Outside of work, though, I use Zen and have also been thinking about switching to Mullvad. Privacy-focused browsers, or even simple extensions like Mullvad, Zen, Brave, LibreWolf, or Firefox with uBlock Origin are easy to install and use these days, so I'm wondering why so many people still stick with Chrome, Safari, or Edge.
What keeps you using your current browser?
2- Safari.
- For minorities. I like that
- Design, care for simplicity and detail
- Integration Apple ecosystem
- Security
- I read about the origin. Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs, by Ken Kocienda.
3- Brave.
- Original idea.
- Small, specialized. For minorities
- I like the founder. Brendan Eich. He is also the creator of JavaScript and was previously CTO of Mozilla.
- I want to encourage projects with a strong founder and a novel idea for minorities.
- A good second option after Safari.
I am open to try other things. But it needs time. It has to be something very, very different. I will not spend that time for something 10% different or better. What do you thing, anyone could recommend me another browser with a clear difference?
My big gripe with Safari is the extensions being moved to the App Store. This creates a lot of unnecessary friction. I’m curious how much their AI extension creation will be able to do in macOS 27, maybe it will make this a moot point, but it’s still annoying.
At work I use Chrome, which I don’t like, but feel forced into it due to the company actively breaking or blocking everything else. As a general rule these days, I want to avoid all Chromium based browsers, to not give Google any more power on the web than they already have, but I’d have to quit my job for that to be possible at work.
I also use Mullvad’s browser from time to time at home.
You can learn significantly more in this tremendous blog series: https://infrequently.org/series/browser-choice-must-matter/
You can argue that this would allow things to move faster, but faster in which direction? Would ad blocking be killed once and for all? Would tracking be embedded into the core technologies so it was unavoidable? Google is first and foremost and advertising company, are those the incentives you want controlling the future of the internet?
Apple's stubbornness on the iPhone is literally the only thing stopping Google. EU regulators are trying to force that to change, which look to be some of the stories your link talks about. I find it ironic that pushing for alternatives engines on iOS is framed as browser choice, when all it will do it hand the whole internet over to Google, have developers only ever test in Chrome, and hurt the ability for any other browser to take off due to compatibility issues.
If Chrome has 95% marketshare, whatever they do is the standard, so why bother getting things approved as official standards? Why would developers bother to wait or use the standard features... just make sure it works in Chrome. That puts us back into an IE6 scenario where we all just have to hope Google plays nice, when their incentive to do so is effectively gone. Have we learned nothing from the past?
But (despite that I used to be hardcore Firefox user and advocate) I'm not married to any particular browser. It's so easy to change browsers that I'll do so the instant one that better meets my needs comes around.
I also use Zen as my secondary browser.
1. Fact-checking built-in 2. Declutter the page 3. Lightweight 4. Ability to listen to the saved articles when I want to
https://hopper.evergreen-labs.org
most non-tech folks aren't even aware firefox exists; they just use whatever is already installed;
i predominantly use firefox, since its firebird days (v0.6 perhaps?); i switch to chrome when its one killer feature, inband language translation, is needed; firefox has a translator, but it is rather lackluster;
Ultimately I switched back to Chrome full-time as a result.
I'm currently moving away from Chrome though, as I can no longer use any MV2 extensions because all the workarounds stopped working.
I'd love to be able to tolerate Safari, but it's just not a good day-to-day desktop browser.
Safari on iPhone
Brave browser - when things don't work on Zen/Firefox.
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/28-percent-faster--the-bl...
And yet Chrome’s memory usage has become a meme at this point.
But, I'm suffering from RAM issues. Got 24GM RAM M5 (Non-Pro) MacBook Pro and about 10-15 tabs open, I'm consuming 19GB RAM with 5-9GB RAM in swap.
I mean... now I'm wondering if I should've got higher RAM.
Since I came from Air M1 8GB RAM, I thought 24GB is plenty enough but seems like not.