this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
43 points (85.2% liked)

Technology

60016 readers
2871 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I know “best” is subjective, but as someone who’s entrenched in the Apple ecosystem I always used to use the stock apps: Reminders, Calendar, Mail, Podcasts and, of course, Safari.

But over time I’ve moved away from some of those apps, towards things that work better than the stock apps but also still sync with my other Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, Watch): Things and Todoist (because I can’t decide on one over the other), Fantastical, Mail (still), Overcast… but I tend to hover between browsers.

I mainly use Safari, and try to use profiles to separate personal and work stuff. But over the years I’ve also tried Firefox, I’ve tried Brave and more recently I’ve tried Arc. But I just can’t make my mind up.

So I was curious what your browser of choice is (and also, if you have any other views on the best stock app replacements - including alternatives to the ones I listed above for GTD, calendars, email and podcasts (don’t get me started on the “best” search engine!), I’d be interested to get your opinions.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Fun fact, there's only 3 real choices.

There's Firefox, Chromium and Safari.

Every other browser is essentially a skin of one of those.

I would suggest using Firefox or one of its spin off versions.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Yeah I know they’re all based on one of three, but they are all subtly different in what they offer.

So whilst there are three main engines, there are definitely more than three choices.

Bottom of the pile for me is Chrome - I don’t use anything Google knowingly/willingly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Personally, I use the ESR version of Firefox so I don't regularly get unneeded updates.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

With respect, I disagree. Rendering pages quickly and reliably is table stakes and all modern browsers do a great job of that. It doesn't really matter at all what rendering engine is under the hood as long as it works well.

I'm glad we have three rendering engines, especially since the largest two are backed by companies who don't always do what's right for the web... but three is enough. More than that would honestly be a waste of effort, I prefer the current situation with hundreds of browsers who pool resources and work together on a rendering engine that is shared by other browsers.

What really separates one browser from another is the toolbars and other user interface elements around the webpage. And Blink/WebKit/Gecko don't provide any of that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Sure, let me know if I'm following this train of thought by drawing a parallel.

If we swapped out rendering engine with game engines. It would be best if we kept to a few game engines and focused on the game mechanics and story?

In that spirit, I would agree with you. Much like the examples you provided, its more about who or what controls the full stack of experience. It's just, quickly thinking about this I'm struggling to find a compelling reason to use a browser beyond the basics. Since the core features I seem to require are satisfied in any browser that isn't provided by an entity that puts capital interests before the user too harshly. Plus the addition of an adblocker and custom theming.

Ultimately, it just needs to show the webpage safely and precisely how it was intended to be seen, without ads. Through the support of extensions, I suspect that would satisfy any additional requirement someone could desire or imagine without the need to delve much deeper into custom browsers. At least, a browser for general use without a specific purpose. But perhaps I'm misjudging the capacity of those potential extensions in the face of a customized browser?

I suspect, how opera paints a bunch of features down the left side may be hard to replicate on another?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Game engines are a lot simpler than a web rendering engine, so I'm not sure it's a good comparison.

Gecko (the FireFox rendering engine) dates back to 1997. And KHTML — the common ancestor shared by Blink/Webkit (Chrome/Safari) is maybe one or two years younger - I wasn't able to find a source. An insane amount of work, by millions of people if you include minor contributes, has gone into those rendering engines.

Creating another one would be an insane amount of work... assuming you want it to be competitive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Sure, Gecko, WebKit and Blink are the 3 big rendering engines, but browser chrome isn’t just a colorful skin. The browser chrome can be have a pretty big impact on experience.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

90% of the times, I use Firefox. 10%, I'll go for Safari...

Actually that might be 99% and 1%, respectively :)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago

I started using Firefox since the beginning of this year, and frankly surprised by how smooth it is. All browsers being fairly similar, I would rather use Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I don't have a Mac but I can offer you a viewpoint: in general it is better to compartmentalise your data and if you're using products by the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta etc) then to separate date between them as much as possible. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

If you're on a Mac, you're in Apple's ecosystem. In some ways they provide better privacy as they're not as dependent on advertising like Google for example, however they do have advertising buisness and are still mining your data and profiling you as it's their business to sell you stuff whether that's more Apple hardware or digital content.

So I personally wouldn't be using all their various apps without knowing in detail what data is going to them. Web browsers, email and calendars are data gold mines, as are anywhere you shop for content such as App stores, music, video etc.

