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It looks like today is Alternative Browser Day on HN. So for those who don't know it, there's also Xombrero: https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero htt

by draven 11y ago

It looks like today is Alternative Browser Day on HN. So for those who don't know it, there's also Xombrero: https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero https://opensource.conformal.com/wiki/xombrero It's based on Webkit so it's more compatible with the "modern web" than dillo/netsurf.

jakeogh 11y ago
surf (best with tabbed) is another webkit option: http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/
- wtbob 11y ago
  I really like surf and its model, but it needs ad blocking. I was working on that a few months back, but got distracted by other projects. Incidentally, the AdBlock list format is…insane.
  - Borating 11y ago
    hostsblock [1] [1] https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/ https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/
  - jakeogh 11y ago
    I use: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist
XzetaU8 11y ago
"dwb" is also webkit based but more minimal (Support for Adblocking, among other things) http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/
- knlje 11y ago
  Thank you for the suggestion! I have so far loved the minimalistic feeling and intuitive keybindings for a vi-user.
- grp 11y ago
  and as an alternative: qutebrowser! same concept as dwb but with Qt and not gtk for those who cares. https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser
mitchtbaum 11y ago
Also, Luakit: http://luakit.org/ http://luakit.org/ It has lots of extensions, like Adblock and Noscript, written in highly-readable Lua, also making it very hacker friendly and very fast.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  Last time I recommended Luakit, I was told it was no longer developed and superceded by dwb (linked below by someone else)
  - gh02t 11y ago
    dwb is dead too, fortunately there is a replacement for that too: https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser . It's already pretty much a drop-in replacement. The dev is very responsive and friendly as well.
    - XzetaU8 11y ago
      Sure it's not that active but I wouldn't call it dead. last commit: 2015-07-26 https://bitbucket.org/portix/dwb/commits/ https://bitbucket.org/portix/dwb/commits/
      - gh02t 11y ago
        I thought I remember seeing a thread on Reddit that it'd been abandoned around that time and wasn't just inactive, but I could be mistaken.
        XzetaU8 11y ago
        It's right there on your qutebrowser link, dwb is first on the "Similar Projects" list (Scroll down) their "Unmaintained" comment leads to the reddit thread you mention, mind you that thread is 1 year old and the user/post is deleted: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2huqbc/dwb_abandoned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2huqbc/dwb_abandoned...
arm 11y ago
Another WebKit-based option (for OS X) is OmniWeb (it’s still alive!): http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/ http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/
- soapdog 11y ago
  Really??? Oh my, I thought that was dead... remember using it long long long ago
Johnny_Brahms 11y ago
I am a growing fan of QupZilla. The only thing I miss is functionality similar to Self-destructing cookies. http://www.qupzilla.com/ http://www.qupzilla.com/
chippy 11y ago
I use Midori - another webkit based browser. http://midori-browser.org/ http://midori-browser.org/
mtgx 11y ago
I think the only way new browsers are going to succeed in the future is if they adopt some major new technology that the mainstream browsers either will never use, or will wait many years until they consider it. Perhaps something like IPFS or some blockchain technology, or anything like that, that is proven to work well but the mainstream browsers still think it's too new and risky, or perhaps just don't want to piss of the MPAA, which by the way, is now a member of the W3C. The new browsers will need to allow for significant new possibilities, for users to want to adopt them.
digi_owl 11y ago
Frankly i have taken to consider all webkit browsers the same, meaning that the web is heading towards another monoculture akin to what we had when IE was what everyone developed for.
- lambda 11y ago
  I don't really think we're in that much danger. For one, WebKit is now forked, into WebKit and Blink. Both of them are rapidly diverging. And there are still enough people using Gecko and Trident (and now EdgeHTML) that you can't just target the intersection of WebKit and Blink and still have any reasonable kind of coverage. For another, I think you fail to understand just how dominant and stagnant the browser market had become when IE was dominant. Not only one browser, but one version of one browser, had over 90% market share, and in controlled environments like corporate networks, effectively 100%. In that kind of environment, it was completely reasonable to just target that one browser. Today, even if you add up all of the WebKit and Blink browsers based on the most generous market share counts, you won't break 70% market share, and there are even still some statistics that have IE/Trident at over 50% market share. So unless you're targeting a very specific market, like iPhone users (where yes, WebKit's share is 100% due to Apple's monopoly), it's very hard to find any demographic in which there is such a strong dominance as IE had back in the day. Additionally, browsers and engines are actually being released at regular intervals these days, with new features and bugfixes. Firefox/Gecko and Chrome/Blink are on rolling 6 week release cycles, meaning that there's very little lag to getting new features and fixes out. Safari/WebKit is released less often, but once every year or two. There were 5 years between the release of IE 6 and IE 7, and IE 7 didn't even pass Acid2, it would be another couple of years until IE 8 did. That extremely long period of time in which one version of one engine was so dominant led to an awful lot of sites designing themselves exactly around the bugs and quirks of that one engine. Couple that with the fact that standards committees are actually working on features that people want, and are making real progress. XHTML stagnated the standards process for a long time, working on a backwards-incompatible specification that did a lot of architecture astronautics on representing documents, when what people needed were backwards-compatible enhancements that supported web applications so they could roll things out incrementally as support became good enough. CSS got a bit mired in CSS 2, but CSS 2.1 allowed them to slim down the specification and get out something working, while CSS 3 allowed them to work on individual features separately, and thus be able to make progress without having to wait for everything in the world to be ready. Another big reason for IE's dominance was that it had proprietary features, like filters and ActiveX and webfont support, and there were no standards that covered similar ground. Now we have HTML5, a plethora of new APIs for interacting with the browser, a substantial number of CSS enhancements, highly competitive JavaScript engines that are capable of running full 3D engines, and so on. And finally, WebKit, Blink, and Gecko are all open source. People can be involved in helping find and fix bugs, implement new features, port them to new platforms and devices. A big problem with IE was that it was proprietary, and ran on one platform. You could build a desktop browser that ran on Windows with your own chrome around it, but that was about it. Now, you want to make some cool new device that needs web rendering support? You want to experiment with interesting new ways to present web content? You now have several high-quality, open source options to choose from, which have enough market share that most sites have done the compatibility work to make sure they are compatible. Sorry for the wall of text; I just wanted to make sure that you understand the history, and how very different the present situation is than the one in which the IE 6 monoculture flourished. It can be a bit worrying how two engines with a common ancestor have such dominance on mobile, WebKit and Blink. It's also worrying that Apple's monopoly prevents people from installing browsers with more up-to-date engines on their phones; I think it's an abuse of their control of the platform. But even so, they don't have the kind of market dominance even on smartphones that Microsoft did on desktops back in the early 2000s, so while it's worrying, it's nowhere near as bad.
scholia 11y ago
There's also Vivaldi, for people who liked Opera before it went to Blink... https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/
- 0942v8653 11y ago
  Fair warning: The UI part is closed source.
  - gsnedders 11y ago
    This, to me, feels like the vital flaw. If I were someone who wanted a browser with all the features of Presto-Opera, I'd be worried about development of it being abandoned again.
j_s 11y ago
Personal recommendations are appreciated; Wikipedia's pages are rather overwhelming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers I'll add OffByOne for Windows, a demo of an ancient (2006) ActiveX control: http://offbyone.com/offbyone/ http://offbyone.com/offbyone/
ams6110 11y ago
xombrero is my main browser. I like the minimalist, keyboard driven interface.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Arachne is another, it's interesting because it can run on DOS or on Linux without a framebuffer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419516
chmielewski 11y ago
Surprised nobody's mentioned xxxterm or uzbl.

