Google Chrome severely damaged extensions, time to move to a better browser
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TImecodes
00:00 Intro
01:00 Sponsor: Squarespace
01:54 Firefox based browsers
04:04 Floorp
05:36 Zen Browser
07:13 Vivaldi
10:15 Edge
11:37 Brave
14:06 Opera
15:08 Others
16:11 What to use?
16:59 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
17:54 Support the channel
Obviously, Firefox and its derivatives should be the first ones you look at.Been around forever, it's the OG that killed Internet Explorer, and until Google started pushing Chrome everywhere, and intentionally breaking compatibility or making performance worse on other browsers, it was the dominant one. Nowadays, the market share is really low, but it's still a great browser.
Of course, if you don't like Mozilla and their recent controversial moves, or you prefer a hardened, non telemetry packing browser, you have a lot of forks of Firefox, like Librewolf, which includes Ublock origin, improved privacy and uses private search engines by default, you have Waterfox, which adds better privacy protections by default than Firefox.
Another one that just popped up recently is called Floorp, and despite the ridiculous sounding name, it provides cool features, like better tracking protections, no telemetry and data collection, and different UIs and layouts you can change. It also will support all the extensions Firefox does, it adds web apps support, workspaces to filter your tabs between work or personal stuff, and it has TONS of customization options to make the browser look and feel, and behave how you want.
Another one I tried is Zen, and I'll say it outright: I hate how it works, forcing me into vertical tabs tabs that don't give me any info on what the tab is without hovering it. You can make these tabs expand by default but I just don't like this layout. The real advantage of Zen, though, is the fact that you can get an optimized version, compiled specifically for newer computers. I tested this out with the portable Linux version, and Speedometer gave me a 21.2 score, compared to Floorp which got 20.6 and the regular Firefox version got 20.8.
If you want the most features and customization, Vivaldi might be a good replacement for Chrome. Vivaldi also is basically an operating system, it packs in an email client with a unified inbox, a calendar, panels that can host any website you want, like chats and social media, they have a notes feature, they let you tile tabs inside of the browser window, you can stack tabs together to tidy up your workspace, you have built-in translation, picture in picture, mouse gestures, and a lot more.Vivaldi isn't entirely open source, their UI code isn't. Vivaldi will drop Manifest v2 support in 2025, when the chrome web store drops all extensions that don't use the new API, so you're not going to be safe from the Chrome restrictions on Vivaldi.
Another strong contender is Brave. This is a Chromium based browser, but it also changes a lot of things. They have what they call Brave Shields that block trackers and ads, without the need for an extension, meaning Brave isn't affected all that much by the move to manifest v3. They also said they'll maintain Manifest v2 compatibility, at least for some extensions.
Opera is another option I'll go over quickly, because it's not open source apart from the Chromium base it relies upon. Opera will keep Manifest v2 support for as long as they can. They have a bunch of features, including their own ad blocker, tab groups, a messaging sidebar, and of course their own AI because everyone needs their own stupid AI. They add a VPN on top of that as well.