Internet explorer wasn't all bad. Seriously PC Mag?

Farewell Internet Explorer: You Weren’t All Bad | PCMag

IMHO it was an abomination from the get go that was bloated, stifled innovation (until Chrome got traction) and was flat out ugly!

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The writer is a bit myopic.

As it stands, only Firefox remains as an alternative web rendering engine choice, the rest having moved to Chromium.

Yes, ignoring the one billion users of webkit, mostly Safari. :roll_eyes:

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Can you get Safari/webkit on Windows? Cause I know they stopped making Safari for Widnows.

The Brave browser is WebKit based.

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I’ll have to check that out for desktop. Cause I know on Android it was Chromium based, at least when I tested it out 2ish years ago.

Edit: internet is telling me it’s WebKit based only on iOS devices, Blink based on everything else.

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Yes you are right, sorry about that

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Well looks like I will be testing brave browser on Windows the rest of the week.

I never had any problems with it.

And I liked Chakra based Edge compared to yet another Chromium/Blink bloat that the current one is. I saw a notieable improvement in battery life when using it.

@Bloodycape Just be aware that they are ‘crypto bros’ and have dodgy marketing (I’m pretty sure they pay people to go on social media to say ‘switch to Brave!’)

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Whoops, for me that’s a red flag and I avoid if at all possible.

Well supporting it was a nightmare and our developers say the same.

I agree with you about the previous version of Edge. I especially liked that it could read e-pubs. Although we’ve heard that was part of the reason for it’s demise as the publishers claimed it was making piracy too easy.

I like Duck, Duck. Go as at least a half hearted attempt at a privacy browser. It still uses google as search engine, but stuff only gets harvested when you explicitly search for something as opposed to virtually EVERYTHING you do in Chrome itself.

wait Brave is run by crypto bros?

I have the DDG browser on my phone as it has some blocking of app tracking from other apps, but do they have a desktop app?

Haha, I exaggerate, but they are pro-crypto.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a red-flag as I do think there’s space for cryptocurrencies, but the market is incredibly dodgy now so I’m no fan of people who push cryptocurrencies.

I put up with Chromium and use Vivaldi. Not owned by a Chinese company like Opera, not encouraging cryptocurrencies or doing annoying marketing pushes like Brave, not essentially pretending they are super-private like DDG, some nice features (double level tabs!), and made by some ex-Opera developers.

I don’t care that some of their UI is closed source.

I used to like Sleipnir, but years ago they went all in on some bizarre skeumorphic MacOS inspired design and all about the ‘aesthetic’. Not cup of tea.

My only concern is quite how they make money.

I tried Vivaldi, but just didn’t stick. So far like Chrome & Edge, but Firefox based Ghostery has been pretty solid for me on the desktop too. It even has some nice youtube features like opening a video in a new tab doesn’t autoplay the video like other browsers(not Firefox) do.

What put you off Vivaldi? I find it not only unobtrusive, but to have the most compact UI. Not that there’s much difference between all the Chromium clones.

That said, early versions were pretty heavy and I have a few issues with this forum with it.

For YouTube, I use Enhancer for YouTube that does pretty much everything I want it to do. Pop-out videos are in some ways slightly better in Firefox, but that’s it. I do try to keep extensions to a minimum.

I want to like Firefox, but the UI just doesn’t jive with me.

Welp, I said all that and have put up with some jankiness in Vivaldi for while because I love the UI, but suddenly my install started switching tabs for no reason. So now I’m typing this in Firefox…

And it’s made more obvious how janky some of those things have been. It’s a shame, as I do love Vivaldi’s UI but now I know some things are just smoother… (and I can now reply with emojis here).

I think I’ll stick with Vivaldi for Android though.