What web browser are you using, and why?

[Mr. Fox]

Hey guys. Long time Chrome user here. Before Chrome, Internet Explorer (which I actually still like a lot from a GUI perspective). I have tried hard to like Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Edge and I just can't like any of the browsers that compete with Chrome. They all have too many things that I do not like about them and none are as convenient to use.

 

Well... that was until a couple of days ago. I stumbled upon Opera GX. Yeah, I know... Opera. I've always viewed it as a joke. But, GX is different. It has a ton of features, looks good, runs extremely fast, and is highly configurable.
 

Opera GX has controls that allow you to set a limit on RAM and CPU resources the browser is permitted to use, and the controls are working really well for me. In Settings you can make the RAM and CPU limiter values persistent.

 

Naturally, I get rid of the the tacky-looking tiles, fake news and other worthless feces they throw on the default home page. Anything like that sucks to me, and if I can't turn off the news lies and propaganda the woke dummies intend to show me, then I'm not going to give them a platform for them to showcase their stupidity. That just makes me angry. If you are like me, you will want to disable GX Corner so you don't have to see that crap every time you open the browser. But, the bottom line is Opera GX is highly configurable. You can do it your way and stop being part of the sheeple flock.

 

I never in a million years thought I would be recommending something other than Chrome, and especially not Opera. So, I guess that is a nice example of why it is best to limit the use of the word "never" (unless you enjoy crow meat). Do yourself a favor and check it out. And, don't forget to cast a vote in the poll once you make up your mind.

 

https://www.opera.com/gx

 

 

As I mentioned above, I think this really sucks. So, I turn it off in settings.

 

@Papusan

[Talon]

2 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

Hey guys. Long time Chrome user here. Before Chrome, Internet Explorer (which I actually still like a lot from a GUI perspective). I have tried hard to like Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Edge and I just can't like any of the browsers that compete with Chrome. They all have too many things that I do not like about them and none are as convenient to use.

 

Well... that was until a couple of days ago. I stumbled upon Opera GX. Yeah, I know... Opera. I've always viewed it as a joke. But, GX is different. It has a ton of features, looks good, runs extremely fast, and is highly configurable.
 

Opera GX has controls that allow you to set a limit on RAM and CPU resources the browser is permitted to use, and the controls are working really well for me. In Settings you can make the RAM and CPU limiter values persistent.

 

Naturally, I get rid of the the tacky-looking tiles, fake news and other worthless feces they throw on the default home page. Anything like that sucks to me, and if I can't turn off the news lies and propaganda the woke dummies intend to show me, then I'm not going to give them a platform for they to showcase their stupidity. That just makes me angry.

 

I never in a million years thought I would be recommending something other than Chrome, and especially not Opera. So, I guess that is a nice example of why it is best to limit the use of the word "never" (unless you enjoy crow meat). Do yourself a favor and check it out. And, don't forget to cast a vote in the poll once you make up your mind.

 

Also a long time Chrome user but I’m willing to check this out as it definitely looks interesting. I run a few plugins/extensions on Chrome so hopefully those are supported here? Either way it looks fresh. 

[Mr. Fox]

1 minute ago, Talon said:

Also a long time Chrome user but I’m willing to check this out as it definitely looks interesting. I run a few plugins/extensions on Chrome so hopefully those are supported here? Either way it looks fresh. 

Yes, same here. Never thought I would find anything good enough to replace Chrome, but this might do it if anything can.

 

And, yes... you can use Chrome extensions. It is built on Chrome and natively supports Chrome Web Store stuff.

[Mr. Fox]

21 minutes ago, Talon said:

Also a long time Chrome user but I’m willing to check this out as it definitely looks interesting. I run a few plugins/extensions on Chrome so hopefully those are supported here? Either way it looks fresh. 

 

18 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

Yes, same here. Never thought I would find anything good enough to replace Chrome, but this might do it if anything can.

 

And, yes... you can use Chrome extensions. It is built on Chrome and natively supports Chrome Web Store stuff.

It imported all bookmarks, passwords, etc directly from Chrome. So, I do have to worry about trying to fart around with manually trying to manage 10,000 things that I started saving since the beginning of time, LOL.

[RandomIdiot]

27 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

Hey guys. Long time Chrome user here. Before Chrome, Internet Explorer (which I actually still like a lot from a GUI perspective). I have tried hard to like Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Edge and I just can't like any of the browsers that compete with Chrome. They all have too many things that I do not like about them and none are as convenient to use.

 

Well... that was until a couple of days ago. I stumbled upon Opera GX. Yeah, I know... Opera. I've always viewed it as a joke. But, GX is different. It has a ton of features, looks good, runs extremely fast, and is highly configurable.
 