If I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox so as to wall off as much as my data from Apple as possible. I'd also consider Thunderbird for email & calendar to remove Apple from that data trove. I personally also pay for my email service rather than using anything bundled in (i.e. iCloud) - the reason being you're not beholden to one provider longterm and can access and migrate your data on other devices (e.g. not Apple in the case of iCloud).

Apple tries to sell itself as a bastion of privacy. It's not - it's probably a bit better than some of it's competitors but it still is involved in user tracking and selling data to advertisers. They made a fanfare about letting users disable advertiser tracking on iPhones but what they didn't make as much noise about is that they actually built the tracking tools in the first place, and they've been building their advertising business as the services side of Apple is big money (it's app store, it's content etc)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Do you have a source on Apple selling user data?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I've done iOS/Mac app development — Apple doesn't "sell" data to me, but they absolutely provide me with extensive user tracking data for free (well, for $99 per year, but that's effectively free). As far as I know they also provide data to other third parties, such as in the news app But app developers is the big one.

The data is anonymised, but I assure you it's very detailed. Detailed enough that some companies probably cross reference it with other tracking and are able to link the data they get from Apple to real people.

Thankfully the tracking is opt-in, but users are forced to make a choice and encouraged to enable tracking and I'd argue they really aren't being educated properly on what they're handing over before making a decision. I can't really blame Apple for that, who wants to spend hours learning how Apple's tracking methods work? But it is a fact that Apple does collect a lot of data and they do share it.

Personally I have spent hours doing that research and I'm not OK with what they track — I opt out. And while my own software does have some tracking, it's a lot less detailed than the tracking Apple does. It's just basic analytics (roughly how many users do I have and what country are they from?) and crash reporting which is (thankfully) rare with my software and therefore useless for any invasive tracking. The vast majority of people using my apps never experience a crash (and that's only possible because I track crashes).

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for this. I did ask OP for a source on Apple selling user data. It sounds like you're saying that they don't.

There's always a rush to include Apple with the other big tech firms that certainly do harvest and sell user data, I guess some people just love to hate on Apple. I get popups on a fresh install of an Apple OS and on first launching certain apps that asks me outright if I want to send usage data to Apple. It's pretty upfront about this. Like you said, it's anonymized so it can't be used to target me with ads based on my browsing history. They also have the Private Relay feature on MacOS and Hide My Email, they didn't have to do that. There's also something called Advanced Data Protection that I haven't messed around with.

Detailed enough that some companies probably cross reference it with other tracking and are able to link the data they get from Apple to real people.

Do you haven't any evidence for this? I doubt that's something Apple would be happy about.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It sounds like you’re saying that they don’t.

Honestly, I think you're really arguing over the technical definition of "sell".

get popups on a fresh install of an Apple OS and on first launching certain apps that asks me outright if I want to send usage data to Apple

Yeah but do you know what data is being sent? Most people have no idea (you might, I'm just saying most people). My position is if people don't know what's in the data, then they aren't really agreeing to it with full knowledge.

Do you haven’t any evidence for this?

I've seen the data (from my own apps), and I can see how easy it is to link crash reports to users. Crash reports include a unique device identifier and also loads of information about the device the moment it crashed. It's trivial to compare all of that data to other data the app collects and find out which user the crash report belongs to.

I doubt that’s something Apple would be happy about.

I'm sure it's a violation of the terms of service, but developers violate those all the time and enforcement is almost unheard of. When Apple catches an app breaking the rules, they usually just tell the developer to stop. Damage is already done by then.

Have a listen to this to get an idea how widespread this is: https://subclub.com/episode/app-store-ethics-dark-patterns-and-rule-breakers-steve-p-young-app-masters

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

And this, my friend, is exactly what I came here for. Very insightful, informative and measured answer. Thank you for taking the time 👍🏻

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I am on the Apple ecosystem as well. I use Safari with ad blockers and a few other extensions. If a website gives me problems, I switch to Firefox. I don't think I have ever been "served" an advertisement for an Apple product from Apple. To my knowledge, they are not using my data for things like that, and if they are, they are being far cleverer about it than I am able to deduce. That said, I am almost completely switched over to Proton Mail, and am slowly moving to the entire Proton Suite. I was in fact getting ready to move all my icloud.com files To Proton Drive so I can stop paying Apple $10 a month for 2TB of cloud storage. I'm still working on the password thing. If anyone knows of an easy way to switch, and can report that it is as effective as the icloud password system, by all means let me know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I have/had a ProtonMail account, and whilst it was great, I believe it was only end-to-end encrypted when sending emails to other people using ProtonMail…? Or at least that was my understanding at the time.

