Historical context: Although I had seen Netscape Navigator and whatnot before, Internet Explorer was what I started using when we finally got an Internet connection at home in the late 1990s. I soon found Opera and used it with great enthusiasm until they sold out and became a Chrome skin in mid-2012. I then switched to Firefox full-time, until Mozilla’s extreme mismanagement eventually forced me away from it as well, a few years ago. After very carefully evaluating all existing browsers for Windows, and re-evaluating them regularly ever since, I did not pick but ended up with Pale Moon, which I currently still run.
But there are such extreme issues with running Pale Moon at this point that it’s no longer possible to go on like this. Loading any major website appears to simulate a 386 PC with a 300 baud modem. Quite recently, in the last few weeks, a whole bunch of random websites have completely broken in it, which was the “final straw” for me. These include Stack Exchange, by the way, forcing me to jump through insane hoops to even be able to ask this question.
I have a Linux Mint VM set up with Ungoogled Chromium in it. With that, I am able to do “emergency tasks” such as asking this question. However, it’s very cumbersome to use and switch between a VM like this, and my entire neat “system” on my host OS (Windows 10) breaks if I have to manually copy URLs into the Ungoogled Chromium inside the VM all the time. I don’t run Ungoogled Chromium on the host OS because their Windows binaries are not trustworthy. They are user-contributed and “without warranty”, making it impossible for anyone to trust them.
Furthermore, Chromium-anything has serious usability issues. For one thing, something as basic as scrolling with the wheel mouse button seems completely broken. It has no proxy settings other than launching the binary with a special flag. The entire way you do various things feels very strange, and it’s not just because I’m unfamiliar with it. This is in addition to the more serious problem of not even being able to trust it in the first place, and very much not liking Google or anything they are involved in.
I have evaluated every single browser known to man, and none is acceptable for one reason or another. Most aren’t even browsers but just Chrome skins with added spyware, such as Vivaldi (sadly by former Opera developers), Brave, Edge, etc. The list just goes on and on.
Firefox had so many harassments with unremovable annoyances/buttons and dumbed-down interface/options when I abandoned it that I swore to never, ever have anything to do with Mozilla again in my life. That bizarre organization clearly despises its users and contributors and is not in any way the enemy of Google.
Tor Browser is practically useless for non-.onion sites, and since I no longer know of a single .onion site, I only keep it installed for its automatic Tor proxy gateway, used for highly specialized and rare tasks.
Chrome and Chromium are of course not options as they are fully Google.
Safari is only on Macs, and I’m not sure it’s even that great for Mac users. (Based on the little use I’ve had with it. I don’t have a Mac myself.)
Waterfox sold out to a sketchy spyware company years ago.
IceCat only runs on GNU/Linux.
SeaMonkey is extremely bizarre in a difficult to explain manner. It’s basically Firefox/Mozilla nonsense under the hood.
Links is an in-joke of some kind.
K-Meleon is just a plain joke.
Basilisk is perpetual alpha-level/experimental nonsense.
Epic Privacy Browser’s website just gives me the creeps. It reads like the typical “appeal to dumb people who have no idea about anything with fancy words that sound good to them” software project. It’s not possible by design to remove all Google stuff from Chromium, and I’m anything but convinced that these guys don’t add their own… Just like Firefox/Brave/Vivaldi and many others claim to care about your privacy and security whole doing the exact opposite.
Then there are countless more “browsers” which are all Chrome or Firefox skins, not worthy of even mentioning here. (Yes, I know that Pale Moon was forked from an old version of Firefox. This is not the same.)
This all feels downright existential in a very sincere way. I feel as if my entire “computer world” has been pulled away from me, especially with Windows going in a very disturbing direction in the last many years as well. I can’t believe that so few other people seem to even be aware of any of this, or care at all that they are running “software cancer” full of spying, harassments and stuff that makes my skin crawl.
After really spending huge amounts of time and energy on this browser problem for years now, I don’t know what to do. I don’t understand how there cannot be a new browser project by a team of open source contributors who reject all the madness by Google/Mozilla/Microsoft/Apple and truly care about privacy, security and the user in general. Because all the existing browsers are downright scams in my view. They call themselves browsers while just using Google’s code and slapping a skin with their own spying on top of it.
Is there really not some kind of serious, capable alternative browser project in the works which is not just yet another fake “browser” whose only purpose is to make a bunch of guys money from search engine deals and such?
And if you wonder why I’m not starting such a project, it’s because I don’t have either the technical or social skills to pull such a thing off. Neither do I have the “peace of mind” either, but I would sure love to be a user of such a user-respecting theoretical browser.
What sparked me to finally ask this question was after fighting a local store chain about there being a new bug on their website which made product images disappear in Pale Moon. I even told them the specific HTML code that was wrong (for some reason, the src now goes to a blank GIF and the actual photo URLs are hidden away as data-src attributes) and how they could fix it in five seconds, but they just kept ignoring everything I wrote to them and kept insisting that it was “my fault” and that I should “try a different browser”.
I hope that I’ve simply missed some major new browser project which has decided to do it all from scratch, with a working stable version ready for me to download right now. With an active Github repo and all. That would be perfect.
