I feel like there is no web browser with a sane default configuration that I can recommend to other people. All browsers are preconfigured in a way that harms the privacy of their users or include services that no one wants such as Pocket and BAT.

Here are my problems with some popular browsers.

  • Mozilla Firefox: Pocket integration, no ad-blocking without extensions.

  • Brave: Everything related to crypto. Also its start page is horrible.

  • Chromium: No ad-blocking without extensions and soon Manifest v3 will cripple all content blockers.

Now, these suboptimal defaults wouldn’t be such a big problem if the configuration files were easy to backup and restore and respected the XDG base directory specification.

  • @slamphear
    7•1 year ago

    Qutebrowser has great, sensible defaults with no telemetry. 😊

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      Can confirm, I only configured some visual changes, font, minimal font size and alike.

      Only problem I have with it is, an increasing number of webpages tell me, my browser is outdated and rarely some pages don’t work correctly.

      I am thinking of moving to Epiphany (gnome-web) some day, but I may start missing the vim-like interaction with qutebrowser.

      • @slamphear
        4•1 year ago

        Have you updated Qutebrowser recently? It was running a pretty ancient version of Chromium under the hood before the 3.0 release (2 weeks ago), but it’s up-to-date now.

      • @[email protected]
        2•1 year ago

        you might be able to fix webpages telling you you’re outdated by changing your useragent string.