opera GX, but it doesn’t feel the same and the optional features are more highlighted than in Vivaldi, which i personally don’t like.
I switched to Brave about a year ago. Since they worked the kinks out of the sync feature it’s been good.
From what I remember, there were some privacy concerns in the beginning but I think they were coming from people who thought it would be equivalent to using tor/tails all the time which it isn’t. I mean, Google is still the default search engine, JavaScript isn’t disabled, the tracking blocker starts on a medium setting. It’s intended to be usable for normal people, but you can adjust that however you like.
If you don’t opt into their advertising/rewards system, it’s basically Chromium with extra privacy features and no Google. Chrome extensions have always worked in my experience.
I install Brave and Firefox ESR for some edge cases. Never need anything else.
