An unfortunate truth about modern days is that Firefox, once a stronghold of freedom and quality in general, now has come to the point where each new release brings a shiver in the spine of whoever was hoping to just keep using the browser the way it was after spending enough amount of time adjusting his/herself to whatever weirdness or quirks Mozilla decided to bake in last time.
Even the mobile versions (including Focus) are suffering: each new release, a new set of annoyances, not counting the profound disrespect with the user, that spent time learning one way of doing things just to wake up next morning and find that now everything is different for no good reason but the whim of some random “smart” UI/UX designer.
And sometimes I envy people who are just fine with all that, because I’m not like them and these things annoy me a lot.
So I went seeking for a new browser. And I had some constraints:
What I found is disconcertingly sad, however, since I tried many different solutions and only one worked decently enough for me out of the box.
I consume a lot of content on Youtube, so it’s the first “Website” I open on a new browser to assess wheter it can handle a complex beast like that or not.
Other interesting (giant) beast is LinkedIn, specially because it’s not only giant and unnecessarily complex, but also kind of badly written and probably poorly maintained, since they are in the feature creep pit for some years, now.
So, that’s the basic procedure. Try Youtube, search for something, play some random videos, then open LinkedIn and simply press PageDown (it’s amazing how difficult rolling one page down properly can be with “modern Javascript”…).
I’m going to talk about the state of these browsers on my Linux distro of choice and I’m pretty sure lots of people are going to say that “well, it works fine on my machine” – and that is the point.
You see, there’s no “works on my machine” when talking about Firefox or Chrome, right? So a simple “not working on my machine is a problem in itself, specially since Void Linux is not an”obscure" Linux distro - the only possible exception being the fact I have musl as C library on this system (but I don’t think this could explain most of the problems I ran into).
Falkon should be the best one, with better support for “modern Javascript” and whatever, however, it’s tighly integrated with KDE (at least here in Void Linux world) so I’m skipping it for good.
$ sudo xbps-install falkon
Name Action Version New version Download size
kconfig install - 5.87.0_1 355KB
qt5-wayland install - 5.15.3+20211001_1 1083KB
kguiaddons install - 5.87.0_1 57KB
ki18n install - 5.87.0_1 3019KB
kcoreaddons install - 5.87.0_1 430KB
polkit-qt5 install - 0.114.0_1 61KB
kauth install - 5.87.0_1 86KB
kconfigwidgets install - 5.87.0_1 395KB
kdbusaddons install - 5.87.0_1 54KB
kservice install - 5.87.0_1 305KB
kwindowsystem install - 5.87.0_1 158KB
libdbusmenu-qt5 install - 0.9.3+16.04.20160218_3 88KB
knotifications install - 5.87.0_1 125KB
kwallet install - 5.87.0_1 409KB
kjobwidgets install - 5.87.0_1 100KB
libksolid install - 5.87.0_1 236KB
kcompletion install - 5.87.0_1 94KB
kiconthemes install - 5.87.0_1 125KB
kcrash install - 5.87.0_1 16KB
kglobalaccel install - 5.87.0_1 113KB
kxmlgui install - 5.87.0_1 723KB
kbookmarks install - 5.87.0_1 139KB
sonnet install - 5.87.0_1 316KB
ktextwidgets install - 5.87.0_1 314KB
docbook-xml install - 4.5_5 97KB
docbook-xsl install - 1.79.2_2 1687KB
kdoctools install - 5.87.0_1 461KB
kio install - 5.87.0_1 4843KB
accounts-qml-module install - 0.7_1 63KB
kpackage install - 5.87.0_1 180KB
kdeclarative install - 5.87.0_1 256KB
kinit install - 5.87.0_1 130KB
signon-ui install - 0.15_1 96KB
signon-plugin-oauth2 install - 0.24_2 73KB
signon-kwallet-extension install - 21.08.3_1 11KB
kaccounts-integration install - 21.08.3_1 119KB
kaccounts-providers install - 21.08.3_1 74KB
purpose install - 5.87.0_1 321KB
falkon install - 3.1.0_5 2819KB
Size to download: 20MB
Size required on disk: 94MB
Space available on disk: 27GB
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]Even wayland-related stuff is listed there…
gab.com is an awesome project and those guys are real fighters – against every big corp trying to deplatform them and even being actively opposed inside theoretically open source communities (like Mastodon), they are still there doing this unbelievably obscene thing that is, you know… obeying the law…
So, if you don’t know the story, dictators prototypes at Mozilla (Corp or Foundation, I can’t remember) considered that allowing anyone to say anything anywhere about anything they chose was really bad and banned the Dissenter extension from its store. The same with Chrome.
Like… wut???
Bla bla bla hate speech was the excuse and Gab people said “you know what? We’re launching our own Web browser” and so they did, launching the Dissenter Browser - based on Brave, but without all that crazy Brave stuff.
And I loved it! It’s a very competent browser and even allows me to download torrents directly in it or open IPFS links (by talking to a local node).
Except they abandoned the project and now are planning to create their own Web browser again, but now based on Firefox.
Shit. Things were going so well…
So, yeah, I can still use Dissenter and even created a local Flatpak package so that I could run it easier on Void (instead of chrooting into Ubuntu every time), but the thing has its days counted, now (and I doubt they’ll launch a Firefox-based version, actually).
