What browsers to use?

[taersh]

Hi.

Apart from Google and Mozilla browsers, what browsers are available and good for a use?

[mikewalsh]

Christ. "How long's a piece of string?"

Mozilla and the Chromium Project have, between them, pretty well got the market sewn-up, Rainer. AFAIK, the only other technology in general use - if you want a graphical browser, that is - is WebKit.....and most of those are seriously lacking in usability.

Think Netsurf? Midori? Wouldn't give 'em house-room.....

There is Falkon - from the KDE Project - derived, so I believe, from Qupzilla. PhilB says this was seriously fast in some tests he performed with it, even beating out most of the Chromium clones.... (??!?) Never tried it, so I can't comment, I'm afraid.

The sad fact of the matter is, many websites now insist on a pretty up-to-date version of one of the 'clones' - preferably Chrome itself. It's kind of reached the same situation as that obtaining in the late 90s/early 00s, where if you didn't run Internet Exploder many websites wouldn't give you the time of day., let alone condescend to actually function!

That's an indication of the kind of strangle-hold Google has over the web at present.....

(*shrug*)

What d'you mainly use a browser for?

Mike.

[taersh]

Mainly I'm browsing this here forum and linuxmusicians.com
Sequentially I also need to upload songs to soundcloud / videos to dailymotion and downloading from youtube.
Checking Email and Ebay as well.

So, not very much internet activity so far.

I posted this by using Opera. But I'm not sure if it's either Mozilla and/or Google based/connected.

Edit: Opera doesn't allow to roll up its window, so not good!

[mikewalsh]

@taersh :-

It's Chromium-based, I'm afraid. Opera hasn't been an "independent" for quite some time.....and a Chinese firm, Qihoo 360 (who have a somewhat 'shady' reputation in the Windows world) are now majority shareholders.

It's still being developed by the same team of Norwegians, though.

Mike.

[Wiz57]

@mikewalsh

" Internet Exploder" Hahahaha!! I remember those days...guess what I did! I hacked my Windows 3.1
(yes Win31) mshtml.dll and changed all references from Explorer to Exploder! By gosh, it worked, and
for a couple of years my IE 3.03 would report itself to websites as Internet Exploder! "You must be
running Internet Explorer 4 or later to access our site" was a huge pain in the, well, you know where!
Wiz

[666philb]

i'm impressed with dissenter browser. a tweaked brave

[taersh]

i'm impressed with dissenter browser. a tweaked brave

It's Chromium based and published under the Mozilla license.
Looks like the only way to get rid of Mozilla and Google, is to get rid of the internet in every manner.
Or developing a complete new browser. Maybe start forking one from the past deprecated?

[666philb]

although chromium based it stops various trackers, has a VPN private browsing mode, allows commenting on every single page on the internet.

it's created by 'gab' who hate big tech and media as they have been demonized by them and deplatformed.

it's banned from apple and Google app stores so must be doing something right

nice when paired with swisscows search

[taersh]

although chromium based it stops various trackers, has a VPN private browsing mode, allows commenting on every single page on the internet.

it's created by 'gab' who hate big tech and media as they have been demonized by them and deplatformed.

it's banned from apple and Google app stores so must be doing something right

nice when paired with swisscows search

Ok, at least this sounds good.
Might give it a try for some days.

[BologneChe]

Paranoid gang!

[taersh]

Paranoid gang!

It seems you don't even understand anything!

[BologneChe]

Paranoid gang!

It seems you don't even understand anything!

What the hell ... the earth will keep turning and everyone will live in their beliefs

[taersh]

So, keep going on to believe that I am a member of a paranoid gang.
You don't know anything of my motivation and/or why I was asking for another browser apart from Mozilla and/or Google.
Stupid AND wrong conclusions you made by simply knowing NOTHING!
As I said: YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND ANYTHING!

