Okay, so the dust after next Mozilla drama has settled. Some people removed Firefox and installed
Waterfox/Librewolf/Zen. I am one of those people who removed FF, but still struggling with finding
subsitute. Let's review the most available, known and active web browsers. Our main question here is
"which web browser will be most usable, most private and most ethical?"
Let's go through our options like through iceberg.
Layer 1 "Corpo browsers" - Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox
There is no reason to use any of those 3 browsers unless you are forced to do that. But you would say
"Firefox browser is not bad itself, it is just Mozilla Foundation." Well, you need to remember that
Firefox has included "AI chatbot" functionality (opt-in yet), has "Safe Browsing" automatically turned
on and DoH with Clownflare turned on (unless person who packaged it for you make other decision), no
straight switcher for JS. And you know what, they also included feature of doing screenshots, like you
will not be able to do that yourself. We could argue about reasonability of such setup, but my point is
that no one asked them to include those features this way.
Personal choice (if I would really have to): Firefox after blocking all telemetry and setting up uBlock
in hardcore mode
Layer 2 "Parents or forks of corpo browsers" - Chromium, Ungoogled Chromium, Iridium, Waterfox,
Librewolf, Zen, et al.
There are many forks, but there is one main problem with them - they are all dependent on Google and
Mozilla. If Mozilla Foundation will shut down, there will not be enough $ to maintain Firefox, all forks
(maybe except of Tor Browser which would have to switch to Chromium) will close. If one day Sunder
Pichai will make decision that there will be no other Chromium-based browser than Chrome, then
maintainers of Ungoogled Chromium, Iridium et cetera will get 24 hours to close repos. There are not
enough dollars to beat their lawyers.
There are also other small issues with those browsers.
Chromium still has telemetry and other Google "features", but not as many as Chrome.
Ungoogled Chromium and Iridium even they remove Google "features", they are Google's mercy what is
visible in case of Manifest v2/v3. Soon uBlock will not be available for them and they can end with
stripped Lite version.
Waterfox was owned by ad-company System1, but from 2023 it has been made "independent". We do not know
what it really means, because official note does not say that it was bought from System1.
Librewolf had a drama right after Firefox last drama, but I am not able to find details.
One of those browsers should be first choice if you are dependent on modern web and you cannot start a
day without typing pacman -Syu. Though still some reasearch and tweaking is needed.
Personal choice: Ungoogled Chromium
Layer 3 "Independent 'modern' browser" - Pale Moon, Basilisk et al.
At this point we can at least open 99% of websites, but some will complain with words like "Your browser
is not up to date". Fsck it. You can still install some extensions (XUL based) like uBlock (but
outdated). You still have highest possible usability and lost as less as possible conveniency. If you
want to use a browser which does not depend on corpo, they are your first choice. They still have some
minor issues (like Pale Moon dev turning off accessibility or forcing OpenBSD port maintainer to stop
packaging Pale Moon for OpenBSD). If you are not dependent on modern web too much and you want to recall
00' days, this is good choice. Those browsers might be less available.
Persnal choice: Basilisk lacks many configuration options, so I would check Pale Moon
At this point usability decreases much due to 2 main reasons:
(1) browser might be mouse-hostile
(2) browser does not support JS, CSS and newest HTML or is missing important functionality
Note that only few of those browsers will have some adblock-type capabilities and they will be baked
into browser.
QuteBrowser - personally I have not tested it, but it should be able display most modern websites as
author wanted, keyboard-driven
NetSurf - missing HTML5 and CSS3 support, so sites can look bad
Dillo - no JS support, limited support of HTML, limited configuration
BadWolf - theoretically it supports bookmarks, but I was not able to get them working, supports JS, but
has no adblock
LuaKit - I was not able to import bookmarks
Personal choice: if you have external bookmarks storage (like Buku), then you will be good with LuaKit
and BadWolf. Also websites should look okay because those browsers eat JS and current CSS. If you do not
care about JS and CSS, just take any.
No JS + CSS support which means that modern websites will either not load at all happily throwing
"Please enable JavaScript support" or layout will be fscked up. There is no adblock support except of
Links which can block pictures. On the other hand, only very primitive ads will load due to missing JS
capabilities. Even non-modern websites layout is fscked up due to missing CSS. If you need browser to
just read text, then you will be okay (but no 100%).
Personal choice: Links+
Layer 6 "W3M"
You are either in asylum or you are candidate for that. Treat w3m more like web pager than web browser.
You can still see some images, but basic things like using search engine might not work. You will
probably not be able to log in to some sites. Layout can be fscked up like in layer 5 or even more.
Though I find some reasons to use it:
(1) You are ready for martyrdom to eliminate any bloat
(2) Your computer has no more than 128 MB of RAM
(3) You want to challenge yourself
I am aware than I skipped some browsers in layers 2-4, maybe I will extend this list in a future.
As usual, everything starts with question "What do I need?". Answer on this question will tell you what
you should use.
Soon (TM) I am going to make similiar list on search engines and say few words what is wrong with them
(which might not be as obvious as it seems).
