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Ask HN: Any Decent Firefox Alternatives?

72 points| taigi100 | 4 years ago | reply

I've been using Firefox for a while now, but I have some issues with it:

1. I need to switch to chrome for various products such as Google Meet (works on Firefox, but I ran into performance (call quality) issues).

2. I often find sites with bad support for Firefox, and I need to again open a second browser (usually Chrome) to check them out.

3. It seems that in the past... long time, they have a talent of making Firefox worst. I still like it if it wasn't for the other 2 issues, but who can tell in 1 year.

Due to the above I was looking for a browser (one, I don't like having multiple on my machine but not sure if the Google Meet performance upgrade is just in Chrome or Chromium) which is as fast as Firefox, has a nice UI and preferably a bit more privacy oriented (not much, just a bit more).

Any ideas? (Currently checking out Vivaldi, but read a lot about performance issues + I don't really like the default UI yet).

95 comments

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[+] sph|4 years ago|reply
There's none, to be quite honest.

Chrome is spyware, Edge is spyware, Brave has too many crypto sponsor for my liking, Firefox is going off a cliff, Vivaldi is the definition of bloat.

The web browser ecosystem is frankly appalling, and it's so complicated it's impossible for new competitors to appear and improve the status quo. We just have to put up with it, and I am furious Mozilla, one of the shining beacons on that landscape, now is sitting idle redesigning the UI just to justify their existence.

I use Edge, with custom scripts to turn off as much phoning home as possible, and it's still bad.

[+] ALittleLight|4 years ago|reply
To my knowledge the crypto rewards feature on Brave is opt-in. How is that an argument against Brave?
[+] cookiengineer|4 years ago|reply
You forgot Opera. /s these days Opera feels like trying to rebrand its ecosystem into dozens of skins for the same Chromium. "Opera Gaming Browser"... srsly?

Sadly most of my favorite "tiny" browsers all have switched away from webkit and are either dead or an electron based UI now.

I'm concerned that libchromium is eating the world :-/

[+] soundnote|4 years ago|reply
Would be wiser to use Brave and turn the crypto stuff off. Better privacy, though less UI fanciness.
[+] marto1|4 years ago|reply
I feel like the 2000s internet would've just split off and made their own thing(e.g. new protocol) in this situation. But it seems we've passed the inertia barrier for things like that.
[+] birtoise|4 years ago|reply
You can turn off crypto sponsors on brave. God cant ppl read anynore?
[+] mrweasel|4 years ago|reply
If your on the Mac maybe just use Safari. I got a new Mac and decided that I didn’t really wanted to bother installing to much stuff, so I skipped Firefox, among other things.

Safari has been great the last few months. Performance hasn’t been an issue, the only site which still drains the batteri is Imgur and besides obvious tracking, I haven’t encountered broken sites.

On the topic of tracking, I found that many of the sites that break in Firefox do so due to privacy features. The sites work in Chrome because Google doesn’t care to implement the same features.

[+] drfxyjhdyfrhgc|4 years ago|reply
https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

>I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

[+] birtoise|4 years ago|reply
So much trouble to use the internet what type of nerd got time for that?
[+] konart|4 years ago|reply
Microsoft Edge.

Chromium based, has vertical tabs (window border can be switched off too) via flags. Works great.

Vivaldi promised many things but its performance sucks indeed and I hate the fact that the browser has bullshit features like Phillips ligths controls or something.

[+] soundnote|4 years ago|reply
Edge and privacy oriented don't really go together, sadly.
[+] micromacrofoot|4 years ago|reply
I feel like a lot of companies stopped testing for Firefox and those issues get attributed to Mozilla (not that some performance issues aren't their fault, but I've definitely encountered issues that get attributed to Mozilla but are failures to test for a different rendering engine).

I use Safari or Edge as a fallback if I run into issues. Google seems to spend a lot of time specifically optimizing their apps (gmail, meet) for Chrome... so I tend to keep Chrome around specifically for those cases. I still find that Edge and Safari have more issues than Firefox.

[+] taigi100|4 years ago|reply
Yep, it's not Mozilla's fault many websites don't offer support for it sadly. But it's still frustrating to never be sure and always having to double check with a Chrome if it's because of Firefox or because of the website.

Do you think those optimizations are only in Chrome or also in Chromium? I'd expect only Chrome but...

[+] easytiger|4 years ago|reply
That said I have a synology NAS that's about 8 years old and still going strong. The dashboard no longer works in firefox's latest builds which is very unfortunate. Obviously it used to work fine
[+] jbotz|4 years ago|reply
So use Firefox where it works, and Chrome where Firefox doesn't work for you. There's a little Firefox extension called "Open with..." which makes it really quick and easy to open a tab or link with another browser.

If the problem is that you don't have enough memory to comfortably use two browsers at once, then... well, then that's your real problem. Get more more RAM.

As for Firefox, although I haven't always been happy with the changes Mozilla has forced on their users, overall it's still the best browser out there, and when it comes to giving you the tools to preserve your privacy specifically it's worlds ahead of the alternatives... although it does take some awareness and effort on part of the user but that's unavoidable nowadays.

[+] fitzie|4 years ago|reply
multiple browsers are the way to go. I had all my eggs in the chrome basket until their login fiasco, but hit limitations with Firefox. I now configure Firefox and brave with the same extensions and use the both equally. using onetab makes it easy to migrate sessions from one browser to the next.
[+] kreetx|4 years ago|reply
Firefox is my primary browser too and use Brave as the secondary, and thus far it's pretty much exactly like Chrome/Chromium.

Many bring up the cryptocurrency relation and I do get that (And other than the world-view differences, they've also had some mishaps like injecting referral codes to URLs, but hopefully they have learned from these). But given that both Google and Microsoft are interested in your personal data then Brave does seem to be a better choice than them.

