Is it Chromium based?
It might be great but for now refuse to support anything that further strengthen Googles grip on the market.
It might be great but for now refuse to support anything that further strengthen Googles grip on the market.
The question then becomes: "What else even is out there?"
Because if you're looking for something that's even remotely feature complete for browsing the modern day web, the majority of the current browsers out there are indeed based on Chromium, as expressed in this article, "Firefox is the Only Alternative": https://batsov.com/articles/2021/11/28/firefox-is-the-only-a...
Here's the table from the article in text format:
Browser Based on Chromium Open-source Market Share (desktop + mobile)
Chrome Yes No 64.7%
Chromium Yes Yes -
Edge Yes No 4.0%
Brave Yes Yes -
Vivaldi Yes No -
Opera Yes No 2.4%
Safari No No 19.0%
Firefox No Yes 3.7%
Today, Google and Microsoft and Apple are fighting Browser War 2, and it looks as though Google is winning. However, Firefox is still fighting, but not to win. But to prove that we don't have to put up with the monopolistic behavior of Google to browse the internet.
Firefox has had it's ups and downs. But "winning the war", in my mind, isn't the point of Firefox.
It is an open-source project fighting a good fight, and the only one at that.
Vivaldi always seemed to hold the most promise but was buggy for me and still missing strong iOS integration that the competition has in place. Having used FF for so long, I was ready to go to a larger provider. So mainly, MS, Apple, or Google. Native browsers have big advantages so resisting those no longer made sense if I'm making a switch.
But Brave in my testing, did not completely convince me. Reviewing my testing notes-
Brave- no dedicated search bar option (important for privacy / prefetching and not having to continually retype your search query). Didn't get to mobile support and crossplatform sync. No dedicated extension store.
Of course, I had to give up on my dedicated search bar requirement, because FF's has been gimped by Mozilla, and Vivaldi had other unrelated usability flaws. So Edge it has been, and being completely honest, I've been thrilled with it. There's plenty other good here to overlook that and I haven't missed it as much as I thought I would.
All that said, I'm now going to keep Brave in mind, moving it up a notch. I always liked Eich which doesn't hurt. I don't fear a Chromium world, and never used FF because it wasn't, in fact I mostly resented it. I just don't see eye to eye with the anti-Blink crowd.
I think Firefox should've morphed into Brave, rather than be a separate project. A Brave that has Vivaldi's feature set would be perfect. Only thing missing then is major vendor support, and it'll always be non-native on all platforms, but at that point it could be overlooked.
For Firefox to fight its way back will require more than anti-Blink monoculture advocates supporting it. Blink has become the same as the USD, and isn't to be feared. For me, that's like saying you're resisting using the US Dollar because you don't want monoculture. Yet look at how much you can do with the USD. It enables quite a bit, embracing it just enables you to get other things done with less resistance. Users benefit. More important missions are at play. Like perhaps privacy, transparency, both things that Brave clearly focuses on. Or whatever one's chosen priorities are.
I legitimately love MS Edge, and I always keep Tor installed for the best privacy, but Brave is now my #2 pick for a daily driver and will be advocating for it for those that don't want to use their native browser.
When I switched to Vivaldi I felt like it's 2003 again, and I've just switched from IE to Firefox. Every single thing Mozilla removed from Firefox over the years is here, and most of the stuff I used hacky addons that would often break is here too! In the core browser, as first-class features, without the need to fiddle with userChrome.css or look through obscure flags. It really is a breath of fresh air and it puts into perspective how many excuses I've made for Firefox over the years. It's not worthy of being my browser, simple as.
Mozilla took my fundamental addons that separated Firefox from other browsers, they took my RSS reader, they took my cool Torrenting and Email clients that were a part of the browser itself. The TreeStyleTab requires you to go through obscure and hidden config files that often break with updates and the extension itself is not stable and fiddly. On top of that, I had way more Firefox extensions that aren't even different from Chrome extensions in major ways. In Vivaldi, I just get a nice panel with RSS, Calendar, Translator, Email client, Notes, whatever I want! The adblocker is built-in, the privacy features are built-in, you even get to put your tabs wherever you want. It has theming support that is as good as Firefox Colors, and it has custom search keywords that replace DuckDuckGos bangs for me more often than not. It even has the dark mode among other page filters, a screenshot tool, web page tiling! All the things that would turn my Firefox profile into a slow extension pile that barely works and longs for death.
Mozilla's "goals" of removing key features meant for people who actually would want to use a "google alternative" are laughable, and it's as bad on "privacy" axis as Chrome is because you have to use something like LibreWolf to get the actual privacy from it, very much like you have to use ungoogled-chromium with Chrome. If they think that turning the browser into a Chrome clone with some bumper stickers that say things like "Proud not to use Blink" and "We do say privacy a lot", then it's already dead to me.
Vivaldi also has an amazing history page.
Vivaldi generates revenue from partner deals with search engines. Every time you search using one of the pre-installed search engines, you’re helping us grow, one search at a time. Currently, we work with DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Startpage, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex. The only exception is Google – we don’t make money when you search with Google. However, we know that some of you use this search engine daily, so we include it in Vivaldi.
(Source: https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-business-model/)
The other other source of revenue is bundled partner bookmarks (see again the linked document).
Not affiliated in any way, just thought if someone wanted to, they might donate.
As for privacy containers - you can easily switch profiles in Vivaldi. It's not integrated to the same degree where you'd get tabs from many profiles in one window, but it works for me. If you like Firefox Containers you should also know that, ironically, unlike Chrome Firefox doesn't have proper site isolation. [0]
[0] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.ht...
It was never the point of Firefox to offer them. Firefox originally started to be the slim alternative to the fat Mozilla suite.
> The TreeStyleTab requires you to go through obscure and hidden config files that often break with updates and the extension itself is not stable and fiddly.
What are you talking about? TST is very stable since years now and except for hidding the original tabbar, there is no need for using any config files. And even this is a stable setting which barely change every some years or so. Obviously, the first months in their transition to the new extension-system TST and Firefox were quite unstable and busy with filling the missing gaps. But that was 4 years ago. There still are some features missing, mostly for comfort, but it has settled down now and is very stable now. And still better than anything other browsers have...
Not OP, and unlike him still use Firefox but:
I lost a lot of functionality/workflow that I depended on. It worked one day until Mozilla deliberately made it not work.
It pisses me even more because it made that decision to be more like Chrome. If I wanted to Chrome I would just use Chrome.
If you don't see why people like me are upset when thing like this happen, we will just have to agree to disagree.