Best browser these days

So a little discussion in the un-gif thread has me thinking about browsers. I’ve been a chrome user for a few years now after I felt like firefox shit the bed. Now I am finding that chrome is doing little things that annoy me. Is chrome still as good as it gets or has some other browser surpassed it?

I use both Chrome and Firefox, and both have little things that annoy me. But all the other options I’ve tried have bigger things that annoy me. I think it’s just a matter of picking your least un-liked annoyances.

For me it comes down to the plugins available more than the browser itself. At least for now, the plugin landscape for Firefox still outshines Chrome - mostly because of the “Tree Style Tab” plugin which Chrome can’t imitate (at this point, most other plugins have Chrome clones).

For many people, Palemoon - an alternate Windows-specific build of Firefox - undoes some of the less popular UI decisions of modern Firefox, but otherwise maintains parity with security and plugin use. A nice alternative to switching to Chrome if your dislike of Firefox is UI-centered.

Yep, both are still fine.

Mouse gestures are critical to me and all the mouse gesture addons suck in Chrome, so I use Firefox.

Spartan coming out in the fall in Windows 10 might be interesting. Word on the street is the IE has caught up with chrome, and the hope is that the spartan update will rebrand the browser and draw more people to it. And also more people will use BING.

Ditto. Mouse gestures are essential.

Hahahahahaha. Wait, you’re serious?

MS has been so stupendously behind on something that has become a critical app for sooooo long, I will be amazed if they can close that gap in one version release.

Pale Moon.

Firefox’s UI sucks the big one, PM’s is far better and 95%+ of Firefox addons work with it anyway. (And there’s specialised versions of a few which don’t like AdBlock)

(Of those I’ve used one doesn’t, an ePub reader with some really, really finicky requirements (and there’s good reason for that))

Edit: And I hope all the firefox addons you used are actively updated - they’re introducing a signing requirement, and addon authors are going to have to go through the (annoying and fail-prone) Mozilla process even if they’re not distributing by AMO.

Be careful using forked, alternate browsers. It’s very much a best-effort DIY project with the smaller ones. Something of a Webkit-offshoot called Midori caught my eye but it has a crashing on startup bug with Windows 8.x that hasn’t been resolved since 2013 since there’s a lack of contributors, for example.

Pale Moon’s been around for years, rei, and it’s actively updated. It’s a fully-featured Gecko-based browser.

It’s decided differently on pretty much all the annoying descisions Firefox has made over the last few years.
(It’s also, like Waterfox, faster because it cuts out support for ancient PC’s, and has dropped i.e. XP support and SSLv3)

Gotcha.

Yea np, wasn’t trying to sound testy :)

I’ve used various experimental browsers in the past myself.

My main browser addons are xmarks and 1password, so I’m pretty much forced to stick with the Big Three (IE, Chrome, Firefox). Mainly I use Firefox.

The vast majority of Firefox addons work with Pale Moon, Gordon.

(There’s a incompatability list, neither of those are on it)

Sounds like pale moon is the way to go. Going to give it a whirl tomorrow.

Ever since chrome came out I have been a big proponent of it and that still mostly holds true to today. I can see using Firefox for certain addons but for everybody else they should be using chrome - especially if they are not a security expert.

Chrome’s issue animated gifs on a single page is however pretty annoying, so I just went and tried out firefox and was pleasantly surprised to see how far they have come. It’s very… chrome like now. But memory isn’t an issue for me so really prefer the one process per page model of Chrome overall.

Timely thread, I’d been starting to feel Firefox to be a bit sluggish. I remember when Firefox was the bomb, then it got clogged up and I switched to Chrome for a while, then Firefox got better again, and now it’s sluggish again.

But I just installed Palemoon, and the 64 bit version is quite noticeably faster than Firefox for me. Retained most of plugin suite (only had to change Adblock to the Palemoon version).

Thanks thread!

(Oh, and the migration tool works like a charm!)

One version? IE hasn’t completely sucked since IE8 has it? IE11 is the current version.

IE9 and 10 still sucked.

1Password needs to be on that list. I confirmed it’s incompatible.