The apps back then weren’t particularly polished, so I ended up migrating everything back to iCloud.

To be honest, I don’t seem to have any issues with iCloud and everything just works. But that’s the problem with Apple, and how they “get” you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

don’t put all your eggs in one basket

That's a good approach - but there's a better one. If at all possible stick to software that uses standard data formats and is able to interact with other software. For example Lemmy uses Markdown (a standard) and it can interact with other software (on the fediverse).

If we ever decide to stop using Lemmy, there's a good chance all of the valuable content we're writing — like this discussion — will live on in whatever other software we decide to switch to instead of Lemmy. Because being Markdown, it's easy to import, and being on the fediverse, it will be easy to transition to a replacement gradually over time with the new software and lemmy both being used at the same time during a potentially years long transition period.

Unfortunately I don't know of any (good) web browser that does that. It's certainly possible for bookmarks/tabs/settings/etc to be synced between browsers, but in general browsers only ever support once off imports, they never actively maintain a shared set of data between browsers.

But there's an out — extensions. For example I don't use the password manager built into my browser. I use a browser extension for passwords and my password manager has an extension for all browsers. Obviously as locked down as passwords need to be, I don't want my passwords accessible outside that app/those extensions, but it does have a good import/export feature and I have used it to test other password managers. I should really look for a good extension that manages bookmarks well and syncs them between browsers.

I were on Apple, I would be using Firefox

I dunno if that's true. There are some really good browsers on the Mac that I suspect don't run (or don't run well) on whatever operating system you do use. Access to awesome Mac only software is the reason I use a Mac, even though I don't particularly like the company Apple has become (they were a wonderful company 20 years ago in my opinion).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I run Linux but only and recommend Firefox. Cross device sync is the best I've ever seen, the add ons library is good, you can theme it and it works well for me. Plus there's no chrome bs on there and the privacy defaults are good.

For search I use Google because it's still the best. And the others typically just give you Google results anyway. If you want Google results but without the tracking, in theory, look at Startpage.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Safari has the best functionality with regard to the other Apple tools you may be using (password storage, Apple Pay, etc.). Firefox is my go-to though because of the Mozilla foundation. Ungoogled Chromium is the best from a user-privacy and control standpoint.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (5 children)

How does chromium have better privacy than Firefox?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I'm not sure how much better privacy Chromium has; it is "degoogled" by default but that doesn't mean it's necessairly more private.

If you wanted better privacy and control then Librewolf is probably the better option - it is Firefox stripped of the telemetry tools, default google search links (which are minimal in Firefox, just default search engine) and privacy hardened (including HTTPS only & default install of Ublock Origin extension)

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

The Apple integration is probably the main reason I use Safari I think; the likes of Apple Pay, Touch ID/Face ID all just works. I’d love that ability in Firefox and then I’d probably use it exclusively.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Librewolf or firefox is definitely better than ungoogled chromium lmao

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I’ve been using arc for about a year now and love it. It’s not perfect but I got used to having a full screen web window and grouped tabbed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Arc for sure! It’s chromium based, unfortunately, but has unparalleled tab and workspace management, and is unfairly sleek and nice looking!

Other than that, Firefox is always nice, and Orion is interesting as well.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Safari's fast, less crashy, highest privacy protections, and uses less memory per tab; I often have hundreds of tabs so that's important. It also has the best inspector, much better than Firebug. Add in StopTheMadness and an adblocker (currently using Ghostery), and it's pretty great.

Degoogled Chromium is useful for sites that don't work in Safari, or as a sandbox I don't mind crashing in development.

I've given up on Firefox, it's too fat and bloated.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I mostly use Linux but have a Mac Mini as a TV PC. I use the same browser everywhere - LibreWolf. It's Firefox but with Mozilla's bullshit adware/sponsored garbage removed and some extra privacy-focused features/default settings. Firefox has become adware itself, with its home page having sponsored garbage and suggested stories from partners. I generally love what Mozilla is doing and we need competition in the browser space, but I don't want Mozilla spamming up my homepage with their "suggestions".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Moved to Firefox when adblock stopped working on Safari. The biggest hurdle was moving away from Keychain for password manager. Everything else was a non issue since now iOS allow others as default browser.

