After I had updated Brave browser on my computer last week, the browser couldn’t start any more, freezing and consuming processor time on startup forever without displaying anything. A few days later, I’ve found the problem occurs when vertical tabs are enabled. Apparently, there is no real quality assurance at Brave and there was no response to a serious bug after a week. Time to stop using Brave?
Not so easy.
I stopped using Firefox as my primary web browser several years ago. The project had been committing suicide for too long. I decided it wasn’t worth to bother with a dying web browser and its problems (most notably broken sites, Firefox was apparently getting ignored by web developers) any more. Better to focus on something that is more likely to survive. Nothing has changed since then, Firefox and its ecosystem decline further. Just one simple example: Look at the number of users of Vimium, “The Hacker’s Browser”, at Chrome and Firefox extension sites. For an extension whose users are likely being biased towards Firefox, there are currently ten times more of them who use the extension in Chromium based web browsers.
Unfortunately, the same problem applies to Zen browser, which is basically a more user friendly Firefox.
Chromium is spyware AFAIK (this is one of the reasons why Brave exists).
What other free software alternatives are there? I’m not aware of any serious one.
I don’t care about features, all the “modern” web browsers are primitive and basically the same as for the user interface (no, I don’t think different themes make significant difference). One can still meet innovative concepts from time to time. I liked Nyxt but the problem is the browser has never worked for me, freezing or crashing several times per day, whatever I tried. The problem might be the WebKit backend; WebKit also removed some hopes for us Emacs users when it irreparably stopped working in Emacs. So I no longer hope for having a user friendly web browser that works. I couldn’t imagine 20 years ago that I’ll get excited in 2025 when Google finally figures out that displaying two tabs side-by-side can be useful…
How about a web browser that at least works? This is not the first time when I wonder what kind of quality assurance Google, Mozilla, or Brave do. I’ve seen annoying bugs in Chrome, Firefox and Brave. Sometimes lasting for months.
Should I simply stick with Brave then? I don’t like its business model based on cryptocurrencies and other questionable business practices, so I’m inclined to move elsewhere. But where to go?
A popular proprietary web browser is Vivaldi. Last time I looked at it, I wasn’t impressed. It’s just another proprietary web browser without any killer feature. But it promises privacy at least. Both Vivaldi and Brave are based on Chromium so they are likely to share the same Chromium flaws and bugs. They differ in its licenses (Brave being free software) and business models (Vivaldi with a much better one). What should I prefer?
Is there any other reasonable option? And is there any hope that we’ll still have any useable alternative to Chrome in future? We haven’t learned from the Netscape lesson and failed again.
Leave a Reply