Firefox Alternative. HELP!

I had already removed Min before you posted. I agree with your assessment of it 100%.
I am trying out Gnome-Web (epiphany-browser), now. It's... meh.
To Gnomey.
Way too Gnomey.
It allows for custom stylesheet though, so I plan to keep it and play with it like a cat with a mouse for a while.

EDIT: Gnome-Web does not honor the New Tab Custom address. I set it to the Zorin Forum. It is checked to Custom. Yet opening a new tab opens to "Most Visited" which is disabled. Reminds me of the Totem Fiasco (Totem Channels)... Gnome touts that you should only use Gnome Apps on Gnome Desktop yet many of their apps are broken or their features never were implemented ...
EDIT Two:

Plan foiled. Gnome-web Gone.

I took active interest in this thread but.. Taha, I see your point. There really aren't very good alternatives to a Mozilla Monopoly.
I'm gonna sadly stick with Firefox. It works. I am familiar with it and how it works mostly... And I have nothing to hide so let it do its little spying...

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If this interest you, I block all telemetry by Firefox using Pi-hole. It is quite amusing to see the blocked request log time to time.

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taha, I hear what you are saying about Brave, "but they are not a company to be trusted." However, there is a more recent narrative of that opinion being wrong.
Not getting political, but we often hear in the news, accusations that over the
course of time are proven not to be true. I believe this to be the case with Brave.
This is from a consensus of many of the tech guys I've seen on Utube who do
browser reviews. Most that I've watched have Brave in the top 3. Or top 2.
I use Brave, and really like the recently added Brave Search Engine (Beta).
I also use Firefox with a few add-ons. Just for full disclosure. Those are my
2 browsers of choice.

Tried several others. Most recently playing with LibreWolf. That is currently I think the ultimate Firefox alternative. Only thing I don't like, can't seem to pull my bookmarks and passwords in from Firefox. I've been doing the Aravi thing recently. When I have the time I do more research on Librewolf hoping to find the answers. Although I don't trust Utube as a company, I do take the advice of several of the Tech people. Many of which solely use Linux. Just imagine if Aravi had a channel, we'd all watch and trust him.

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come to think of it, that gives me an idea to help get Zorin out there....

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I actually do... LOL

I like to be trusted when I need to be trusted. Other than that- Always Fact Check. I need no deceit to simply be in error.
And... I am in error far more often than I would like...

You going to post the channel....? LOL

In my book, the trust is always there. Not because I'm a nice guy, but rather you earned it. Always believed in Swarf and yourself. Great Hearts.

Nope.

It's not Linux related and I learned the hard way to keep some things separate.:wink:

See, you're a smart Man.... lmao...

Yep sadly at the moment, there aren't any. But I think it is the case of a positive feedback loop wherein people just stick to using Firefox and chromium and those products keep improving because of the big user base and these small projects don't take off/have their issues resolved because of the low/non-existing user base.
So I think if some people like us actually try to give these products a try and help them a bit, they would take off and would become actually usable.
I would like to thank everyone who participated in this thread as I think some very good applications got put on the radar. I will be trying them a bit more to see which one of them are worthy contenders.

That is very true and I completely agree with you. And for that exact reason, I never follow these news websites, tech youtubers, , mass media outlets, etc. I did not base my negative opinion of Brave based on just one person/entity. It was an aggregation of many user reviews on several websites. Also I installed it and it quickly raised a lot of alarms for me as I realized what's what :smiley:

But I think that we managed to find some interesting apps in this thread. A bit rough on the edges, but that's no big deal. I will be giving them a test drive to see how they hold up and how much potential they have to turn into something big.

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Please let us know your thoughts after the test drives taha. Shared experiences are a good thing. Like there was this one lady I knew, she liked this weird...
Kidding with you all.... Geez...

Am also curious to the alarms Brave raised for you. I most likely was unaware of things to look for.

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So I spent some time testing a whole lot of browsers and I'm here to share my thoughts on the worthy ones, the other ones that I tried are not even worth mentioning :smiley:
So here are my comments. I hope it helps someone.