Opera GX has controls that allow you to set a limit on RAM and CPU resources the browser is permitted to use, and the controls are working really well for me. In Settings you can make the RAM and CPU limiter values persistent.

 

Naturally, I get rid of the the tacky-looking tiles, fake news and other worthless feces they throw on the default home page. Anything like that sucks to me, and if I can't turn off the news lies and propaganda the woke dummies intend to show me, then I'm not going to give them a platform for they to showcase their stupidity. That just makes me angry. If you are like me, you will want to disable GX Corner so you don't have to see that crap every time you open the browser. But, the bottom line is Opera GX is highly configurable. You can do it your way and stop being part of the sheeple flock.

 

I never in a million years thought I would be recommending something other than Chrome, and especially not Opera. So, I guess that is a nice example of why it is best to limit the use of the word "never" (unless you enjoy crow meat). Do yourself a favor and check it out. And, don't forget to cast a vote in the poll once you make up your mind.

 

https://www.opera.com/gx

 

 

As I mentioned above, I think this really sucks. So, I turn it off in settings.

 

@Papusan

I remember reading about this before launch. To be honest the thought of "the browser for gamers" kinda made me throw up in my mouth. So considering it seems like most of that crap can be disabled, what benefit does it have over plain old Opera

[Mr. Fox]

3 minutes ago, RandomIdiot said:

I remember reading about this before launch. To be honest the thought of "the browser for gamers" kinda made me throw up in my mouth. So considering it seems like most of that crap can be disabled, what benefit does it have over plain old Opera

I couldn't answer that because I haven't used Opera in a while. They may have overhauled it. But, I really like the amount of GUI customization and the ability to manually control what system resources the browser is allowed to consume. It is like everything Chrome should have been, but wasn't.  Chrome on steroids, LOL.

[serpro69]

Interesting to see this new version of Opera, haven't used it since like forever. I used to like Firefox before it's move to WebExtensions API back in the days, but haven't really gotten to use it much since then. I heard performance was greatly improved lately, but I'm just lazy to try it out again.

I've moved to Brave from Chrome several years ago. It's pretty much the same, but a little more "privacy oriented".

[Ishayin]

The browsers I use most are Opera, Vivaldi, Pale Moon and Firefox in that order. Other options I have installed but very rarely use are Waterfox, Otter Browser and Tor. I would probably say Vivaldi is my favourite, but I still use Opera the most just out of laziness really that I still haven't managed to move all my setup over to Vivaldi yet. I never tried GX since it just looked like a gimmick to me. But maybe some of it's extra features really are useful if they don't slow it down too much?

 

The main things I dislike about Opera are its occasional insertion of advertising into your speed dial along with search defaults and shortcut limitations – I can't set Startpage as my default (but I always use search shortcuts so no biggie), and can't change some of the initial built-in shortcuts (so you can't e.g. use 'y' for YouTube, since it's already hard coded assigned to Yahoo). And it is a bit annoying not to be able to disable the built in extensions. So I kill the 'Opera Touch Background' and 'Rich Hints Agent' extensions from the task manager every time I start it (I'm not sure, but killing the latter may help to keep their advertising away). Vivaldi is much more 'user choice friendly' with things like this, and is closer to being the true spiritual successor of classic Opera, which was of course:

 

The old Presto engine based Opera was by far my favourite ever browser (in the period from versions ~9–12). Then when it borked itself with Blink I had to switch to Palemoon and a whole suite of Firefox add-ons to get the closest approximation of the same functionality back again that was there as standard in the old Opera. Then I switched over to using more Chromium extensions as both the Blink Opera gradually improved, and Vivaldi came along. Though on principle I'm not so keen on supporting the increasing monopolistic hold Google's technologies are having over the modern internet.

 

Probably we should have a whole separate thread on what browser add-on/extensions people are using. They often have far more impact on the UX than the browser itself.

 

Has anyone tried LibreWolf yet?

[Aaron44126]

Used Chrome for a long time.  Chromium is a really solid engine.  I started to get apprehensive about Google's data collection practices, and ended up switching to Chromium Edge when it became available.  It was a pretty seamless transition because it could use Chrome web store extensions.  That was fine for a period of time, but Edge has become worse than Chrome now, so I had to get off.

