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Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it
by elagost 7y ago
Is there a better alternative to Firefox? Of all the browsers it seems like the "least bad" choice (above Chromium, and other proprietary browsers) and I use it, but is there something safer, simpler, and more secure?
- LeoPanthera 7y agoGNOME has "GNOME Web", previously known as Epiphany. KDE has "Falkon". Both are quite good.
- snazz 7y agoI'd still be seriously concerned about how few eyeballs they get with regards to security---Google has entire fleets of machines dedicated to fuzzing every line of Chromium code and both Chrome and Firefox use advanced sandboxing to make it so that a single exploit in the JavaScript engine wouldn't be able to result in user-level remote code execution. I'm sure they're both probably fine (if nothing else from security by obscurity) but modern browsers are complicated pieces of software that require a lot of engineering to keep secure.
- saagarjha 7y agoGNOME Web is based on WebKit, while Falkon has migrated away from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine, which is Chromium based.
- LeoPanthera 7y agoIt's slightly ironic for KDE, as Blink is a fork of WebKit, which itself is a fork of KHTML, which was originally the KDE HTML renderer. Full circle!
- gtk40 7y agoKDE also has Konqueror, which now allows you to use either KHTML or WebKit as the rendering engine. KHTML works fine on simple sites like Hacker News nowadays but chokes on newer ones often.
- superkuh 7y agoYes. Firefox forks that forked before Mozilla jumped the shark (v37, then multiprocess, then rust) that evolved into their own thing without all the features/attack surfaces that aren't strictly required for a browser to just render html and execute JS.
- snazz 7y agoSimpler, sure. Safer and more secure, how? There's been a lot of new security features in Firefox recently that you'd be missing out on if you used something that old. You can't put "just" in front of "execute JS" (or "render HTML" for that matter); that's a pretty complex task with a lot of security concerns. I can't imagine that the communities of these Firefox forks can keep up with backporting upstream security fixes, especially since the modern Firefox codebase has diverged so much.
- samantohermes 7y agoWhat you are saying is not accurate. 1. https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml https://www.palemoon.org/releasenotes.shtml 2. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22270 3. https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399 https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=22399
- c0nducktr 7y agoPretty sure this bug existed in v36 as well.
- big_chungus 7y agoSuckless Surf may be the simplest one out there: https://surf.suckless.org/ https://surf.suckless.org/ It's basically a lightweight interface to webkit. There's only so light one can go, however; a browser basically ships an entire rendering stack and big chunks of an OS, and with all the weird features and backwards compatibility issues that have accumulated, one can only go so small.
- thrwaway69 7y agoI use vivaldi. It provides a lot of customization for my taste unlike others. My biggest problem with most browsers is tied to how they handle tab management and lacks basic features that should be there without installing an extension. Example - stacking, auto closing, filter, finder etc. Not hiding tabs after certain number of them. edit: more info here at https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/ https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/
- alwillis 7y agoBrave. Blocks all trackers, fingerprinting and mining scripts by default, based on Chromium. Built-in IPFS, Webtorrent and Tor: https://brave.com/ https://brave.com/
- SaxonRobber 7y agoAlso a botnet
- roca 7y agoThe parent poster already ruled out Chromium.
- app4soft 7y agoWaterfox (with Web Extensions) or Pale Moon (with XUL/UXP extensions)
- elagost 7y agoIf I'm to avoid Firefox, I'd like to avoid its forks as well - they don't really improve upon anything meaningful both of those have had more issues than Firefox in the past. I'm thinking smaller than Firefox.
- app4soft 7y ago> they don't really improve upon anything meaningful both of those have had more issues than Firefox in the past. Please, prove it.
- jcranmer 7y agoFrom looking at the commit history of Pale Moon, it is maintained by essentially three people. Their maintenance strategy is to freeze at an old version of Firefox, and randomly backport patches purely to try to keep somewhat up-to-date on JS or DOM features. Given the sheer size of the codebase, its inherent complexity (a JIT compiler is going to be very ripe for potential security vulnerabilities), and the utter lack of any sign of trying to mitigate these problems (e.g., fuzzing, or even merely attempting to identify security fixes in Firefox that may warrant backporting), if you are worried about any security issues in Firefox, moving to such a fork should only worry you more.
- marmaduke 7y agoOdd that the three replies to your question are grayed out. I don't think there is a viable alternative to Firefox unless you accept a simple web experience and use eg w3m
- protomyth 7y agoChromium runs on OpenBSD.
- toyg 7y ago> is there something safer, simpler, and more secure? No. Building a good browser is hard. Typically you can get something "safer" (from a privacy/business model perspective) and/or "simpler" (from a development perspective) relatively easily - see KHTML and other niche efforts. But when it comes to "more secure" while supporting modern web features, you need a lot of skilled eyeballs on code and a lot of people trying to break things. You achieve that either with tons of visibility, or with tons of money. Those small projects have neither. Mozilla has both.
- ethbro 7y agoAlso, it's a never-ending task, given web evolution.
- rvz 7y agoThe downvotes in this section clearly show the real state of browser technologies and the few choice one will have if they use an alternative OS. Brave and Vivaldi are still forks of Chromium, Waterfox is a fork of Firefox. Thus you are not going to find any updated alternatives like those on the BSDs anytime soon. Meanwhile, WebKit-based browsers doesn't seem to suffer from the overuse of dependencies and multiple languages nor does it have packaging hell unlike Chromium and Firefox.
- andrekandre 7y ago> Meanwhile, WebKit-based browsers doesn't seem to suffer from the overuse of dependencies and multiple languages nor does it have packaging hell unlike Chromium and Firefox. why is that?
- saagarjha 7y agoWebKit is commonly used on many platforms, so I’d guess that plays a big role in it.
- kevingadd 7y agoIn the case of Blink at least, they basically own almost all their dependencies. From my memory WebKit is the same. It makes sense that they would end up that way given their history - KHTML -> Safari -> Chrome all target multiple runtime environments and in the case of Safari especially they were targeting an environment without a bunch of existing unix/linux history behind it. In comparison historically Firefox has been more aggressive about pulling in 3rd-party dependencies like cairo, ANGLE, etc. (You could count ANGLE as a 3rd-party dependency for Blink, I suppose, but I don't because AFAIK it's a Google project originally)
- shpx 7y agoThe only true alternative I see on the horizon is https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ from Mozilla, but it's still a work-in-progress.
- Gaelan 7y agoMy understanding is that there will never be a consumer-facing browser called "Servo." Instead, pieces of Servo will get merged into Firefox as they become production-ready (this has already begun). Presumably, eventually everything will be merged in and Servo will stop existing as a separate project.
- fulafel 7y agoIsn't Servo mostly a harness for the rendering engine and some other components, known as WebRender, Quanyum CSS etc wheb used in Firefox.
- arminiusreturns 7y agoEmacs eww, lynx?