I’m in the same boat as a lot of you. Firefox on my Linux machines, Chrome on the Windows side, mostly because a few sites I need for school and a couple government portals just behave better on Chromium. Which kind of proves the meme’s point.
The part that gets me, as someone still in school for IT, is that the monoculture is honestly convenient on the support side. One engine means one thing to test against, one set of quirks, one set of fixes. And that’s exactly how we ended up in the IE days. Everybody built for the dominant browser because it was easier, right up until it wasn’t.
@andreas nailed why nobody builds their own engine. It’s basically writing an OS at this point. That’s why I’m rooting for Ladybird even though I won’t be daily driving it anytime soon. Having one truly independent engine out there keeps everybody a little more honest.
On Brave, I get @MadGoat’s take. Shields out of the box is legit good, and the sync without an account is a nice touch if you hop machines a lot. The crypto stuff and a couple of past controversies make some people side eye it, but most of that can be switched off. For somebody who needs Chromium compatibility and doesn’t want to babysit extensions, it’s hard to argue with.
Since this turned into a browser roundup, here are a few security focused ones that don’t come up much:
Trivalent from the secureblue project. Hardened Chromium for desktop Linux that ports over the patches from Vanadium, the browser GrapheneOS ships. The devs are upfront that it’s a security browser, not a privacy browser, which is why they won’t bring back Manifest V2. Catch is it’s built for the Fedora family only.
Mullvad Browser. Basically Tor Browser without the Tor network, built with the Tor Project. The whole idea is making every user look the same so fingerprinting has nothing to grab onto. Pair it with any VPN you trust.
Cromite. The successor to Bromite. Chromium with ad blocking and anti fingerprinting baked in, and it runs on Linux, Windows, and Android.
Arkenfox. Not a browser, it’s a hardened user.js config for Firefox. If you’re already living in about:config like @Jymm, this is the deep end of that pool. Fair warning, it will break some sites until you tune it.
Funny part is most of the hardcore security browsers are Chromium based too, because a lot of security folks consider Chromium’s sandboxing and site isolation stronger than Firefox’s. So even the people trying to escape Google’s influence are building on Google’s engine. Kind of the whole thread in one sentence.
And +1 to @Jymm on about:config generally. Being able to actually change how the browser behaves instead of just picking a theme is a big reason I keep coming back to Firefox.
