I know “best” is subjective, but as someone who’s entrenched in the Apple ecosystem I always used to use the stock apps: Reminders, Calendar, Mail, Podcasts and, of course, Safari.
But over time I’ve moved away from some of those apps, towards things that work better than the stock apps but also still sync with my other Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Watch): Things and Todoist (because I can’t decide on one over the other), Fantastical, Mail (still), Overcast… but I tend to hover between browsers.
I mainly use Safari, and try to use profiles to separate personal and work stuff. But over the years I’ve also tried Firefox, I’ve tried Brave and more recently I’ve tried Arc. But I just can’t make my mind up.
So I was curious what your browser of choice is (and also, if you have any other views on the best stock app replacements - including alternatives to the ones I listed above for GTD, calendars, email and podcasts (don’t get me started on the “best” search engine!), I’d be interested to get your opinions.
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Safari’s fast, less crashy, highest privacy protections, and uses less memory per tab; I often have hundreds of tabs so that’s important. It also has the best inspector, much better than Firebug. Add in StopTheMadness and an adblocker (currently using Ghostery), and it’s pretty great.
Degoogled Chromium is useful for sites that don’t work in Safari, or as a sandbox I don’t mind crashing in development.
I’ve given up on Firefox, it’s too fat and bloated.
Arc for sure! It’s chromium based, unfortunately, but has unparalleled tab and workspace management, and is unfairly sleek and nice looking!
Other than that, Firefox is always nice, and Orion is interesting as well.
Arc has really changed the way I expect a desktop browser to work now. It’s kind of annoying when I go back to Firefox on my PC now.
I like Vivaldi, which is Chromium based. I also like Safari for the speed. Difficult to choose between the two. The feature that Vivaldi has and Safari hasn’t, which I’m missing in Safari, is tab auto-refresh.
At what point do you use tab auto refresh?
I am genuinely curious.
I run Linux but only and recommend Firefox. Cross device sync is the best I’ve ever seen, the add ons library is good, you can theme it and it works well for me. Plus there’s no chrome bs on there and the privacy defaults are good.
For search I use Google because it’s still the best. And the others typically just give you Google results anyway. If you want Google results but without the tracking, in theory, look at Startpage.
Firefox or one of its fork you like .
Safari. Firefox borks out on so many websites for me. Safari “just works.”
Got an example of a page that does not work in Firefox?
The silliest one is my Plex web admin page. I even had to make a Github issue request about it, and found a bunch of others who had done the same thing.
Several government websites, among others. I should start a list. I’m sure it’s a combo of unlock origin with FF’s privacy protection settings, but I’ve tweaked it so much for the websites that are broken and nothing ever changed. Switched over to Safari and everything loads beautifully.
Fun fact, there’s only 3 real choices.
There’s Firefox, Chromium and Safari.
Every other browser is essentially a skin of one of those.
I would suggest using Firefox or one of its spin off versions.
With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all modern browsers do a great job of that. It doesn’t really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.
I’m glad we have three rendering engines, especially since the largest two are backed by companies who don’t always do what’s right for the web… but three is enough. More than that would honestly be a waste of effort, I prefer the current situation with hundreds of browsers who pool resources and work together on a rendering engine that is shared by other browsers.
What really separates one browser from another is the toolbars and other user interface elements around the webpage. And Blink/WebKit/Gecko don’t provide any of that.
Sure, let me know if I’m following this train of thought by drawing a parallel.
If we swapped out rendering engine with game engines. It would be best if we kept to a few game engines and focused on the game mechanics and story?
In that spirit, I would agree with you. Much like the examples you provided, its more about who or what controls the full stack of experience. It’s just, quickly thinking about this I’m struggling to find a compelling reason to use a browser beyond the basics. Since the core features I seem to require are satisfied in any browser that isn’t provided by an entity that puts capital interests before the user too harshly. Plus the addition of an adblocker and custom theming.
Ultimately, it just needs to show the webpage safely and precisely how it was intended to be seen, without ads. Through the support of extensions, I suspect that would satisfy any additional requirement someone could desire or imagine without the need to delve much deeper into custom browsers. At least, a browser for general use without a specific purpose. But perhaps I’m misjudging the capacity of those potential extensions in the face of a customized browser?
I suspect, how opera paints a bunch of features down the left side may be hard to replicate on another?
Yeah I know they’re all based on one of three, but they are all subtly different in what they offer.
So whilst there are three main engines, there are definitely more than three choices.
Bottom of the pile for me is Chrome - I don’t use anything Google knowingly/willingly.
Google might be the primary maintainer of Chromium, but they don’t really control it. Literally hundreds of other companies and thousands if individual developers contribute to Chromium every day and if Google did something they don’t like the engine would be forked in a heartbeat.
In fact it has been forked — thousands of times (according to GitHub). It’s just none of those forks have gained much traction. If Google really messes things up, such as if they actually go ahead and remove cookies as they’ve threatened to do for years, then one or two of those forks will gain traction. Likely enough traction that Google themselves would struggle to keep up and could end up killing Blink and basing Chrome off one of the forks.
If you don’t trust Google (I don’t), then don’t use Chrome. But I wouldn’t write off all Chromium based browsers, some of them are awesome. And the main problem it used to have (battery life) isn’t an issue anymore. My M1 MacBook Air lasts forever on battery power and I always have a chromium based browser running.
Over 96% of contributions are Google, terrible take.
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/AUTHORS
The vast majority of names on that list are not google employees. And that’s nowhere near a complete list. Chromium dates back to kthmlw almost three deacdes ago. The vast majority of the code in Chromium was not written by Google.
The authors file is not the source of who writes it today.
