Browsers of Choice
2015/10/26
I can recall when I launched Nautilus for the first time, on a Mandrake Linux, back in 2003. There was also Mozilla. Back then there was no Firefox nor Chrome. There was a Chromium, but it was an arcade space shooter.
I'm a Firefox user since a long time, pretty much since when it started to appear on GNU/Linux distributions. Lately I'm not so satisfied with it. It became painfully obvious in its limitation. It's so damn bloated. On the other hand I gave a try to a number of different products, and eventually I always get back on Firefox.
Periodically I think I should take the steep learning curve, and learn how to use (and customize!) Uzbl. I tried Kazehakase and crashes beyond any acceptance. I can live with Midori, which has got a real nice website, but sometimes it simply doesn't work as I expect. TOday I started to use Qupzilla, and I have to say I liked the experience so far. It's early to say, but maybe I found somethng decent.
The big deal with browsers
If you look at them from the Unix perspective, modern browsers are inherently wrong. The Unix principle is: do just one thing, do it well, and speak strings, which is a common language for everyone.
I'm not saying that Unix is perfect. The string thing, for starters, is totally wrong. The world is not entirely English, and encoding is a problem!
But the Do one thing, do it well is a good principle! And browsers do many thing. And apparently do everything wrong. So, nowadays most people use the browser for basically anything. It does everythng, often with quircks and annoyance, it leaks sensitive data, it runs arbitrary code from the Internet.
What I think is relevant
For me it is extremely difficult to find a good browser. And I tried many of them. There are a number of things I search and look for, when evaluating a browser…
Start-up speed. And here is where Firefox has some real problem. Midori does good here! The program startup is almost immediate on my machine! Qupzilla is reasonably fast.
Control. Everything I tried kind of failed here. Probably Uzbl would win the cake, with the non-trivial condition of knowing how it works! The kind of things I always say I should give a try, eventually…
A decent Private Browsing handling. Again Firefox fails here: if you spawn two private browsing window they will share the session and this ain't good! Here Midori is ok, and Qupzilla fails. This includes Decent privacy settings. I really care for privacy, and apparently there's no way of gettings some. The best here is the TOR Bundle Browser. It simply beats all my very specific settings in terms of leakage of fingerprint data. On the other hand it is not alwyas practical to spawn Tor. Not to mention slow.
…In conclusion, a big mess. I'm never satisfied entirely.
There are many other products I should give a try. Maybe, eventually, I will find the one which sucks less. This is a good starting point, I believe.