The Firefox ToC discussion pushed me down the browser engine rabbit hole (again). Have you had a chance to daily drive some really good but obscure web engine that is not Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Apple) and Blink (Chromium)? How viable is it for a complete switch - this includes banking, chatting, logging into websites, etc.
Edit: Added link to the Firefox discussion to give better context to my question.
I’m going to stick with some form of Firefox fork, personally. Chromium forks are questionable, as if I recall right they include a binary blob provided by google, which could be hiding god knows what.
Firefox is fully open source, so any code supporting this potential data harvesting can’t hide, and will be removed by most forks.
I used librewolf until there was some concern about them updating in a timely manner.
Now I used Firefox with Phoenix to maybe get the best of both worlds and IronFox on mobile.
with the recent news of a ToS from FF which forks would you recommend as a daily driver to replace FF?
Librewolf has been solid for me. I’ve seen others plug waterfox as well
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I don’t think there are any viable engines other than the three you mention. Other browsers than the three you mention are viable, I am typing this in LibreWolf, but they are all based on one of these three engines.
I recently tried Ladybird and it crashes e.g. when I try to access my Lemmy instance. Definitely not viable yet in 2025, but this doesn’t mean it must remain so.
I mean it isn’t even in beta yet.
I’ve been using IronFox on mobile since Mull went away, but I’m ready to hear why that’s a bad option from anyone who knows better.
So far its worked very similarly to Mull, in that I’ve had no issues with it so far. I don’t do banking or financial shit on my phone though, so I can’t comment on how well it works for that functionality.
Zen
Reminds me to check out lynx again.
I’ve used librewolf and it seems good but I’m not a browser expert.
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Fennec (Firefox based)
seamonkey but it’s pretty hard to use without much love nowadays with so many incompatible websites. It’s a perfect mail client tho.
Just get Firefox ESR with arkenfox, that should be enough.
I’m really hoping the new ladybird browser is delivered sooner than expected
What’s the Firefox ToC discussion you mention?
It is their data now boy
I’m trying out waterfox for mobile and librewolf for desktop. No complaints so far
Just don’t try to schedule a video for publication in LibreWolf; its time zone obfuscation will totally have it publish at an unexpected time unless you figure that out first!
where did you get Waterfox on Android? The Playstore or F droid?
Used F-Droid to download aurora store (open source client for the play store) and used Aurora for waterfox…
thanks, i asked because the Google PlayStore has WaterFox from waterfox.net. Not sure if this is real or fake, because other Fox forks can only be installed from Fdroid like Mull/Fennec
Articfox librewolf
GNOME Web (Epiphany)
I kind of daily drive it as I made webapps with it for some services I host (which Firefox still doesn’t offer natively)
The UI is quite nice but it isn’t always the smoothest in terms of performances. Still, a very respectable effort
Epiphany is making headway. It’s gotten much better in the last year or so.
I can still crash it with too many tabs, JS sometimes makes it crash, and the extension experience is bad, but it’s gotten better.
It is covered by WebKit call out though.
If you want obscure, I can recommend Lagrange. It can browse only gemini pages though, so you can’t visit your favourite html websites.
Gemini is so weird and cool! My first day with it really made me want to start a little microblog on it or something