Look at actual commit data, like here https://bkardell.com/blog/2023-Mid-Season-Power-Rankings.html
History is history. Those people won’t magically come back.
Personally, I use the ESR version of Firefox so I don’t regularly get unneeded updates.
I started using Firefox since the beginning of this year, and frankly surprised by how smooth it is. All browsers being fairly similar, I would rather use Firefox.
90% of the times, I use Firefox. 10%, I’ll go for Safari…
Actually that might be 99% and 1%, respectively :)
So I had been using Orion for about a year with good results. It’s modified webkit so it feels like Safari but supports Chrome and Firefox plugins and has anti-fingerprinting/privacy measures.
I switched away after the situation a month or so ago with Kagi (same dev) adding Brave to their search and being a general ass to the people that raised concerns.
Currently I am using Librewolf, a privacy focused fork of Firefox, which has preformed really well. The only real issue I have is not being able to auto-fill sms 2FA codes like Safari.
I mostly use Linux but have a Mac Mini as a TV PC. I use the same browser everywhere - LibreWolf. It’s Firefox but with Mozilla’s bullshit adware/sponsored garbage removed and some extra privacy-focused features/default settings. Firefox has become adware itself, with its home page having sponsored garbage and suggested stories from partners. I generally love what Mozilla is doing and we need competition in the browser space, but I don’t want Mozilla spamming up my homepage with their “suggestions”.
Way back in the day, the best browser was OmniWeb. It was truly awesome but quite expensive (I think a license was about $60?). Unfortunately they didn’t have the resources to keep up as CSS/JavaScript became more complex. It still worked for the vast majority of websites when they gave up on development, but the writing was on the wall and they weren’t selling enough licenses to hire a large team. Also back then the only open source browser was FireFox and it’s always been a really complex rendering engine to work with (there’s a reason everybody uses Blink or WebKit as the foundation for their browser).
As far as I know, OmniWeb is the only (major) browser that was exclusively designed for the Mac (and NeXT before that). Even Safari historically ran on Windows and the current version borrows quite a lot of UI conventions from the iOS version. OmniWeb was a proper Mac browser. In fact back in the early days of Mac OS X OmniWeb wasn’t just the best Mac Browser, it was arguably the best Mac App in general. They’d been working on it for decades when other Mac apps were either brand Cocoa apps or else still using Carbon (the compatibility layer between MacOS 9 and MacOS X).
OmniWeb is kinda-sorta-alive as a side project, using WebKit now instead of their proprietary engine, and the latest “test build” was released just a couple months ago. But the last stable/officially supported version of OmniWeb 5 shipped twelve years ago. It’s somewhat dated now, for example the URL bar is the full width of the window and you can’t change that - a hold back from the days when even desktop computer screens were only 800 pixels wide or even less. https://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/
One of the early developers of OmniWeb (retired a long time ago) once claimed OmniWeb is older than World Wide Web (generally recognised as the first ever web browser) but given the internet didn’t exist back then he wasn’t able to point to any strong evidence. Wikipedia lists 1995 as the release date for OmniWeb, however he said that date is wrong and it was distributed years earlier (obviously not on the web — there was no other web browser so you had to get it some other way).
These days, I think the best web browser (and therefore also the best Mac browser) is Arc. It’s not exclusively a Mac app, but it is written in SwiftUI and the iOS/Windows versions are quite different - Arc respects platform specific UI conventions and different use cases (especially on a phone).
Hers’s a link to download it: https://arc.net/gift/70d85b6 (unfortunately you do need to sign up with an email account, since Arc is “software as a service” and (like OmniWeb did) they eventually plan to start charging for certain features. I’m OK with that personally, you do need an account to sync tabs between devices which I see as a must have feature).
For Mac I use ARC browser. It’s a bit different in UI than most browsers but it does some things I really like. It’s heavily optimised for keyboard commands, and it has separate “spaces” which you can create and define (e.g. personal, work, etc).
Another satisfied Arc Browser user.
Tried it, immediately uninstalled on finding it needed a mandatory account created.
Safari has the best functionality with regard to the other Apple tools you may be using (password storage, Apple Pay, etc.). Firefox is my go-to though because of the Mozilla foundation. Ungoogled Chromium is the best from a user-privacy and control standpoint.
How does chromium have better privacy than Firefox?
I’m not sure how much better privacy Chromium has; it is “degoogled” by default but that doesn’t mean it’s necessairly more private.
If you wanted better privacy and control then Librewolf is probably the better option - it is Firefox stripped of the telemetry tools, default google search links (which are minimal in Firefox, just default search engine) and privacy hardened (including HTTPS only & default install of Ublock Origin extension)
Because op does’nt know what he is talking about
That wasn’t the OP 😂
Op of the comment
Fair enough 👍🏻
Run Wireshark with a basic Firefox install and get back to me when you’re not dumb as shit. The other commenter has an argument with Librewolf.
Firefox, is just a REAL alternative, it is more human focused, is it owned by less evil company? Yes. ( I know chromium is MIT, but they can just remove it and everybody is fucked )
No point in reasoning with someone like that.
Librewolf or firefox is definitely better than ungoogled chromium lmao
The Apple integration is probably the main reason I use Safari I think; the likes of Apple Pay, Touch ID/Face ID all just works. I’d love that ability in Firefox and then I’d probably use it exclusively.
Maybe Brave?
Tried it, kinda liked it, but then read a lot of shady stuff about them not being as privacy-focused as they’re made out to be.
I might give Arc a go, not sure how good/popular it is though. But I think anything other than Safari will be a compromise because of the Apple Pay/Touch ID/Face ID integration.
Yeah I know about that stuff too, but in my personal POV still with the downsides I believe it’s the best option for me, maybe Firefox/LibreWolf + uBlock?
