uBlock Origin Lite has been working well for me on Chrome. I use Brave on my phone for its ad-blocking. I also use Adguard's free DNS on my phone. I was using it on my router but it's not really necessary. I use Smart Tube on my ONN Android TV boxes.
I basically never see ads anywhere, not even on YT.
My trial didn't last long ! The tabs don't display evenly on the top of the browser and when I right select to customize panel items the application becomes transparent. As with Windows I disabled most of the features favoring clean simple look. The book marks and context menu are crowded unlike other mozzilla based browsers. Back on librewolf.
Yes Brave is indeed resource heavy, though I was under impression that's how most browsers are nowadays. It's good enough for me, unless they somehow ruin it I don't see a reason to switch just yet
In this discussion which can kind of detoured about other browsers I haven't seen anyone mention ungoogled Chromium. I have been using it for about a year or so and have had no problems with it. It even seems to be fairly fast on an old HP laptop.
You can find it in most of the repos for the different distros I have tried and there is also a flatpak that should work on any distro. There are instruction on the github page and I think even on the start page of UGC when you first open it that tell how to set it up so you can install any Chrome add-ons you want without having to log into the Chromium Web Store.
You can also easily copy any bookmarks and passwords from other browsers into it.
That;s just it, @MidnightRose , I don't think a browser SHOULD be resource-heavy! Drove me mad always doing its thing in the background, just like Edge. I don't like Chromium-based browsers, full stop. I'll stick with Firefox and Zen, but as @zenzen said, I need to remember to make a back up.
The web is way more complex today than it was ~10 or ~20 years ago. Seemingly trivial features that we take for granted today were not possible to implement before.
When you visit any website, you expect things to work right out of the box, but this is only possible because browser vendors continuously implement features according to a certain standard. Anyone here remembers Flash, Java Applets or Silverlight?
Adhering to some standard is a good thing because it makes the experience much better for everyone overall, but it comes at a cost as well, including resource usage. I would argue that, all things considered, it's an acceptable trade off because browsers are actually quite efficient, and computer power has been able to keep up with the demand. Most of the RAM used goes to caching which means that it can be released back to the operating system if another program needs to use it. Although I'm not a big fan of techniques like prefetching which are wasteful and have serious privacy concerns.
There are also other political concerns like who controls the standard — do I need to say it? — but that's a topic for another day.
In short, a browser that has fewer features will be easier on the resources, but it'll also be less compatible with the modern web. And here we could talk about how newer or modern is not always better, but this all ultimately adds up to developers caring less about preserving backwards compatibility because most people are using the same browser base: Chromium.
What we need is not more efficient browsers, but more customizable. Being able to create a browser profile that only has the features that I actually need would make it more efficient, more private and more secure. Right now, Firefox is the best at this, though far from perfect.
@zenzen , I agree... and I'm still using Firefox, which I can customise to my preferences (and isn't based on Chromium). What really bugs me though, is when an update erases those settings and I have to go through the process (yet) again. However, what's even more annoying is when those updates opt me in to something I really do not want! Firefox has been guilty of both.
Zen, as was rightly pointed out to me previously, is a fork of Firefox, and although it is still being actively developed, has never lost all of my addons or changed my settings autonomously. That it also provides a viable option to Chromium-based browsers is very important. If it gets glitchy, I just switch back to FF. I've got to say that it is getting better and better with each update.
There is nothing more annoying, then when your internet browser says, "you don't need that extension anymore so going to remove it."
Thats how you know your software is a dictator, because of the actions of the company, who own the app you use. Confirmed!
Firefox is starting to feel like it wants to be Chrome now too, just leaves people with very few options for quality web browsers. I remember back in the day, there was an internet browser called Opera.
I used Opera quite heavily in the 2000's. But then I kept running into a wall, with all the things Opera couldn't do, that both Chrome and Firefox could. So I eventually gave up o Opera.
And furthermore, it looks like everybody else gave up on Opera for the same exact reasons, because I know of nobody who actually uses that web browser these days. Chrome and Firefox are the current world leaders right now.
I just installed ZEN this afternoon and then spent some time getting used to it. I was able to set up a home page with all my favorite sites on there so I can easily go to them without having to dig through my long list of saved bookmarks.
Zen seems to be much faster than Ungoogled Chromium. And this is on an old HP laptop with an i5 processor and 12 gig of ram.
I do have one question. Do you know how to remove the preinstalled favorites on the home page? I have no use for fakebook or twitter etc.
That's really weird, it never did that to me. And I've been using Firefox for a very long time.
If this is a recurrent issue what I'd recommend is using a custom user.js file which hold your configuration. It's the equivalent of the settings view, in a text file.
This is unfortunately true of all software. The only option is to freeze the current version and not proceed with the update, but that has its own share of downsides.
If it's like in Firefox, you should go to Preferences -> Home -> Shortcuts. Of, if they are actually bookmarks, press Ctrl+Shift+O to bring up the bookmark manager. You can delete them from there as well.