Nice thing: it has a package for MacOS, so I can use a decent-enough browser in my computer-from-Work.
This project started in the RISC OS world and implements its own “layout engine”, that is: it’s not yet another WebKit-based browser, that I find exciting and very important: it’s crucial that we keep creating new Web engines, otherwire we’re in the hands of very few organizations that don’t always have users’ best interest in mind.
That said, netsurf is still kind of a work-in-progress. It’s good enough when dealing with simple Websites like mine, but is unable to load Youtube, for instance.
Also, it has zero concerns about… Google, being difficult to change the integrated search engine (I couldn’t find a way via Preferences) and even using Google itself as the internal search engine for their website.
(Weird enough, it can’t render DuckDuckGo page correctly, although the search itself still works properly.)
So, overall, amazing project, specially as an engine. I can use this browser as an alternative when reading my favorite blogs. Very light on resources usage, too.
This is the browser from the Suckless… project?…
It’s WebKit-based and don’t have native tabs, in the good old Suckless fashion. If you want tabs, you must use tabbed. Most of the actions and menus make use of dmenu.
Funny thing is: I’m using spectrwm, now, that is kind of based on dwm (don’t know to what extent), but the combination spectrwm+tabbed+surf results in… not tabbed browser. On the contrary, tabbed becomes a standalone window, the same with any other surf one…
But still, I tried to use surf as my main Web browser and the main problem I noticed was that it consumes a lot of resources. Probably not surf itself, as it’s quite simple, but the WebKitWebProcess processes running for each open page hit quite hard on my machine: the CPU load was already above 2 with something like… five windows.
As a basis for comparison, while using Dissenter Browser, even with a lot of open tabs and windows, the CPU load would be still under 1 (except if I had LinkedIn open and running, of course, because LinkedIn).
Add some Lua steroids on surf and that’s what you get, basically, with luakit: it’s very customizable and generally very lightweight.
The problem I found with luakit was that it always feel incomplete. It’s the kind of do-it-yourself tool that gives me that feeling of an unsurmountable amount of small tweaks that I’d need to do in order to have an usable browser.
Like… years of work until reaching a satisfying point.
Is that bad? Maybe not. But that’s not what I’m looking for at this moment.
While trying to find a working Web browser for Haiku I noticed some people recommending this browser and both in Haiku and in Linux it failed miserably.
The project “aims to recreate the best aspects of the classic Opera (12.x) UI using Qt5” but I couldn’t find any resemblance of Opera in it, to be honest, and while I hope the project achieve its objectives with much success, well… for now it’s just not working.
Some could say that I should collaborate instead of complain but, yes, I am collaborating with these projects by at least giving them a try. You also should give them a try. What if you fall in love with one of them?
I tried Midori many times in the past and it’s always almost there. Its rendering is quite okay, but it’s always lacking in some fundamental UI aspect. In this iteration:
Accelerator '<Primary>n' tries to invoke action 'app.win-new' without target, but action expects parameter with type 's'), while using the menu option of opening a new window does;Also, it uses a lot of resources, similar to what happens with NetSurf. Right now I opened it again to take a screenshot (what I didn’t, because there’s nothing interesting to show, actually) and the CPU fan already started spinning faster…
So, yeap, it’s still almost there.
The problem with most “alternative” Web browsers (and probably with most “alternative” stuff) is that sometimes developers and UI designers try to invent new ways of doing things that don’t really need new ways of being done. So here and there you’re going to see a menu in some weird place and so on and so forth. And that’s kind of expected, right? They’re are starting from scratch, so why not try some new tricks?
And what amazed me the most with Eolie was that there is, indeed, “novelties” in the UI but they are all… quite good!?
The “tabs”, for instance, are not in the top, but vertical at the left side. Amazing, because most people with tiny screens actually prefer to avoid any waste on vertical space. And since most Websites have a proper favicon, it’s enough to show you which sites are open.
Also, if you open many tabs of the same site, it’s not going to fill your sidebar with tabs/buttons, but instead they are all grouped into only one “tab” that will receive a “badge” with the number of open pages “inside” it. Neat!
Clicking on such tab/button, you can choose which page you want to see, but using Ctrl+Tab also works as expected: quick press simply cycle to the next page and by holding Ctrl you’re going to see a list of open pages on that window. Also neat!
The rendering is perfect, as far as I can see (it is WebKit-based), although I managed to catch some bugs, specially on pages with “infinite scroll”: if you press PageDown, the browser gets lost.
(Yeap, you got it: LinkedIn.)
Also, when opening a new tab, if you immediately start typing something the focus is stolen and you have to press Ctrl+l again to go back to the URL bar and continue to type.
Kind of annoying, but passable. I’ve seen worst.
It’s also possible, according to their Website, to sync things with a Mozilla account, but I haven’t tried that.
In theory one could install extensions, too, but I didn’t find a way of doing that.
I’m using Eolie daily, now, and I’m quite happy with it.
I still hope some fork of Firefox will be able to find its way back to when the browser was “the browser hackers love”, though, as well as I wish the best for all these projects I mentioned here, because, you know, it’s good to have many options.