What should I be looking for in a browser?

Elarion · February 7, 2020

I used Chrome for about 4 years, and then started using Opera, for about another 4 years now. Chrome was always really nice for the syncing between mobile and all of my PCs. Worked way better than Opera, for the most part. I really love how Opera works out of the box though. The Speed Dial and Sidebar are fantastic, as I use Messenger to communicate with many people. The dark theme is also fantastic.

I've had many people tell me I should try making the jump to Firefox though, for many reasons, whether it's the reason of Open Source and Privacy, or reasons such as the more obscure "Firefox Send" and their other features. I tried getting into it, and after about a week, I was still running into things I wanted to change. I never did get a sidebar as nice as Opera's, and the default dark theme does make right click menus and many other things dark. They're still quite bright. I tried using third party addons like Shadowfox to fix this, but then that broke other parts of the browser.

Most forums/reddits that I've asked in gave me highly biased answers, and they didn't really explain their reasoning, so I figured I'd ask here.

What exactly should I be looking for in a browser? Is Firefox's open source nature worth the "out of the box" issues that I have with it? Or should I just continue using Opera?

abernalmac · February 7, 2020

Opera has been having some problems lately. Since the aquisition by a Chinese company and the change of CEO I personally stopped using it.

Maybe give this a read: https://www.ghacks.net/2020/01/19/what-is-going-on-at-opera-software/

I've been using Firefox and so far so good, since I didn't use many of the features that you mention.

homeap5 · February 8, 2020

Try Vivaldi - another chrome clone, but really interesting.

Elarion · February 8, 2020

4 hours ago, homeap5 said:

Try Vivaldi - another chrome clone, but really interesting.

I did try Vivaldi, and I really loved the customization...but it was a little much for me haha. Maybe someday I'll take another look at it, when I have a few days to just go through and set everything perfectly.