I'm leaving Firefox, and this is the browser I picked...

Published July 24, 2023, 1:10 p.m. by Courtney

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00:00 Intro

00:26 Sponsor - Linode

01:38 Why U No Love Firefox?

03:42 What I want in a web browser

05:03 Firefox Forks

06:35 Epiphany - GNOME Web

07:58 Google Chrome

08:47 Chromium

10:02 Brave

11:21 Vivaldi

12:46 Opera

13:26 Microsoft Edge

14:22 The FINAL CHOICE + full benchmarks

Let's start with why I want to switch from Firefox to something else.

First, Firefox is adding ads in the browser.

Firefox has telemetry enabled out of the box.

Firefox pushes other services I have no use for, like Pocket.

Firefox doesn't integrate all that well on linux, and doesn't really look like a native app, unless you use custom userchrome.css, which might be disabled in the future. I like the Proton redesign, but it still doesn't really look like a native application.

Firefox's mobile app isn't great on Android. On iOS, it's just a Safari wrapper, but the interface isn't great either, IMO.

Now, what am I looking for in a browser, apart from a nice daily companion to share my adventures on the wonderful place that is the internet?

I want something that looks at home on my desktop as much as possible, something that looks like it's using GTK or Qt.

I don't need thousands of features and extensions: an ad block, syncing with an account to keep my passwords in sync between devices, or compatibility with a password manager, and that's it.

I need a mobile client that has reasonable performance and a usable interface.

I need decent performance so stuff loads relatively fast and doesn't stutter too much. Anything that performs in the same class as Firefox will work for me.

Ram usage is irrelevant, as I only use computers with 16Gb of RAM or more, so my browsing never really poses a threat to that.

I want a browser that's private out of the box, without opt-out telemetry, ads in the browser, or data collection.

I'd like to avoid chromium based browsers if possible, because Chromium is controlled by Google, however open source it is, and that monopoly kinda scares me. In the end, if it's not possible, I'll live with it. Grumpily, but I'll live with it.

That's about it! We might have to compromise on some of these points, so we'll be attributing a score to each browser. Let's look at what's available.