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Depending on your preferences you might enjoy Vivaldi, Qutebrowser or Chromium. That's just off the top of my head. There are obviously many other good browsers

Depending on your preferences you might enjoy Vivaldi, Qutebrowser or Chromium. That's just off the top of my head. There are obviously many other good browsers out there.

throwawaysea 5y ago
I've tried Vivaldi and it's great. My understanding is that it shares the same components as Chrome. Are there other 'fully independent' browsers? Does that even matter?
- soundnote 5y ago
  Vivaldi's built on top of Chromium, but they've written an inhouse UI layer, built-in ad blocker and tracking protection and run their own sync services. (Some other Chromium derivatives do, too: Brave and Edge being the most prominent ones) Brave and Vivaldi default to privacy friendly search engines, try their damndest not to track you, have built-in adblockers and run their own sync services. Easily the best options for Chromium-based browsers. Edge is also excellent if you don't care about privacy, but their sync service doesn't even include end to end encryption for all classes of synced data.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    > try their damndest not to track you This is questionable. Brave has injected referral codes into typed domains and other really suspect things. I haven't heard too much controversy around vivaldi, but until 2020-ish they did assign a unique ID to each install and track that.
  - postalrat 5y ago
    How does Vivaldi fund development?
    - soundnote 5y ago
      By search engine deals with not-Google companies (privacy friendly engines, Bing, etc.) and from their founder. I don't remember how many users they needed to be at break even, but they're not there as far as I know.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  If we are talking at least somewhat independent (not a rebasing fork) and somewhat maintained (at least getting security updates) I think it is as follows: The only modern browser engines are webkit, chromium and gecko. The next step down would be EdgeHTML (no longer shipped by default in any major browser, but maintained for security patches) and Sciter (only geared towards building application UIs, not general browsing. Not free as in both beer and speech). The next step after that is Trident (the old IE engine, somewhat maintained for security patches). The next step after that is probably things like netsurf, lynx and other browsers that do not and do not aim to support normal browsing.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    I am not entirely sure what a rebasing fork is, but it sounds like there are only three practical choices, from Apple, Google, and Mozilla. I haven't used Netsurf and the rest but it looks very interesting. My main worry is that some limitation may cause certain websites to break in unknown ways - that could be a huge problem when doing things like logging into a bank account.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      To browse the modern web you have those three choices, yes. You could probably still get by on the EdgeHTML based Edge, but support will wind down over the coming years. If you manage to even load your banks website in netsurf that's impressive. For me it crashes even loading wikipedia, and it does not support JS at all, so basically all interactivity on the web besides forms and links is not supported. I don't think anyone, even netsurfs developers recommend even trying to use netsurf as your main browser for things like banking. A "rebasing fork" is something like waterfox and similar projects that essentially have modifications to one of the big three engines and periodically pull in all the changes the source engine did. A lot of the chromium based browsers do this to be able to include modifications to chromium in places where it is not officially supported. A non-rebasing fork would for example be when google forked webkit (to create blink which is a core component of chromium), which took a much more divergent path. I forgot to mention two other engines that might be interesting to read about: kHTML (the original source for webkit so it is chromiums grandfather in a sense. Not developed since 2016) and Goanna (a fork of firefox from before firefox quantum. It is developed but last I heard they couldn't keep up with new standards and security. Development seems a bit chaotic).

Depending on your preferences you might enjoy Vivaldi, Qutebrowser or Chromium. That's just off the top of my head. There are obviously many other good browsers out there.

throwawaysea 5y ago

I've tried Vivaldi and it's great. My understanding is that it shares the same components as Chrome. Are there other 'fully independent' browsers? Does that even matter?

soundnote 5y ago
Vivaldi's built on top of Chromium, but they've written an inhouse UI layer, built-in ad blocker and tracking protection and run their own sync services. (Some other Chromium derivatives do, too: Brave and Edge being the most prominent ones) Brave and Vivaldi default to privacy friendly search engines, try their damndest not to track you, have built-in adblockers and run their own sync services. Easily the best options for Chromium-based browsers. Edge is also excellent if you don't care about privacy, but their sync service doesn't even include end to end encryption for all classes of synced data.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  > try their damndest not to track you This is questionable. Brave has injected referral codes into typed domains and other really suspect things. I haven't heard too much controversy around vivaldi, but until 2020-ish they did assign a unique ID to each install and track that.
- postalrat 5y ago
  How does Vivaldi fund development?
  - soundnote 5y ago
    By search engine deals with not-Google companies (privacy friendly engines, Bing, etc.) and from their founder. I don't remember how many users they needed to be at break even, but they're not there as far as I know.
SahAssar 5y ago
If we are talking at least somewhat independent (not a rebasing fork) and somewhat maintained (at least getting security updates) I think it is as follows: The only modern browser engines are webkit, chromium and gecko. The next step down would be EdgeHTML (no longer shipped by default in any major browser, but maintained for security patches) and Sciter (only geared towards building application UIs, not general browsing. Not free as in both beer and speech). The next step after that is Trident (the old IE engine, somewhat maintained for security patches). The next step after that is probably things like netsurf, lynx and other browsers that do not and do not aim to support normal browsing.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  I am not entirely sure what a rebasing fork is, but it sounds like there are only three practical choices, from Apple, Google, and Mozilla. I haven't used Netsurf and the rest but it looks very interesting. My main worry is that some limitation may cause certain websites to break in unknown ways - that could be a huge problem when doing things like logging into a bank account.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    To browse the modern web you have those three choices, yes. You could probably still get by on the EdgeHTML based Edge, but support will wind down over the coming years. If you manage to even load your banks website in netsurf that's impressive. For me it crashes even loading wikipedia, and it does not support JS at all, so basically all interactivity on the web besides forms and links is not supported. I don't think anyone, even netsurfs developers recommend even trying to use netsurf as your main browser for things like banking. A "rebasing fork" is something like waterfox and similar projects that essentially have modifications to one of the big three engines and periodically pull in all the changes the source engine did. A lot of the chromium based browsers do this to be able to include modifications to chromium in places where it is not officially supported. A non-rebasing fork would for example be when google forked webkit (to create blink which is a core component of chromium), which took a much more divergent path. I forgot to mention two other engines that might be interesting to read about: kHTML (the original source for webkit so it is chromiums grandfather in a sense. Not developed since 2016) and Goanna (a fork of firefox from before firefox quantum. It is developed but last I heard they couldn't keep up with new standards and security. Development seems a bit chaotic).