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Comment by buzzert | Hacker News Reader

If anyone here is running Linux and is now researching a "backup plan" in case Firefox pivots, I would highly recommend Epiphany (now called GNOME Web): https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web

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Gnome Web (for Gnome), Falkon (for KDE), and Safari (for macOS) are really underrated browsers. It's true that they all use the WebKit engine, so it doesn't exactly promote a variety of engines, but at least none of them have any "monetization" features built in.

There are also surf https://surf.suckless.org/ and qutebrowser https://qutebrowser.org/, both based on webkit.

I use my own fork of surf daily, but am having to fallback to mainstream browsers quite often these days as sites stop working on it or it's unusably slow. Slack no longer works, GitHub breaks occasionally, etc.

Is there a well-maintained fork that fixes these issues? The main repo[1] hasn't seen updates in over a year now. I read that development slowed down after the main maintainer left suckless, but I'm hoping the community will pick it up. It's an excellent minimal browser.

[1]: https://git.suckless.org/surf/

FWIW Slack seems to work fine in surf for me. Are you sure you have an up-to-date WebKitGTK on your system? Those kinds of issues are typically fixed there, and not in surf itself. As long as the WebKit API stays backwards-compatible, there's probably not much need for surf to change (other than for new features).

There's zsurf based on QtWebEngine/Chromium too, FWIW: https://github.com/SteveDeFacto/zsurf

There is also badwolf https://hacktivis.me/projects/badwolf (again based on webkit)

qutebrowser uses QtWebEngine by default, which is based on Chromium.

You can use it with QtWebKit instead, but given that's based on a 2016 WebKit with no process isolation or sandboxing, I wouldn't recommend it.

Or perhaps Konqueror? Seems apt seeing that KDE wrote what became WebKit.

"Falkon" is the current KDE web browser. It used to be called QupZilla.

There is also a cross-platform Otter Browser (https://otter-browser.org) based on WebKit.

I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Opera yet.

Opera is now Chinese owned.

But the former Opera devs started Vivaldi some years ago. And it's really great.

My minor gripe with it is that you can't drag and drop URLs or any other text. Other than that it's a joy to use.

That's optional.

In Settings, search for "Allow Text Selection in Links" and deactivate it. Now you can drag+drop links.

Icecat is better. Epiphany is pretty slow and huge, and it depends on a lot of libraries.

> Firefox pivots

Pivots to what?

I can only guess they mean if they pivot to be less privacy focused.

Or pivot to maintaining a half-ass Chromium fork instead of a whole-ass browser, since that's apparently the fiscally responsible thing to do.

There were massive layoffs today apparently with discussion of finding better ways to make money. Some are taking it as a sign of Firefox potentially deciding to monetize data (and, thus, deincentivize privacy focus internally). That might be what OP is talking about.

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