by draven 11y ago

jakeogh 11y ago

surf (best with tabbed) is another webkit option: http://surf.suckless.org/ http://surf.suckless.org/

wtbob 11y ago
I really like surf and its model, but it needs ad blocking. I was working on that a few months back, but got distracted by other projects. Incidentally, the AdBlock list format is…insane.
- Borating 11y ago
  hostsblock [1] [1] https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/ https://gaenserich.github.io/hostsblock/
- jakeogh 11y ago
  I use: https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsmasq-blacklist

XzetaU8 11y ago

"dwb" is also webkit based but more minimal (Support for Adblocking, among other things) http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/ http://portix.bitbucket.org/dwb/

knlje 11y ago
Thank you for the suggestion! I have so far loved the minimalistic feeling and intuitive keybindings for a vi-user.
grp 11y ago
and as an alternative: qutebrowser! same concept as dwb but with Qt and not gtk for those who cares. https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser

mitchtbaum 11y ago

Also, Luakit: http://luakit.org/ http://luakit.org/ It has lots of extensions, like Adblock and Noscript, written in highly-readable Lua, also making it very hacker friendly and very fast.

scrollaway 11y ago
Last time I recommended Luakit, I was told it was no longer developed and superceded by dwb (linked below by someone else)
- gh02t 11y ago
  dwb is dead too, fortunately there is a replacement for that too: https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser https://github.com/The-Compiler/qutebrowser . It's already pretty much a drop-in replacement. The dev is very responsive and friendly as well.
  - XzetaU8 11y ago
    Sure it's not that active but I wouldn't call it dead. last commit: 2015-07-26 https://bitbucket.org/portix/dwb/commits/ https://bitbucket.org/portix/dwb/commits/
    - gh02t 11y ago
      I thought I remember seeing a thread on Reddit that it'd been abandoned around that time and wasn't just inactive, but I could be mistaken.
      - XzetaU8 11y ago
        It's right there on your qutebrowser link, dwb is first on the "Similar Projects" list (Scroll down) their "Unmaintained" comment leads to the reddit thread you mention, mind you that thread is 1 year old and the user/post is deleted: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2huqbc/dwb_abandoned/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2huqbc/dwb_abandoned...

arm 11y ago

Another WebKit-based option (for OS X) is OmniWeb (it’s still alive!): http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/ http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

soapdog 11y ago
Really??? Oh my, I thought that was dead... remember using it long long long ago