 

I settled on Firefox ESR.  When I tried Firefox, I was really surprised at how much it has improved from a resource use / performance perspective.  (That was the main thing that pushed me off of Firefox, to Chrome, like a decade ago.)  Even though I think that Firefox's extension library was better before they switched to only supporting the WebExtensions API, at least this API supports porting extensions pretty easily from Chrome so I didn't have any issue finding replacements for Chrome extensions that I was using.  I disabled the Pocket/ads stuff.  I like the ESR branch in particular because they only do major updates once per year, on a predictable schedule.  So, instead of having to be on the lookout for privacy-impacting changes or obnoxious new features showing up at any time, I only have to worry about things changing and finding new stuff to disable once per year.

 

...And I kind of like supporting a world where there are browser engines other than Chromium.

 

Also I like to think back on my browser use history sometimes.  As I recall it:

 

1994-2001: Netscape

2001-2005: Internet Explorer
2005-2011: Firefox
2011-2019: Chrome
2019-2021: Edge
2021+: Firefox ESR

[Vasudev]

I use Firefox(Windows, Android, Linux), Chrome(Linux) and Edge(Windows only)

[defcon42]

Chrome. Since eternity.

 

And Opera GX - as Edge f.e. - is Chromium based, so almost identical with Chrome under the hood.

 

Performance-wise, Opera GX is not faster than Chrome on my machine. Some of the features are nice to have, but lacking impact on my daily use.

 

As long as the "competition" also uses Chromium, there is no reason to use another browser than Chrome.

[RandomIdiot]

3 hours ago, Ishatix said:

 

Has anyone tried LibreWolf yet?

 

I've been using Librewolf for a bit now. I guess its better than waterfox - which I was using previously. For my use Librewolf was a little over-secure, so disabled some of the features. Don't remember which ones now.

For my notFox browsers, after flip flopping between Opera and Vivaldi, I finally settled on Brave.

 

IMO, all browsers suck in their own way. It's just a matter of finding the one that sucks least for my needs

[duskw4lker]

I used Opera since its launch, until Opera 12. Then I switched to Vivaldi and never looked back. Vivaldi imho is truthful to the inception of Opera, since its original Developers quitted Opera and started their own project because the direction that Opera was taking. And as User I noticed that problem after Opera 12: I got lost with the aggressive changes in UI and behavior of the browser and felt that the browser wasn't 'mine'. It felt like visiting a supermarket that rearranged the shelves and aisles from scratch every damn time that I went there.

 

So far, I can't complain, Vivaldi is perfect for my needs, even though it is starting to take the direction towards an AIO browser with calendar, email client, and many other stuff that gets added with each update (that I don't need).

 

but the good thing for me is that it is absolutely easy to turn off the feature or any feature that you don't need and use the browser as you want it to be. Highly customizable  to your needs is what I would call Vivaldi, also consistent: with each update you never find asking yourself 'what how do I do this as before? where is this button/feature now? where did they move this option? what the hell did they do to my custom experience?'

[Ishayin]

 

On 2/25/2022 at 3:54 PM, RandomIdiot said:

 

I've been using Librewolf for a bit now. I guess its better than waterfox - which I was using previously. For my use Librewolf was a little over-secure, so disabled some of the features. Don't remember which ones now.

For my notFox browsers, after flip flopping between Opera and Vivaldi, I finally settled on Brave.

 

IMO, all browsers suck in their own way. It's just a matter of finding the one that sucks least for my needs

Thanks for the feedback! I will have to try out LibreWolf sometime. Another one I forgot about in my previous post is Librefox which rather than being a fork is instead simply a privacy and security enhanced configuration of Firefox itself.

 

What do you like about Brave? I've never tried it myself due to its more business orientated philosophy. But it's probably more transparent at least than say Opera or Chrome.

 

23 hours ago, duskw4lker said:

I used Opera since its launch, until Opera 12. Then I switched to Vivaldi and never looked back. Vivaldi imho is truthful to the inception of Opera, since its original Developers quitted Opera and started their own project because the direction that Opera was taking. And as User I noticed that problem after Opera 12: I got lost with the aggressive changes in UI and behavior of the browser and felt that the browser wasn't 'mine'. It felt like visiting a supermarket that rearranged the shelves and aisles from scratch every damn time that I went there.

 

So far, I can't complain, Vivaldi is perfect for my needs, even though it is starting to take the direction towards an AIO browser with calendar, email client, and many other stuff that gets added with each update (that I don't need).

 

but the good thing for me is that it is absolutely easy to turn off the feature or any feature that you don't need and use the browser as you want it to be. Highly customizable  to your needs is what I would call Vivaldi, also consistent: with each update you never find asking yourself 'what how do I do this as before? where is this button/feature now? where did they move this option? what the hell did they do to my custom experience?'

 

Yes, yes and yes! User choice is key to me, and something that seems to go out the window first with corporate controlled software (and hardware for that matter).