Browser Comment
Falkon Seemed to be the one on the first sight but, it uses chromium under the hood
Konqueror Same as Falkon
Dooble Also uses chromium under tho hood
Librewolf Fork of the latest available Firefox without the Mozilla branding, telemetry, and products. But being the fork of latest version means that all of the bad things are forked here as well… namely the Proton UI design.
Dot browser Is not a complete product and was borderline unusable when I tried it.
GNU IceCat By far the most professional and the best, truly libre alternative to Firefox
Netsurf It kept crashing, and on Wikipedia it says that they use their own rendering engine but I have a tingling sense that tells me its chromium yet again. But I am not going to bother investigating it.

I wrote this in a hurry but I will come back to it in a couple of days or so to give some more comments on the browsers specifically GNU IceCat. I think that I will be using IceCat moving onwards.

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I just threw IceCat 60.sumfin on my machine to try it out given your glowing recommendation. Gotta ask, though... What differences are there between it and Waterfox?

So Waterfox is also a Firefox fork but I did not give Waterfox a try because the parent company is even arguably worse than Mozilla. Waterfox is owned by System1... an advertising and data analytics company :smiley:
I don't think I need to explain any more on why to avoid it.
But actually it used to have a sole developer until one day, the Dev sold Waterfox to System1. Its a similar situation to Audacity.
I haven't installed it in any recent time and I'm not compelled to do it. I'd even say Firefox is better than Waterfox.

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Have you ever considered Pale Moon?
It is based on LTS version of Firefox.
I used it in VM Windows 2000. It is about the only browser which still supports Windows 2000.

Yes... back when I used Waterfox, I conversed with that developer about it, even. I had no idea this had happened.

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Thanks for this info.
I was not aware of it at all.
More and more installing apps getting like wolking through a minefield. :bomb: Got be carefull not to step on those "sold" ones :flushed:

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I see GNU IceCat reportedly has Mozilla heritage.

Yeah, it is based on Firefox after all. But for those interested about the history, the Wikipedia article is very interesting to read. I highly recommend it to everyone.

On that note, I keep seeing the android version of IceCat getting mentioned here and there but I cannot find any files or packages for it. Very weird :smiley:

It is not available on Google Play. For some reason.
https://downloads2021.com/?pid=6&offer_id=346&ref_id=4edc5414dfb779f271e35dbf9127dd7c_ddb5f092_e97084f5&sub1=ddb5f092&m=Icecat%20browser%20for%20android

I highly recommend checking that package, though.

Well... I am not too happy with GNU IceCat.

You must whitelist everything in order to get pages to work. Sadly, not all .js files are visible in order to whitelist. For example, after jumping through a lot of hoops to get my Protonmail to load on IceCat, I finally reached the impenetrable barrier of unknown .js that needed whitelisting - I am unable to log into to my protonmail on IceCat at all.

Logging into this Zorin Forum required whitelisting 24 scripts.
It took multiple tries just to get the page to load at all. I understand being secure... But it shouldn't be like pulling teeth.

Word to the wise... If you get a popup saying "Hidden html discovered. Reveal it?" Click cancel. :expressionless: Revealing it will fill your page with 256px .svg icon images.
It gives that popup in Yahoo mail each time you click on a folder. Whenever you click "compose". Whenever you do anything. Very annoying.
Yahoo Mail on IceCat was also broken - I could not Close Drafts or delete drafts.
I stopped testing at that point; I had had enough.

Going to my Launchpad - more whitelisting necessary... Two of them unknown just like with Protonmail - rendering IceCat useless.

When security and privacy features cause access to be cut off and render the browser useless for what it is for; who is at fault? The .js files that are blocked for having no known license by IceCat?
IceCat for being over-zealous?
The websites for injecting Spy Software at every opportunity? IS it spy software?

I do not know. What I do know is that IceCat is Functionally Useless.

EDIT: After further testing, I found the Addons that were causing the trouble. The solution, of course, was to disable them. Which means- they are functionally useless.
"Reveal HTML" Add on was also enabled and can be disabled. This stopped Yahoo Mail from being annoying at every click but did not fix broken drafts.
I ended up disabling the vast majority of add ons that were added and enabled by default - to no avail. Still could not log into Protonmail.

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