[+] jankovicsandras|4 years ago|reply
I used Pale Moon https://www.palemoon.org/ for several years and it was OK. I went back to Firefox because of some compatibility issues. Firefox needs some configuration in Settings and about:config , for example I turn off media.autoplay, Pdfjs, webassembly, etc, but YMMV. about:config is not available in standard FF mobile, only in FF Nightly. uBlock Origin plugin is essential, and I use Noscript for safety and speed, also Privacy Badger, etc. FF became really annoying, yes, but at least it's still possible to configure it, unlike most other browsers.
[+] mcintyre1994|4 years ago|reply
I use Vivaldi, the performance issues are news to me and it seems pretty good. Though the latest update it keeps crashing when I open file selections, need to figure out what’s going on there. Before that it was very stable for me. I wouldn’t want to give up its tab management now though, especially its ability to do side by side/tiled groups.
[+] syedmeesamali|4 years ago|reply
Yep I’m also in love with Vivaldi especially the customization options.
[+] AlbertCory|4 years ago|reply
I use Brave on both the Mac and on Android. The issues I see below relate mainly to their crypto sponsorships, and I don't care for that either, but it's pretty voluntary, isn't it?

The only issue I've seen that some sites can detect that they're an ad blocker and complain or refuse to work.

[+] hollander|4 years ago|reply
1. Use Firefox

2. Use Edge for Meet or any other situation where Firefox fails.

[+] eldavido|4 years ago|reply
This is what I do. It seems to work ok.

Google Meet perf really is terrible though. Makes me wonder if the entire idea of in-browser video is misbegotten.

Slowly but surely, I've noticed my general exasperation with browser apps growing in the last few years. Between getting into mobile development, better sandboxing, easy app store-based distribution, much better isolation between apps, and learning C++ (from working in robotics) it feels it's time to get back to writing high-performance native code that doesn't involve the ridiculous tradeoffs the modern browser requires (latency, memory use, etc). I think this might be a trend we see more of in the next decade.

[+] runjake|4 years ago|reply
I've been using Brave, but I shut off the Rewards junk.

Every option has serious trade-offs, so you're going to have to decide which are acceptable to you.

[+] garettmd|4 years ago|reply
I use Brave, with the Rewards junk, and it has maintained its speed that every other browser I've used loses as it fills up with caches, history, extensions, etc.
[+] taylodl|4 years ago|reply
I switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. Yes, Vivaldi. There are some folks here complaining it has a lot of bloat and while that's true, I don't care. I like it. Why?

* Based on Chrome. Unfortunately there's a lot of truth to the statement that "Chrome is the new IE", from the standpoint that modern sites are optimized (and tested) to run on Chrome.

* The sidebar. Downloads, bookmarks, etc. are quickly available in a simple pull-out.

* Speed Dial. Sounded corny when I first installed Vivaldi, now I love it. YMMV.

* Tab Stacking. If you're like me and have lots of tabs open, this is a great feature.

* Notes. Tracking notes on a page is an awesome feature!

People say Vivaldi is slow, but I haven't noticed it being slow to render sites - it's slow to launch. How often do you launch your browser though? At least for me the browser is one of the few always-running programs I run. There is a performance issue I've noticed in making YT videos run full-screen - there's a very noticeable lag especially if you have several tabs open. So far that hasn't been enough to outweigh the positives.

[+] thunderbong|4 years ago|reply
And it has ad blocking and disables tracking by default.

Regarding the slowness, I don't experience it. I just checked, and I have 506 tabs opened.

[+] kup0|4 years ago|reply
On desktop, it's still Firefox as #1 for me, Edge as #2, and everything else is extremely distant 3rd, except things I might test out to see if they have a use for me.

I know the idea of "gaming browser" is instantly cringeworthy, but I actually like some things in Opera GX. Having a built-in bandwidth limiter is awesome when I'm downloading large files and don't want them to completely take over my bandwidth. There are some good ideas in lots of lesser-used browsers, like this, but I never see these features bubble up to the big ones like FF/Edge.

Ad-blocking (and browser capability which supports content blocking) is a high priority for me (no I will not debate this on moral/ethical grounds- I refuse to see ads, end of story).

So, Chrome's manifest v3 among other poor choices by Google mean I will 100% stay away from Chrome- and I only use Chrome-based browsers when I absolutely must.

That said, I don't think these days I use anything that requires Chrome/Edge (thankfully). So I pretty much can avoid them completely.

[+] drcongo|4 years ago|reply
I just downloaded Edge based on some replies in here (though Safari is my daily driver, Firefox is my dev browser, Brave is my usual video conferencing browser but is pretty terrible at it) and boy does it take a long time to turn off all the crapware that comes with it. And even when you do, it comes back ten minutes later. I'm super impressed that Microsoft have managed to faithfully recreate the Windows experience for Mac users who might be tempted to switch!
[+] taigi100|4 years ago|reply
I just did the same, seems nice for now. Yes, it takes a while to set it up but the same applies to any browser nowadays.
[+] srvmshr|4 years ago|reply
A while ago, I used to recommend Waterfox. Its mostly a dead project now & differing by a wide margin with Firefox upstream. Updates are few and rare.

I use Vivaldi at present. It is mostly fine. Plugins work fine & the web/mobile sync is decent. No crashes or memory overflow on either platform - using since 6 months approximately.

My SO uses Edge and she has been reasonably happy with it

[+] paulryanrogers|4 years ago|reply
Have you tried LibreWolf? I'm not a big fan of a bundled ad blocker, but they seem less ambitious and therefore more sustainable. (Only tweaking defaults of FF itself.)
[+] sys_64738|4 years ago|reply
Another one for Vivaldi. Been using it for years without complaint.