If you're finally ready to leave Chrome behind, these are my top recommendations and when to use them.
The title is err, not correct because the top 2 alternatives Opera and Arc are based on Chromium engine. I have seen tons of people swear by Arc, but I am seriously asking (since as a Linux user I can't use it), how much good can a browser be in this day and age if ultimately it's ad blocking breaks and it will since Manifest v2 will go soon(unless Arc folks have a solution for it)
The rest alternatives are Firefox, Zen (FF fork but honestly Atleast this was something new I learned from this article) and Tor (which is weird since it is not meant for normal web browsing and using it will not only be slow but put additional strain on the nodes, correct me if I am wrong).
I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.
As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.
My own comment has been: "Don't you dare to have opinions that don't align with mainstream thinking here".
Here either you praise Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko or you are insulted and treated like a pest. And that's a deterrent for me to even look at Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko. I prefer not to be part of that community.
I didn't see it as an insult... The mindset of, "I don't like the people who like x, so I won't even try x before trashing it," is objectively childish.
DNS blocking (such as AdGuard) doesn't work for everything. Ad blocking extensions are the only way to block YouTube ads in your browser as far as I know.
I’ll second Vivaldi! There’s no other browser with that kind of tab and workspace management. It’s how my brain works. The mobile app is great too with tab groups and the sync between the two is fast. I keep Librewolf on my laptop as well for the odd website that only likes FF.
Vivaldi is great, but because of manifest v3 i'm looking for alternatives. Firefox is not an alternative for me because of the privacy stuff they changed recently.
I gave Vivaldi a try way back in its early days when I was on Windows. IIRC, it was bundled with lots of features even then and I think, for some weird reason, had Philips Hue Lighting support integrated (unless I am really confusing it with something other, this is multiple years old experience of mine).
I used it as my main browser for Atleast couple of months then.