[K4sum1]

Waterfox Classic, I like the customizibility and the ability to use the more powerful, classic extensions that were dropped with Firefox 57 and newer.

[Mr. Fox]

On 2/25/2022 at 8:54 AM, RandomIdiot said:

IMO, all browsers suck in their own way. It's just a matter of finding the one that sucks least for my needs

Amen to that. It's really true. IE was the last real no-nonsense piece of software for view web pages. I'd still be using it if so many web pages didn't mitch and boan about it. That whole era of computing was better because things were simple. Then somebody thought it would be special to try to make web browsers a digital Swiss Army knife. Now we have Chrome OS. Computing in general is starting to suck and the suckiness of web browsers, and software as a whole, is a symptom of it.

[Sandy Bridge]

Vivaldi has been my primary browser since 2017.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Opera Presto was my main browser from 2007 through 2015 (2016 was a year of transition, with Firefox also being a primary browser for part of the year).  Opera Presto was king of power user features and customizeability without extensions, and now Vivaldi has taken up that mantle.

 

And truthfully, I don't even use that many of the features Vivaldi has.  But the ones I do use I really like.  Single-key shortcuts are a must, the History panel on Vivaldi is miles beyond any other browser which is great for finding something I looked up last month but can't quite remember where (especially if I remember it was a Tuesday or a couple days before some event), and I've finally mostly migrated my RSS feeds to Vivaldi from Opera Presto.

 

Second-most these days is Firefox.  There are a few sites I try to remember to use there because it blocks auto-playing videos (including non-ad videos).

 

I still occasionally use Opera Presto, but it's a distant third these days.  Sometimes I'll pull it up as an alternative to another tab in the same browser, for cases where it's nice to have that visual separation of tabs, and when I know the site will work in Opera Presto in 2022.  The nice thing is my muscle memory of shortcuts transfers between Vivaldi and Opera Presto, unlike Vivaldi and Firefox.

 

Chrome was never alive to me due to Google's privacy policies (including the very first one they shipped with Chrome).  Opera Blink was initially dead to me because they dropped all the features, but has been more permanently since they sold it to China.  China's domestic monitoring of the Internet is far too creepy and controlling for me to want a Chinese developer to be behind my web browser.

 

Never heard of LibreWolf or Epic, didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser despite it being my primary search engine.

 

I also have a few oddball browsers installed for super niche cases, nostalgia, or just to try them out.  These include a 10-year-old version of K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, Netscape Navigator, and Serpent.  Netscape is probably my favorite of those due to its non-minimalist UI, but of course it doesn't work with many sites these days.

[Ishayin]

8 hours ago, Sandy Bridge said:

Vivaldi has been my primary browser since 2017.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Opera Presto was my main browser from 2007 through 2015 (2016 was a year of transition, with Firefox also being a primary browser for part of the year).  Opera Presto was king of power user features and customizeability without extensions, and now Vivaldi has taken up that mantle.

 

And truthfully, I don't even use that many of the features Vivaldi has.  But the ones I do use I really like.  Single-key shortcuts are a must, the History panel on Vivaldi is miles beyond any other browser which is great for finding something I looked up last month but can't quite remember where (especially if I remember it was a Tuesday or a couple days before some event), and I've finally mostly migrated my RSS feeds to Vivaldi from Opera Presto.

 

Second-most these days is Firefox.  There are a few sites I try to remember to use there because it blocks auto-playing videos (including non-ad videos).

 

I still occasionally use Opera Presto, but it's a distant third these days.  Sometimes I'll pull it up as an alternative to another tab in the same browser, for cases where it's nice to have that visual separation of tabs, and when I know the site will work in Opera Presto in 2022.  The nice thing is my muscle memory of shortcuts transfers between Vivaldi and Opera Presto, unlike Vivaldi and Firefox.

 

Chrome was never alive to me due to Google's privacy policies (including the very first one they shipped with Chrome).  Opera Blink was initially dead to me because they dropped all the features, but has been more permanently since they sold it to China.  China's domestic monitoring of the Internet is far too creepy and controlling for me to want a Chinese developer to be behind my web browser.

 

Never heard of LibreWolf or Epic, didn't know DuckDuckGo had a browser despite it being my primary search engine.

 

I also have a few oddball browsers installed for super niche cases, nostalgia, or just to try them out.  These include a 10-year-old version of K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, Netscape Navigator, and Serpent.  Netscape is probably my favorite of those due to its non-minimalist UI, but of course it doesn't work with many sites these days.

 

Good point about the history panel in Vivaldi – the Opera history view is extremely frustrating and buggy to use by comparison.

