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Ask HN: Which browser should I migrate to, away from Firefox?

• Anton_Rich 5y ago
  There's Lisp based browser Nyxt. It's being actively developed. I'm not using it. I recently found out about it and am intrigued.
• consumer451 5y ago
  Am I even asking the correct questions here? Are my priors sound?
  • 28194608 5y ago
    Yes. I recently switched to chrome after using firefox for 10 years. My main reason are firefox is going down in development/share and it in-turns effects security and performance.
    • consumer451 5y ago
      Confirmation bias aside, thanks for the sanity check.
    • consumer451 5y ago
      One other question, did you look at using Chromium instead of Chrome? It has a smaller attack surface which is a plus, correct? Does Chrome add any security features to Chromium?
• jstx1 5y ago
  You sound kind of paranoid. Firefox’s security is fine.
  • consumer451 5y ago
    > You sound kind of paranoid Once you get directly spearphished it changes your threat modeling, and in my case, you learn phrases like threat modeling. > Firefox’s security is fine. There is some debate about this which can be found surrounding my linked comment in OP.
  • kosasbest 5y ago
    > Firefox’s security is fine. They just patched two vulns as of time of writing. Don't assume a browser is bulletproof. Since a browser is so complex, bugs and vulns appear regularly in them and can exploited for months before a patch arrives.
• __d 5y ago
  So ... Chrome has the best resourced development. Brave leverages Google's investment, and adds their own features (and vulnerabilities). Opera similarly. So ... there's not a lot of choice, really. Firefox or the mono-culture.
  • consumer451 5y ago
    Thanks. Yeah, I am aware of the sad realities there. I listened to Brave’s founder on Acquired.fm recently discuss the reason for their Chrome choice. I want to get more granular and pick the best chromium flavor (distro?), but I am struggling to find the correct metrics to quantify “most secure.” And if I get that detailed, maybe there is a different answer on each OS.
• codevark 5y ago
• cookiengineer 5y ago
  Yep, I did the same. Currently, I am still building my own fork of WebKit (RetroKit [1] ) that removes all attack surfaces it still has (e.g. canvas, webgl, webaudio, applet and embed support, pdf plugins...you name it). I realized at some point that all bridge concepts are super buggy, in Gecko, in WebKit, in Blink...and the only way to reduce the attack surface is to remove the featureset. Tried to do the same with chromium and gecko before...but arguably both projects come with so much overhead (repo tools, hardcoded git urls everywhere, custom clone scripts for each platform and environment etc) that they're inforkable. Take a look at projects like nwjs, where the maintainer has to go almost insane trying to keep up to date with upstream...and he basically didn't change anything else than the public headers to be able to embed chromium more easily. I don't need WebGL to browse websites. If I want to visit a web experiment I can still use ungoogled chromium --user-data-dir=/tmp/... As for the alternative in the meantime: I'm using ungoogled chromium with my own Browser Extension [2] to block off all tracking and filtering/rewriting the actual content. [1] Still WIP. Would love to get more people on board: https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit [2] https://github.com/cookiengineer/defiant https://github.com/cookiengineer/defiant
• yoyopa 5y ago
  I've been using Netscape for years. Never had an issue.
• maverick74 5y ago
  Well... Since you don't want to use Firefox and that anything Chromium-based is highly (NOT) recommend (really!), that leaves you with........ Lynx Really, any thing is better than Chromium based browsers... And Lynx is actually great! (If you like this kind of software!!!) There is also Firefox based browsers... But I'm not sure you would like them...
  • deleted 5y ago
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