Are there any good browsers that are not either Chromium or Net scape based?

[Harry Voyager]

Question is in the title. Was thinking it might be good to be on a different basic browser platform than the rest of the world, but it looks like pretty much every browser out there (aside from IE) is based on Chrome or Firefox. Is there really no other browser engine option out there? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Apple's safari? Its webkit based. Its pretty common, esp in the mobile space.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Pretty much everything in active use is either Blink (Google), Gecko (Mozilla), or WebKit (Apple).

[Harry Voyager]

@Electronics Wizardy @Mira YurizakiI was looking at Safari, but it says they discontinued Windows support in 2012. Are there other, reasonable WebKit based browsers that still support Windows? 

[Mira Yurizaki]

18 hours ago, Harry Voyager said:

@Electronics Wizardy @Mira YurizakiI was looking at Safari, but it says they discontinued Windows support in 2012. Are there other, reasonable WebKit based browsers that still support Windows? 

Midori

[Kisai]

On 1/15/2020 at 5:20 PM, Harry Voyager said:

Question is in the title. Was thinking it might be good to be on a different basic browser platform than the rest of the world, but it looks like pretty much every browser out there (aside from IE) is based on Chrome or Firefox. Is there really no other browser engine option out there? 

Opera, and "new" Edge are based on Chromium, not "Chrome". If you download a vanilla Chromium build (eg nw.js) you get basically Chrome without all the google integrations. These all use the V8 Javascript engine. Iron Browser is basically Crippled Chrome. Vivaldi is a customization fork.

 

Firefox, only Firefox is really based on firefox. It uses the Spidermonkey javascript engine. Waterfox is just a crippled Firefox now, based on old firefox code, however was the original 64-bit build of Firefox. Pale moon is even worse and is based on ancient firefox code.

 

Webkit-based browers that are not based on Chromium are Apple's Webkey (Safari) which itself was based on KHTML (Konquerer.) Chrome and Safari's Webkit deviate in 2013. Safari uses it's own SquirrelFish Javascript engine.

 

The problem, is that basically using anything but release versions of Chrome, Firefox or Edge is asking for security problems. Ideally, you would only use the OS-provided browser (eg Safari on iOS/OSX or Edge on Win10,) as that will be updated with the OS updates. However a better proposal is to use the OS-provided browser only with the OS services (eg outlook.com on Windows, iCloud on iOS/OSX) and use Firefox, Chrome, or even Opera on Windows/OSX to keep separate browsing contexts up. For example. run your outlook email only in Edge, run your gmail in firefox, run your youtube's and netflix's on chrome, etc. That way if you happen to stumble upon a malware-ridden site you're only exposing the one browser context rather than using one browser for everything and risking saved passwords and credit cards being probed out of the browser. (Good Grief, please stop auto-filling forms unprompted browsers.)

 

[Harry Voyager]

@KisaiI'll admit, I hate the autofill function and the continual requires to remember everything. And every time I think I've turned it off and cleared it out *poof* Would you like Chrome/Google/Everyone under the sun to remember this credit card/home address/underwear size?  

 

I haven't even typed it in yet, yet it already knows and has helpfully filled it all in for me. 

 

I wonder how long it's going to be before our credit cards are validated by our face, which has been conveniently digitized and available for printing at your friendly public library 3D printer, with life like skin texture added for you to add to your blow up robotic doll collection...

 

I'd say my only consolation is nobody would want my face on their robot blow up doll, except this is the Internet, and as with most things Rule 34, I probably just do. not. want. to. know. and should just leave it at that. 

 

At least we're not at the point where my neighbors housebots are drugging me to make sure they have good neighborhood pool party... 

[Sir0Tek]

@Kisai

Quote

Waterfox is just a crippled Firefox now, based on old firefox code, however was the original 64-bit build of Firefox. Pale moon is even worse and is based on ancient firefox code.

It's been a while you'd took a look on Waterfox, I assume? It split into a current and a classic edition, the current is definitely not just a crippled Firefox. I couldn't warm up with Palemoon anyway, but it's not using ancient code. It does use a fork of Gecko called Goanna.

[Dat Guy]

I usually have w3m (command-line based) and NetSurf (its very own thing) installed - both are incapable of rendering "web applications", but I couldn't care less.