The Firefox ToC discussion pushed me down the browser engine rabbit hole (again). Have you had a chance to daily drive some really good but obscure web engine that is not Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Apple) and Blink (Chromium)? How viable is it for a complete switch - this includes banking, chatting, logging into websites, etc.
Edit: Added link to the Firefox discussion to give better context to my question.
Is Arc considered obscure?
I’m really hoping the new ladybird browser is delivered sooner than expected
Zen
Fennec (Firefox based)
Please don’t bank with a bleeding edge web engine that isn’t forked from one that’s been around for decades. It’s really not secure to use things that people haven’t had time to attack yet.
I’m going to stick with some form of Firefox fork, personally. Chromium forks are questionable, as if I recall right they include a binary blob provided by google, which could be hiding god knows what.
Firefox is fully open source, so any code supporting this potential data harvesting can’t hide, and will be removed by most forks.
I used librewolf until there was some concern about them updating in a timely manner.
Now I used Firefox with Phoenix to maybe get the best of both worlds and IronFox on mobile.
with the recent news of a ToS from FF which forks would you recommend as a daily driver to replace FF?
Librewolf has been solid for me. I’ve seen others plug waterfox as well
I don’t think there are any viable engines other than the three you mention. Other browsers than the three you mention are viable, I am typing this in LibreWolf, but they are all based on one of these three engines.
I recently tried Ladybird and it crashes e.g. when I try to access my Lemmy instance. Definitely not viable yet in 2025, but this doesn’t mean it must remain so.
Articfox librewolf
Cromite. it is a very good and private, easy to use browser, but can be heavy on resources https://github.com/uazo/cromite. It uses Chromium engine. There are browsers like Ladybug and there is also an another project that use their own web engine, but anything that doesn’t use the engines you mentoioned, is impossible to daily drive, most of them doesn’t evem support javascript, or any script execution, which means you can only browse the most basic blogs, and forget about shopping, social media, and even forums
I’ve been using IronFox on mobile since Mull went away, but I’m ready to hear why that’s a bad option from anyone who knows better.
So far its worked very similarly to Mull, in that I’ve had no issues with it so far. I don’t do banking or financial shit on my phone though, so I can’t comment on how well it works for that functionality.
I’ve used librewolf and it seems good but I’m not a browser expert.
Reminds me to check out lynx again.
Internet Explorer 11
(just kidding)
seamonkey but it’s pretty hard to use without much love nowadays with so many incompatible websites. It’s a perfect mail client tho.
Just get Firefox ESR with arkenfox, that should be enough.
I use qutebrowser, it’s a keyboard driven browser that uses QtWebEngine (based on Chromium).
