Browser wars

The hardest part about making a browser seems to be restraining yourself just to make a fucking browser.

Customer: I want a browser please

Chrome: Here's a browser with embedded spyware and blatant disdain for your RAM

Firefox: here's your browser with embedded AI for some reason

Brave: Here's a browser with embedded cryptoslop and a dodgy CEO

Opera: What's up gamers here's your browser with tacticool RGB bloat

Microsoft: Here's your spyware AI that sort of also works as a browser that might actually cause Ted Kaczynski to rise from the grave and kill again, to the thunderous applause of all.

To be fair, Chrome is actually pretty good at some things. I noticed when building an infinite feed of Lemmy posts, Chrome required zero optimization to render hundreds of posts at once. Safari was a different story. I had to rebuild my feed of posts with some pretty complex list virtualization to get Safari to be performant.
I wish I remembered what Firefox was like at the time, but I don’t. Possible it’s also very performant. But as a developer, Chrome is way more enjoyable to build for.
This is NOT an endorsement for Chrome. I absolutely hate Google. Just wanted to provide my perspective as a developer. And maybe that also explains the high ram usage of Chrome since there’s some ✨magic✨ optimization happening that Safari lacks.
- True, but part of that is Google developed some "web standards" for Chrome only, and forced the others to adapt or be left behind. Also in some cases, websites work better if you just spoof your user agent to Chrome and get those "improved" pages
- Yeah I've got to say, as a developer that Chrome and chromium forks are way more consistent and performant - and easier to develop for.
- I was editing a very large confluence page a little while ago in FF and was getting frustrated with how slow it was getting. I figured it must be better on edge, surely there's been a bunch of optimizations there for the whole thing to have been deemed viable.
  Nope, FF was faster. By a decent margin, even. The editor was still usable in FF while edge struggled just to render it at all.
Oh Firefox, I still haven't moved on from that "study" which was just a ad for a TV show. I disable studies on every machine I touch now.
I laughed at Opera. Most of these are spot on.

Firefox forks. Use them.

Also fuck Chromium based browsers. All of them.

My favorite so far has been Zen Browser.
- +1 from me there, before I was using sideberry to achieve something close to what zen has build-in. Then I found zen and never looked back. And now I really can't live without glance anymore.
Librewolf up in this piece
Waterfox for heavy-duty online-exam stuff etc. links2 -g for wikipedia and browsing.
Ever since hearing about Mullvad having their own ( Mull ), I haven't switched back and I'm glad. Looks real polished and runs a lot quicker on both my Linux running laptop and win10 desktop. Even with my laptop being much better specs, speeds are consistently bad for page loading times on Firefox.
Haven't checked on how fast Librewolf is, but I'm sure it'd also be faster.

The only reason I use Firefox is because of ublock origin.

Mozilla: message received, people don't want support for manifest V2
Try LibreWolf and IronFox sometime. It's Firefox with less BS.

I was wondering why my normal everyday usage started slowing my PC to a crawl the past few days. Very fucking stupid of you, Firefucks.

When I'm at my desk and working, the last fucking thing I guve a shit about is whatever AI bullshit you're now pushing. I got my PC hooked up to a big CNC machine I'm sending commands to while also designing new items while on a second monitor. My third monitor is for one thing: Keep fire fox open for email and a YouTube video.

Is it too goddamn much to ask for a browser to just play one video and display my emails?!?!? That's all I need from you. Because, you sneaking this shit in jeopardizes my entire system and hardware when shit starts slowing to a crawl.

They have had a fraction of Chrome's userbase long before any of this AI nonsense.

if they didn't turn to shit constantly perhaps more people would consider switching over
And they seem really committed to ensure that remains the case.

Base Firefox is actually dogshit, it's wild how much they've ruined it. LibreWolf and similar forks are the way to go.

Not sure if similar desktop forks for Chromium exist, but at least there's the "ungoogled" package.

Either way, just wish I could find a selfhosted browser sync tool that doesn't rely on a google account or w/e. LibreWolf is great for my PCs but IronFox feels far too restrictive for mobile while Fennec doesn't feel like enough. Vanadium is fine but that's a Chromium fork.

I do like the way base FF does vertical tabs, though. The only reason I still main that browser for longer web surfing sessions.
If I know exactly where I'm going I use LW, though.
BTW do people really keep the default functionality of LW to clear all login cookies? I know it's more secure, but kind of a pain to have to sign in to rainwave.cc or whatever every new session.
- Librewolf also has native vertical tabs :) Not sure if it's the same implementation as FF, but I believe it is.
  Regarding cookies, I've manually added exclusions for frequent, trusted websites, and left the default clearing on.
- I don't personally - mine wipes history and a few other bits on close but that's all. I've made a few other overrides for convenience like dark mode and such too. I get this kind of kills the point but there are some things I'm not willing to let go of
I like librawolf on Linux, but a lot of pages break
Is palemoon still around, striped down, and good?

This feels like confirmation of the conspiracy theory that they don't want to be popular because of the Google money they get

Performance on Android is what's killing me.

Sometimes I have to open sites in Cromite

I find Firefox performance on Android much better than WebView browsers (this is on GrapheneOS, so it's the hardened WebView / Vanadium, perhaps that is why)

This was a reason why I fully moved to waterfox an Zen

Firefox is fantastic. What are you people whining about, the optional AI sidebar?

Yes. I also love Firefox but for reasons that are in the exact opposite direction of "AI chatbot integration that can only be fully disabled with about:config".
Edit: I should add that, at least for me, the "optional" status of the AI chat features in the sidebar depended on whether tabs were set to horizontal or vertical. For vertical tabs, the only way to disable AI chat in the sidebar was with about:config, and I would still prefer if such a specific feature wasn't bundled with the browser.
- How come I don't see any of that AI stuff on my install? It's a regional thing? OS-based?

LMAO this is too good.

icecat still works fine btw.

What u guys think about the forks? Waterfox? Zen? Good alternatives?

Librewulf is my go-to.
zen is great. I love the vertical tabs. It runs pretty well, doesn't hog resources. Plus ublock-origin!
I'm using Zen. It's been pretty OK.
i moved on from waterfox when the 'classic' fork had to be added. I can't even remember what it was that waterfox was doing now, but it was irritating that I had to deal with some slop making it in.

No PWA support, so I left. I like my Taskbar icons to work, on Windows and Debian.

I know there's an extension for that, but it breaks too often.

Left to what? Where?
- Back to Chrome in my case. Three separate Google profiles, so one Gmail icon for each plus calendar, keep, Messenger, Facebook WhatsApp.