Browser update: On Linux and macOS, I used Brave Origin Nightly for a while because it strips away junk like Leo AI, News, Rewards, Brave Ads, Speedreader, telemetry, Talk, Tor, VPN, Wallet, Web3 domains, Wayback Machine, and the Web Discovery Project, while keeping ad-blocking via Shields. It is great having things like Widevine (Netflix, etc.) built-in without any hassle.
However, Brave Origin Nightly still has a large memory footprint, and its speed is only just "good enough". I missed lightning-fast performance. For a while, I switched to Brave Origin Nightly only on Mac and strictly for DRM content or when apps like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams were not working properly. But now I am fully back, because I figured out a way.
The best things about Ungoogled Chromium:
- Open source
- No sync
- No profiles
- No forced Google integration
- No fingerprinting
- No pointless gradients, stats, or widgets cluttering the new tab page that cannot be disabled
- No useless toolbar icons
- No "calling home" features that slow down browsing
- No telemetry
- No fingerprinting
- No slowdowns caused by bloat
- You have the control
- Privacy-first
Cons:
- It takes a bit of tweaking to get services like Netflix working, but it is completely worth it for a tinkerer like me.
- No auto-updates (you have to subscribe to GitHub releases and install new builds manually).
- Anything can break at any time after updates
I have tried over 20 browsers, and this is still the one.
The Firefox UI and its lag behind modern CSS specs still don't convince me. What I hate most about Firefox-based browsers is that search and history don't work by simply typing a keyword and pressing Enter to go straight to the latest or most visited result. I want it to work as fast as a thought. Chromium's web standards and DevTools are absolute must-haves for me, and Firefox's UX still has too many issues.
Edit: It seems Netflix is still an issue on ungoogled-chromium from time to time, but I keep Brave Origin Nightly as a fallback.
Repos:
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium
https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-macos
Brave Origin: https://brave.com/origin/
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