The title is err, not correct because the top 2 alternatives Opera and Arc are based on Chromium engine. I have seen tons of people swear by Arc, but I am seriously asking (since as a Linux user I can’t use it), how much good can a browser be in this day and age if ultimately it’s ad blocking breaks and it will since Manifest v2 will go soon(unless Arc folks have a solution for it)
The rest alternatives are Firefox, Zen (FF fork but honestly Atleast this was something new I learned from this article) and Tor (which is weird since it is not meant for normal web browsing and using it will not only be slow but put additional strain on the nodes, correct me if I am wrong).
I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.
As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.
Vivaldi is great, but because of manifest v3 i’m looking for alternatives. Firefox is not an alternative for me because of the privacy stuff they changed recently.
I’ll second Vivaldi! There’s no other browser with that kind of tab and workspace management. It’s how my brain works. The mobile app is great too with tab groups and the sync between the two is fast. I keep Librewolf on my laptop as well for the odd website that only likes FF.
DNS blocking (such as AdGuard) doesn’t work for everything. Ad blocking extensions are the only way to block YouTube ads in your browser as far as I know.
AdGuard does more than DNS blocking. It strips ads from the response content.
Haven’t seen a single YT ad
I only know the DNS blocking from them.
ETA: Not sure if their app does more.
It does.
Gotta say, it’s kind of a bummer to be downvoted for sharing my own experience. Are those ‘disagree’ or ‘doesn’t contribute to discussion’ votes?
Don’t take it to heart, bro. I saw people downwoting for an honest “thanks”. 😄
They’re “how dare you tout a chromium browser” votes. The FF circlejerk is and has been crazy for a while now
It’s not crazy. Google is doing the damndest to destroy the internet as we know it and using those browsers makes you complicit in that destruction.
I’ll link an unpopular opinion I posted yesterday: https://lemm.ee/post/59167603
My own comment has been: “Don’t you dare to have opinions that don’t align with mainstream thinking here”.
Here either you praise Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko or you are insulted and treated like a pest. And that’s a deterrent for me to even look at Mozilla/Firefox/Gecko. I prefer not to be part of that community.
That’s a very childish mentality. You don’t have to be part of a community. It’s just a browser.
Let me rephrase it, then: I prefer not to give market share or voice to Mozilla and their shitty community. I consider FF a mediocre browser anyway.
And I didn’t insult you, so you can shove that “childish” elsewhere.
I didn’t see it as an insult… The mindset of, “I don’t like the people who like x, so I won’t even try x before trashing it,” is objectively childish.
I like Vivaldi but all the manifest V3 stuff just pushed me to Librewolf for everything whether it works or not, so maybe I should “thank” Google
I gave Vivaldi a try way back in its early days when I was on Windows. IIRC, it was bundled with lots of features even then and I think, for some weird reason, had Philips Hue Lighting support integrated (unless I am really confusing it with something other, this is multiple years old experience of mine).
I used it as my main browser for Atleast couple of months then.
AdGuard (the app, not the extension or the DNS) should do it. I guess.