Email and calendar I’m on Spark, not ideal, but it works for my workflow.

Notes: Simplenote, better syncing across platforms and free.

Overcast, Spotify for music, quite generic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

So I had been using Orion for about a year with good results. It’s modified webkit so it feels like Safari but supports Chrome and Firefox plugins and has anti-fingerprinting/privacy measures.

I switched away after the situation a month or so ago with Kagi (same dev) adding Brave to their search and being a general ass to the people that raised concerns.

Currently I am using Librewolf, a privacy focused fork of Firefox, which has preformed really well. The only real issue I have is not being able to auto-fill sms 2FA codes like Safari.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Way back in the day, the best browser was OmniWeb. It was truly awesome but quite expensive (I think a license was about $60?). Unfortunately they didn't have the resources to keep up as CSS/JavaScript became more complex. It still worked for the vast majority of websites when they gave up on development, but the writing was on the wall and they weren't selling enough licenses to hire a large team. Also back then the only open source browser was FireFox and it's always been a really complex rendering engine to work with (there's a reason everybody uses Blink or WebKit as the foundation for their browser).

As far as I know, OmniWeb is the only (major) browser that was exclusively designed for the Mac (and NeXT before that). Even Safari historically ran on Windows and the current version borrows quite a lot of UI conventions from the iOS version. OmniWeb was a proper Mac browser. In fact back in the early days of Mac OS X OmniWeb wasn't just the best Mac Browser, it was arguably the best Mac App in general. They'd been working on it for decades when other Mac apps were either brand Cocoa apps or else still using Carbon (the compatibility layer between MacOS 9 and MacOS X).

OmniWeb is kinda-sorta-alive as a side project, using WebKit now instead of their proprietary engine, and the latest "test build" was released just a couple months ago. But the last stable/officially supported version of OmniWeb 5 shipped twelve years ago. It's somewhat dated now, for example the URL bar is the full width of the window and you can't change that - a hold back from the days when even desktop computer screens were only 800 pixels wide or even less. https://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb/

One of the early developers of OmniWeb (retired a long time ago) once claimed OmniWeb is older than World Wide Web (generally recognised as the first ever web browser) but given the internet didn't exist back then he wasn't able to point to any strong evidence. Wikipedia lists 1995 as the release date for OmniWeb, however he said that date is wrong and it was distributed years earlier (obviously not on the web — there was no other web browser so you had to get it some other way).


These days, I think the best web browser (and therefore also the best Mac browser) is Arc. It's not exclusively a Mac app, but it is written in SwiftUI and the iOS/Windows versions are quite different - Arc respects platform specific UI conventions and different use cases (especially on a phone).

Hers's a link to download it: https://arc.net/gift/70d85b6 (unfortunately you do need to sign up with an email account, since Arc is "software as a service" and (like OmniWeb did) they eventually plan to start charging for certain features. I'm OK with that personally, you do need an account to sync tabs between devices which I see as a must have feature).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

IMHO everybody should have multiple browsers for day to day work. It's been this way for over a decade. Have a default and then have side browsers that have their strengths. For the Apple ecosystem, Safari is still the best default imho. Firefox is my number 2. I try to avoid anything Google related but use brave if I need web usb.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

For Mac I use ARC browser. It's a bit different in UI than most browsers but it does some things I really like. It's heavily optimised for keyboard commands, and it has separate "spaces" which you can create and define (e.g. personal, work, etc).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Tried it, immediately uninstalled on finding it needed a mandatory account created.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago

Another satisfied Arc Browser user.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Safari. Firefox borks out on so many websites for me. Safari “just works.”

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Got an example of a page that does not work in Firefox?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I like Vivaldi, which is Chromium based. I also like Safari for the speed. Difficult to choose between the two. The feature that Vivaldi has and Safari hasn't, which I'm missing in Safari, is tab auto-refresh.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

At what point do you use tab auto refresh?

I am genuinely curious.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Websites that aren't updated live themselves; typically news websites and the like.

load more comments
view more: next ›