Is there a privacy-centric open source browser that follows web standards and doesn’t come with any unfortunate baggage in the room? It’s time to find out.
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In the end, I looked for two candidates, one each from the Firefox and Apple/Google orbits. I tried them all, and settled on LibreWolf from the former, and Vivaldi from the latter. LibreWolf because it’s done a fine job of making Firefox without it being Firefox, and Vivaldi because its influence from the early Opera versions gave it a tiny bit of individuality missing in the others. I set up both with my usual Hackaday bookmarks, tabs, and shortcuts, changed the search engine to the EU-based Qwant. I’m ready to go, with a bit more control over how my data is shared with the world once more.
Why Vivaldi though? It’s closed source, which should disqualify it from their initial statement of considering open-source browsers.
Yeah Im not sure as well. Vivaldi didnt really impress me when I tried it out.
I put this article up since we still have a lot of people thinking about different browsers as of 2025. Its interesting to see how people use the internet.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I think this is absolutely an appropriate article for this community, I just think the article is a bit… lacking. There’s also the FUD about Mozilla, which is a bit more complex of a topic than they lead on, so kind of shoddy journalism IMO.
Thats fair. Any good ones that have come out in the last month or so?
Not sure exactly which part you’re asking about.
For Mozilla, the best source I’ve found is Louis Rossmann’s wiki on Mozilla’s TOS changes (and his breakdown on YT if you don’t want to read).
For articles about which browser to pick, idk, I don’t really follow that. I use Firefox and Firefox derivatives because I believe engine diversity is of utmost importance, and I only use Chromium forks as a backup for sites that don’t work properly on Firefox.
Librewolf
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The only “issue” I have with libre is its essentially a full pull of Firefox nightly with some rust patches on top. Its reliant on Firefox, so its not really a “new” browser per-say.
That being said, I use it everyday :) Its an excellent project.
Hard to fault them for that though. It’s damn near impossible to build a fully or even mostly functioning browser for the modern internet without a huge team of devs unless you build it on top of chromium or Firefox, and I’d rather the latter
Yep agreed. I guess I just had a misconception at first.
Per se is a Latin phrase meaning “in itself”. To see if you’re using it properly, replace per se in your sentence with “in itself” and see if it makes sense.
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Extremely slow on my PCs, I switched to Zen (same product, different recipe)
Its great, but needs some tweaks, bofere use for “normal” people.
Don’t remember exactly, but I enabled webGl and checked /unchecked other thinks.
I’m using librewolf now, after Mozilla actions.
Vivaldi and Librewolf are good recommends. So good call by the author.
I wish I could completely ditch Blink based browsers for Gecko ones, just because I dislike how dominant Blink is thanks to Chrome. But some sites don’t render correctly on Gecko. So a fallback is needed.
Edit: I haven’t used Vivaldi in a long time, and apparently it’s not what I thought it was. Are there really no outstanding open source Blink-based browser out there?
We vote with our browser. And you are voting Chromium. It’s ok, but you could do something about it.
I’m really not. I use Firefox 99.5% of the time (I need to switch to Librewolf). But there are some rare occasions - usually shitty old billing websites - where Gecko simply does not work due to said shitty old website. Not paying those bills is an impractical solution. Having a fallback for those rare occasions isn’t unreasonable.
Sorry, I misunderstood then. I use Librewolf btw, great choice.
I never came across a single page that didn’t render correctly with Gecko - do you have an example?
Yeah. Most recently it was a shitty site that looked like it had been built in 2000 and I had to use to pay an EMS bill: services.webillems.com
Tried several times on Firefox and it wouldn’t let me proceed with the payment. It kind of acted like it had. But when I called them to confirm they said it never went through. Tried multiple times with the same results. So I then tried on Chrome and it went through first time.
There’s have been others too. But like I said before, it’s rare. But annoying.
It’s down to these sites using stale, poorly-written legacy code and/or never being upgraded.
What’s wrong with Vivaldi?
Some people are uncomfortable with it being closed-source. It’s more of a philosophical objection than a criticism of the browser’s functionality.
Fair enough. I love the browser and while I know there’s ways to emulate the same experience, its native with this one.
If you dont require open-source in your decision, Vivaldi is great. Its what i use most. It has a ton of granular features that i appreciate, but can be a bit too much for folks that want a more minimal experience.
Agreed. It’s the enthusiast’s browser for sure.
To me the killer feature is the ability to send my tabs to any device I have. Without it it’s impossible for me to ditch Firefox, I rely too much on this feature.
I wonder if Waterfox allows this. It’s MOSTLY Firefox but without going down the AI trash route.
It does
Fennec, you can log in with your Mozilla sync account and access them from any other sync-enabled browser in their ecosystem.
While I use it, I can live without it, especially since it only seems to work 2/3 of the time between my desktop and my iPhone.
There’s probably alternatives to this, such as doing a Note to Self on Signal or similar apps, which has a 100% success rate.
I’m wondering how much of a deal breaker it actually is.
Been with Vivaldi even when it was uncool to be with Vivaldi. The recent incorporation of Proton felt really dirty / sketchy ad pushing. I hope Librewolf takes off, I’m guessing that’s where I will head when Vivaldi completely jumps the shark.
I’ve dumped FF for Zen and Waterfox.
Zen’s only downside is that it can’t play some DRM media like some sports websites. Waterfox can, so I use it for that.
Maybe yt-dlp works with those sites. Then you can use mpv to play those media.
mpvcan play youtube URLs on commandline.And from many other sites
librewolf/ff nightly
but i miss netscape and pre version 40 firefox
Yeah old Firefox was the best. With a bookmark menu on the left where I could scroll forever and see it at a glance.
Those top bars are awful shit, and I cannot fathom how anybody uses them.
It’s because I have 500 open tabs and like 6 bookmarks
I’ve switched to Floorp which feels like a more modern Firefox/LibreWolf to me
I did the same, then switched again to Zen, same reasons
Zen felt way too apple to me
How is it different or better?
Zen has some cool features like being able to split-view two tabs in the same window and preview links without opening them. The colour coded workspaces (should u choose to colour code them) is also useful and aesthetically pleasing
I just like the small aesthetic differencies better (btw: I hate Apple)
Used to use Floorp, then Zen, now on Firedragon, a mod of Floorp with many features from Librewolf.
I have like 5 different Firefox forks depending on how much memory usage I can afford to spare at the time I need to look something up
I like Zen.
I was pretty happy with Zen until updates started to bring in some bugs and lag. It takes up the most resources to start and the URL bar peeks out a majority of the time in compact mode. If you prefer new tabs and are in compact mode the side tabs don’t hide and cover a large part of your bookmarks bar while on a new tab page and it feels messy.
I went back to Floorp for a bit, but inevitably ended up back on Qutebrowser. The only downside to Qute is half the greasemonkey scripts to bypass YouTube ads don’t work and the python-adblock plus Brave adblock don’t block first party ads.
You can get around the first problem by adding a shortcut to bring up weblinks that open in MPV, but I haven’t found a solution to the second problem yet.
I’m really enjoying Orion on iPhone and Mac
Tried shifting on so many browsers but returned back to Edge. The tab management on edge is amazing, I’m still waiting for a browser with tab system like them
I haven’t used Edge in a while, but are you talking about having work spaces to organize groups of tabs?
Did you look at Zen, the Firefox derivative that cloned the Arc UI?
