The Firefox ToC discussion pushed me down the browser engine rabbit hole (again). Have you had a chance to daily drive some really good but obscure web engine that is not Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Apple) and Blink (Chromium)? How viable is it for a complete switch - this includes banking, chatting, logging into websites, etc.
Edit: Added link to the Firefox discussion to give better context to my question.
LibreWolf. Vanadium
Librewolf on desktop and ironfox on mobile. The prior for over a year and the latter a few months. Occasionally need to use something else on desktop that needs webgl or similar. I don’t want to change librewolf setting so I use something else. Usually a work related thing anyway
GNOME Web (Epiphany)
I kind of daily drive it as I made webapps with it for some services I host (which Firefox still doesn’t offer natively)
The UI is quite nice but it isn’t always the smoothest in terms of performances. Still, a very respectable effort
I decided on LibreWolf for work, Mullvad for sensitive search such as places near me, Firefox for random stuff and Tor for piracy sites. I’m currently looking to replace Firefox as well
I2P
I use 4 different browsers, on desktop and mobile. No standard browser.
I’m really hoping the new ladybird browser is delivered sooner than expected
Zen for desktop: https://zen-browser.app/
Ironfox for mobile: https://ironfoxoss.org/
Is Arc considered obscure?
Only IceCat and Librewolf
Zen
I’m going to stick with some form of Firefox fork, personally. Chromium forks are questionable, as if I recall right they include a binary blob provided by google, which could be hiding god knows what.
Firefox is fully open source, so any code supporting this potential data harvesting can’t hide, and will be removed by most forks.
I used librewolf until there was some concern about them updating in a timely manner.
Now I used Firefox with Phoenix to maybe get the best of both worlds and IronFox on mobile.
with the recent news of a ToS from FF which forks would you recommend as a daily driver to replace FF?
Mullvad Browser is a good one; it’s a partnership between Mullvad and the Tor Project.
Librewolf has been solid for me. I’ve seen others plug waterfox as well
Fennec (Firefox based)
Please don’t bank with a bleeding edge web engine that isn’t forked from one that’s been around for decades. It’s really not secure to use things that people haven’t had time to attack yet.
I don’t think there are any viable engines other than the three you mention. Other browsers than the three you mention are viable, I am typing this in LibreWolf, but they are all based on one of these three engines.
I recently tried Ladybird and it crashes e.g. when I try to access my Lemmy instance. Definitely not viable yet in 2025, but this doesn’t mean it must remain so.