Johnny_Brahms 11y ago

I am a growing fan of QupZilla. The only thing I miss is functionality similar to Self-destructing cookies. http://www.qupzilla.com/ http://www.qupzilla.com/

chippy 11y ago

I use Midori - another webkit based browser. http://midori-browser.org/ http://midori-browser.org/

mtgx 11y ago

I think the only way new browsers are going to succeed in the future is if they adopt some major new technology that the mainstream browsers either will never use, or will wait many years until they consider it. Perhaps something like IPFS or some blockchain technology, or anything like that, that is proven to work well but the mainstream browsers still think it's too new and risky, or perhaps just don't want to piss of the MPAA, which by the way, is now a member of the W3C. The new browsers will need to allow for significant new possibilities, for users to want to adopt them.

digi_owl 11y ago

Frankly i have taken to consider all webkit browsers the same, meaning that the web is heading towards another monoculture akin to what we had when IE was what everyone developed for.

lambda 11y ago
I don't really think we're in that much danger. For one, WebKit is now forked, into WebKit and Blink. Both of them are rapidly diverging. And there are still enough people using Gecko and Trident (and now EdgeHTML) that you can't just target the intersection of WebKit and Blink and still have any reasonable kind of coverage. For another, I think you fail to understand just how dominant and stagnant the browser market had become when IE was dominant. Not only one browser, but one version of one browser, had over 90% market share, and in controlled environments like corporate networks, effectively 100%. In that kind of environment, it was completely reasonable to just target that one browser. Today, even if you add up all of the WebKit and Blink browsers based on the most generous market share counts, you won't break 70% market share, and there are even still some statistics that have IE/Trident at over 50% market share. So unless you're targeting a very specific market, like iPhone users (where yes, WebKit's share is 100% due to Apple's monopoly), it's very hard to find any demographic in which there is such a strong dominance as IE had back in the day. Additionally, browsers and engines are actually being released at regular intervals these days, with new features and bugfixes. Firefox/Gecko and Chrome/Blink are on rolling 6 week release cycles, meaning that there's very little lag to getting new features and fixes out. Safari/WebKit is released less often, but once every year or two. There were 5 years between the release of IE 6 and IE 7, and IE 7 didn't even pass Acid2, it would be another couple of years until IE 8 did. That extremely long period of time in which one version of one engine was so dominant led to an awful lot of sites designing themselves exactly around the bugs and quirks of that one engine. Couple that with the fact that standards committees are actually working on features that people want, and are making real progress. XHTML stagnated the standards process for a long time, working on a backwards-incompatible specification that did a lot of architecture astronautics on representing documents, when what people needed were backwards-compatible enhancements that supported web applications so they could roll things out incrementally as support became good enough. CSS got a bit mired in CSS 2, but CSS 2.1 allowed them to slim down the specification and get out something working, while CSS 3 allowed them to work on individual features separately, and thus be able to make progress without having to wait for everything in the world to be ready. Another big reason for IE's dominance was that it had proprietary features, like filters and ActiveX and webfont support, and there were no standards that covered similar ground. Now we have HTML5, a plethora of new APIs for interacting with the browser, a substantial number of CSS enhancements, highly competitive JavaScript engines that are capable of running full 3D engines, and so on. And finally, WebKit, Blink, and Gecko are all open source. People can be involved in helping find and fix bugs, implement new features, port them to new platforms and devices. A big problem with IE was that it was proprietary, and ran on one platform. You could build a desktop browser that ran on Windows with your own chrome around it, but that was about it. Now, you want to make some cool new device that needs web rendering support? You want to experiment with interesting new ways to present web content? You now have several high-quality, open source options to choose from, which have enough market share that most sites have done the compatibility work to make sure they are compatible. Sorry for the wall of text; I just wanted to make sure that you understand the history, and how very different the present situation is than the one in which the IE 6 monoculture flourished. It can be a bit worrying how two engines with a common ancestor have such dominance on mobile, WebKit and Blink. It's also worrying that Apple's monopoly prevents people from installing browsers with more up-to-date engines on their phones; I think it's an abuse of their control of the platform. But even so, they don't have the kind of market dominance even on smartphones that Microsoft did on desktops back in the early 2000s, so while it's worrying, it's nowhere near as bad.

scholia 11y ago

There's also Vivaldi, for people who liked Opera before it went to Blink... https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/

0942v8653 11y ago
Fair warning: The UI part is closed source.
- gsnedders 11y ago
  This, to me, feels like the vital flaw. If I were someone who wanted a browser with all the features of Presto-Opera, I'd be worried about development of it being abandoned again.

j_s 11y ago

Personal recommendations are appreciated; Wikipedia's pages are rather overwhelming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers I'll add OffByOne for Windows, a demo of an ancient (2006) ActiveX control: http://offbyone.com/offbyone/ http://offbyone.com/offbyone/

ams6110 11y ago

xombrero is my main browser. I like the minimalist, keyboard driven interface.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Arachne is another, it's interesting because it can run on DOS or on Linux without a framebuffer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10419516

chmielewski 11y ago

Surprised nobody's mentioned xxxterm or uzbl.