As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
Chrome and Edge are owned by big companies and report god-knows-what back to their motherships whilst constantly pushing their own services
Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
Safari doesn’t have windows or extensions support
Opera is full of random features and promotional bumpf that I don’t care about and have to turn off
Vivaldi is a complicated beast that takes a bunch of work to set up, it also includes a mail client, calendar and feed reader in the browser which I don’t need.
DuckDuckGo doesn’t have any extension support at all
Arc is really fiddly and doesn’t always behave how I want it to (bookmarks behave like tabs for some reason)
Brave pulls things like this and is also full of crypto/wallet type stuff, plus you can’t even change your home page.
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
Actually, it does have extensions. You can download them through app store in both iOS and Mac OS.
But it is more limited compared with chromium and firefox environment, and most known extensions in those don’t exist for safari, although there are usually alternatives with other names
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
I’m an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn’t a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven’t had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I’ve personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven’t gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:
The other browsers don’t implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections.
Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap.
Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about “Firefox specific bugs” because they haven’t implemented non standard APIs.
Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they’ve caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there’s a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it’s version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you’re in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
Thank you for this explanation! I was so confused by people saying Firefox causes problems because my experience and AFAIK, Firefox adheres to standards the most. I always had the easiest time with Firefox and always built sites using Firefox then tricks to make other browsers work the same. Maybe it’s because as a designer/dev I have always been more particular about sticking to standards.
iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
sigh And here I thought after how many decades of standards, we would be past this shit by now. <insert rant about monopolising big corps forcing their moneygrubbing crap on people>
Arc has been pretty good for me so far. But the challenge will be at what point they stop stuffing it with new ideas, and will that be before it turns into a bloated mess. Edge is a great example of this.
Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information
Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.
Firefox uses its own rendering engine so it can have some Firefox specific bugs / differences that might be missed, plus doesn’t have support for some of the extensions that you want
I used to do QA for a Web portal, and issues with Firefox not scaling .svg files properly was driving me up the wall. There were more obscure issues, but this one was so basic that I couldn’t believe we still had to have a separate code for Firefox browsers.
As a web developer the problem I have is there are issues with all the browsers that are available today:
I just want a simple Chromium browser that doesn’t require me to turn a bunch of shit off, is private by default and supports extensions, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!
As a web developer you should really take a look at Firefox developer eidition. It comes with very nice features for web developers and you are always at the edge of new things FF will support so you see things that will come soon to the rest of the Firefox users.
Normally I would agree with you, but I often need to use the Postman Interceptor extension which is only on Chromium browsers
Workflow differs from person to person. Not sure what that extension does or why it’s needed, but I guess you are use to it.
Check out ungoogled-chromium. It needs some extra work to get extensions (and probably drm stuff) to work, but has good defaults otherwise.
Actually, it does have extensions. You can download them through app store in both iOS and Mac OS.
But it is more limited compared with chromium and firefox environment, and most known extensions in those don’t exist for safari, although there are usually alternatives with other names
If you want you can just use Vivaldi like any other browser, I would think, what is there that needs to be set up that doesn’t in other browsers?
I guess you do get 3-4 questions when you install Vivaldi, like do you want tabs on top, should it import anything, and do you want to use mail and calendar too or just browser.
But “a complicated beast” to set up? No, it works like any other browser right out of the box. It offers advanced customization if you want to dive into them though.
I’m an ex website designer/dev and only tinker with websites these days. But I was doing this shit back in the days when HTML 4.01 was new. Anyways it was usual to use a bunch of tricks to get multiple different browsers (including different versions) to render the same or similar enough. I had to have a bunch of different browsers installed to test them all on because emulation wasn’t a thing yet either.
I think the last serious development I did was a few years ago but as browsers have become better at adhering to standards and rendering more consistently, I haven’t had the need to use anywhere near the amount of tricks and hacks as I used to. I’ve personally had little issue with browser compatibility.
Has something happened in the last few years to change that?
Firefox performs as well as chrome 99.8% of the time. The problem is chromium keep implementing things that haven’t gone through the spec process fully yet. This causes the following situation:
The other browsers don’t implement half baked privacy violating features which Google decides will be a new web API despite objections. Developers build features on their sites using that half baked crap. Users try to use the new features on Firefox and kick off about “Firefox specific bugs” because they haven’t implemented non standard APIs.
Safari is its own kettle of fish though and causes a lot of drama. Recently they’ve caught up a lot in terms of support for most standard features developers want. However there’s a big issue with supporting iOS Safari - it’s version is tied to the iOS version of the phone. So users with older phones will be stuck forever on older versions of Safari with breaking bugs for things like flexbox. If you’re in a market with lots of older phones then you have to spend a lot of time ensuring you support that older browser version. iOS Safari is the new internet explorer.
Thank you for this explanation! I was so confused by people saying Firefox causes problems because my experience and AFAIK, Firefox adheres to standards the most. I always had the easiest time with Firefox and always built sites using Firefox then tricks to make other browsers work the same. Maybe it’s because as a designer/dev I have always been more particular about sticking to standards.
sigh And here I thought after how many decades of standards, we would be past this shit by now. <insert rant about monopolising big corps forcing their moneygrubbing crap on people>
Any chromium based browser will force manifest v3 on you though, keep that in mind.
One point for Brave, is that they have specifically said they will continue to support Manifest v2 in their browser.
That’s nice. still not worth it tho lol
I have changed the homepage on brave plenty of times.
Why even make shit for Chromium? Fuck everyone using Chromium.
Arc has been pretty good for me so far. But the challenge will be at what point they stop stuffing it with new ideas, and will that be before it turns into a bloated mess. Edge is a great example of this.
Yea, I really liked Edge when it was first launched, clean fast and simple. These days there is so much shoe-horning of Microsoft integrations it just feels like they’re desperately trying to steal all of your personal information
Arc could be amazing but there are some features which just don’t work as I would expect.
It’s quirky, for sure. The easel feature isn’t at all integrated which I find odd.
I used to do QA for a Web portal, and issues with Firefox not scaling .svg files properly was driving me up the wall. There were more obscure issues, but this one was so basic that I couldn’t believe we still had to have a separate code for Firefox browsers.