[geo_c]

I've been using Falkon as my default browser, because it's fast, clean, and as far as I can tell, ungoogled. It doesn't have nice themes, just a choice of 3, but when I link from an email for some kind of business purpose, it has no problems with log-ins or downloads. Give it a shot, it's available in the puppyfossa package manager in the ubuntu repos. It will also delete history and cache on exit. It's got a lot going for it.

When I want a nice look I use Palemoon or Firefox with a 'programmer' type theme and 'dark reader' plug-in, so everything is black. I like my computers to be black in the background so I get that HAL-9000 sense of deep space.

~geo

[user1111]

although chromium based it stops various trackers, has a VPN private browsing mode, allows commenting on every single page on the internet.

it's created by 'gab' who hate big tech and media as they have been demonized by them and deplatformed.

it's banned from apple and Google app stores so must be doing something right

nice when paired with swisscows search

I'm also using Dissenter now. Very nice ... and very quick. Unlike Brave (from which it is derived) - who substitute usual ads for their ads, Dissenter is funded via voluntary donations - so no ads injected by the browser. Also their comments are unfiltered/unsorted - totally free 'speech', so unlike the others they're not a 'publisher', which does mean pretty much anything goes including extremes and offensive comments that otherwise likely would be blocked/removed (along with prioritising/filtering what you actually get to see - or not). Little wonder that the others have sought to 'shut-them-down'.

Thanks 666philb for the swisscows pointer - one I'd forgotten. I have been using duckduckgo but do find some searches yield repetitive choices that all look near identical, such that when there are a few pages of those that's pretty much a failed search in my books.

Dissenter run within a Xephyr, unshared, capabilities dropped chroot is working very well for me as my daily/regular boot viewtopic.php?f=60&t=1915&p=16475#p16475 Paranoid ... nah! Sensible. In the pay-to-view https protocol world the 'oneself' as the payment method can be a way too high a price, poor value for money. IMO its nice to be able to filter that out. If that is a barrier to viewing a sites content - so be it, I just move on to another choice (click). Rarely I might opt to pay (load up another browser that can see their content), but more often have no need to do that.

[rockedge]

How long's a piece of string?

well.....if we asked Mandelbrot......

[mikeslr]

Hi taersh,

Mike Walsh's mention of falkon reminded me that it existed. I thought it had just been a Windows program. You can obtain it using Bionicpup64's Puppy Package Manager. With dependencies, that will download 97 debs. No problem for your PaDS. I used that to create an SFS which not only ran OOTB, but played Youtube Music without any fuss. Produced a 52 Mbs SFS.
I don't recall if, AS-IS, it displayed on the menu with an icon. The /usr/share/applications/ desktop had a name starting with org.kde, assigned it to both network and internet categories, and just referred to its icon as just falkon.png (no path). In the past I've forgotten that kde uses that naming convention for application desktops and have struggled to find it. So while I thought of it I mounted the SFS, copied its contents to a folder and made adjustments to the desktop file and used dir2sfs to create a new SFS.
Unfortunately, Bionic's package is version 3.0.0, now over two years old. There's an AppImage available, https://download.kde.org/stable/falkon/3.0.1/ which is slightly newer, but it did not run under Bionicpup64 OOTB. There are also newer --version 3.1-- snaps and flatpaks, https://www.falkon.org/download/ and somewhere on the forum instructions on how Puppies can make use of them.
But for now --and for so long as the websites I frequent will allow it access-- falkon 3.0 appears to be a fine addition to Puppy's web-browsers.
One sour note: it stores both cache and profiles in /root: would have to use the 'old' technique of moving/symlinking. Portablizing might be worth considering.

[rockedge]

I just used Pkg to install falkon on Bionic64-8 with :

Code: Select all

pkg add falkon

and the dependencies seem to be installed and falkon starts from the entry in Menu->Internet->Falkon.
version is reported as 3.0.0

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[xenial]

I have firefox 45esr up and running.love this firefox version very much when we had complete themes and is incredibly fast for it's age.

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