[Keith]

On 2/24/2022 at 9:07 PM, Mr. Fox said:

Hey guys. Long time Chrome user here. Before Chrome, Internet Explorer (which I actually still like a lot from a GUI perspective). I have tried hard to like Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and Edge and I just can't like any of the browsers that compete with Chrome. They all have too many things that I do not like about them and none are as convenient to use.

 

Well... that was until a couple of days ago. I stumbled upon Opera GX. Yeah, I know... Opera. I've always viewed it as a joke. But, GX is different. It has a ton of features, looks good, runs extremely fast, and is highly configurable.
 

Opera GX has controls that allow you to set a limit on RAM and CPU resources the browser is permitted to use, and the controls are working really well for me. In Settings you can make the RAM and CPU limiter values persistent.

 

Naturally, I get rid of the the tacky-looking tiles, fake news and other worthless feces they throw on the default home page. Anything like that sucks to me, and if I can't turn off the news lies and propaganda the woke dummies intend to show me, then I'm not going to give them a platform for them to showcase their stupidity. That just makes me angry. If you are like me, you will want to disable GX Corner so you don't have to see that crap every time you open the browser. But, the bottom line is Opera GX is highly configurable. You can do it your way and stop being part of the sheeple flock.

 

I never in a million years thought I would be recommending something other than Chrome, and especially not Opera. So, I guess that is a nice example of why it is best to limit the use of the word "never" (unless you enjoy crow meat). Do yourself a favor and check it out. And, don't forget to cast a vote in the poll once you make up your mind.

 

https://www.opera.com/gx

 

 

As I mentioned above, I think this really sucks. So, I turn it off in settings.

 

@Papusan

Good to know. Thanks for sharing. It looks like it's built off of the Chrome engine, at least to me anyway. Lol. The last I remember, you were using Brave. Did that not pan out for you?

[Mr. Fox]

1 hour ago, Keith said:

Good to know. Thanks for sharing. It looks like it's built off of the Chrome engine, at least to me anyway. Lol. The last I remember, you were using Brave. Did that not pan out for you?

Yes, it is based on Chrome and that is one of the reasons it is decent. I liked Brave but found using it too inconvenient in terms of sync function and having to unblock too many things. It is more secure, but I value the convenience more than I worry about security. Both are important, but if I am going to use something that is more secure it needs to be equally convenient as what I am giving up.

[K4sum1]

Vivaldi seems interesting, but I would prefer the ability to have Aero on the top bar like in every other browser.

 

[Azther]

i currently main the modern Waterfox. previously i was using Vivaldi but it started to do weird stuff like crashing when a paypal popup window opened after it received its latest update some time ago. due to that i switched to Firefox to begin with, then found out Waterfox was a more privacy focused and stripped down version based on Firefox ESR so ive since stuck with that.

[Hertzian56]

Yeah waterfox my default with firefox and palemoon for specific purposes. Also an older opera portable, one  thing I like is that opera has a built in vpn. What I like about the firefox/variants is that you can set it to delete cookies, history etc upon exit. I usually will only login to certain sites using those so I don't give any browsing info etc to them other than the specific site I logged into.  gmail, disqus are examples. Opera and variants ie vivaldi, are the fastest to load though that's for sure. I usually just keep the already installed browser, explorer I think, as my default so if there's tracking or bug it usually goes after the default browser which I never use.

[luisxd]

When Netscape died I moved to Mozilla Firefox and used it for everything with no problem for years, but a few months ago it started to have a lot of issues, specially performance issues, so I moved to Brave and it's been great so far.

 

I wanted to try Opera GX a few months ago when I ditched Firefox but I can't touch anything with the "gaming" brand on it.

[Papusan]

On 2/25/2022 at 4:31 PM, defcon42 said:

Chrome. Since eternity.

 

As long as the "competition" also uses Chromium, there is no reason to use another browser than Chrome.

Yep. And there isn't many reasons to go from another Chromium browser. And I won't touch Windows newer browser. Microsoft have the bad habit add in too much junk/bloat. 

 

Here's a few.... 

Is Microsoft adding too many controversial features to its Edge browser?

 

Microsoft is adding more bloat to Edge with a Games button

by Ashwin on Dec 28, 2021 in Microsoft Edge - 27

Microsoft is adding a new feature to Edge, but you're probably not going to like it. The Chromium-based browser now has a games button, because why not? 

 

Microsoft's Buy Now, Pay Later integration in Edge is highly controversial

by Martin Brinkmann on Nov 30, 2021 in Microsoft Edge - 35

Microsoft announced a new addition to the company's Microsoft Edge web browser in mid-November. Available only in Insider Builds of Edge at the time, the feature was rolled out in Edge 96