I DON'T like my web browsing options in 2024...

welcome back it's time we had an honest conversation about web browsers I don't know about you but at the start of the year I like to have a look at the things that I use on a daily basis and go is this the best I could be doing and at the start of 2024 I find myself asking a few questions of one of the tools that all of us use the most I would argue on our computers and that is our web browsers when it comes to web browsers they're all or at least vast majority of them free for us to download and use and whatever platform we want there's a plethora of options out there and none of them seem to be perfect from where I'm standing but I have had to ask some tough questions about the web browser that I've used for a long time I've been a Firefox user uh in some way or other since probably about 2006 uh as it was one of the few Alternatives that could be installed and used on Windows uh to Internet Explorer which just was awful at the time and Firefox was one of the first open-source software projects that I started using and I've been using it on and off ever since I took a long break uh until Firefox Quantum or Firefox version 40 came along because that improved a lot of the performance issues that I'd been having with Firefox as time has gone on though the development of Firefox really seems to have stalled or at least slowed down and while the rest of the world's web browsers seem to be pushing all kinds of weird gimmicks uh and also the comb ation about privacy tracking and security becomes more highlighted in the news Etc I think it's fair to ask more of our web browsers so what follows is a bit of a rambly video but I want to structure it around a few key questions and I want to go out there and say first of all that this video isn't sponsored by any web browser or anything like that I've worked with some of these projects in the past to make videos about their features that are coming up in their browsers but this isn't sponsored and it's only my own thoughts what I do want to highlight is uh these questions here these are the questions that I'm going to ask of some of the browsers that maybe you're used to using uh what are the defaults like when it comes to security the features they offer privacy and the search engines they use how many platforms does the web browser support how much transparency is there around the development of said web browser and how active is that development like how many releases come out how how quick are security fixes to happen and how many features are useful features are actually getting added to the browser uh and then critically how is the browser funded and how might that affect the browser's priorities and how stable is the project overall so what you're going to notice longtime fans of the channel know that I'm a huge advocate for open source software and while I don't have a question specifically geared around the licensing of a web browser I think it runs secondary to some of these other questions in my mind uh because I think if the answer to a lot of the these questions is positive then chances are we'll have a product that is at least heading in the right direction when it comes to licensing so let's jump into it okay so let's start with the big one first because that's the one I've used for the longest time now when it comes to overall uh enthusiasm for Firefox I've been an adamant uh supporter of Firefox for a long time the main reason is that firefox's web engine is distinct from all the other web browsers out there today it uses a gecko web engine and because it's so distinct it's valuable to have it in the marketplace of web browsers the problem is that distinct web engine and that web browser it seems to just be chugging along it seems to exist but it's not doing a whole lot to try and bring new users uh and convince them to use Firefox other than kind of the same standard messaging they've been using for a long time uh and then when we start digging into some of these other questions like how often a featur is added and how is the browser funded uh it does throw some problems into the mix because at the end of the day uh Firefox is uh is solely owned or developed and funded by the Mozilla Foundation Mozilla Corporation uh there's sort of a Unity of those two things financially speaking and when you start digging into where a lot of the donations or money that is generated from uh search engine Revenue comes from it starts raising some questions as to how motivated the team at Mozilla would be to actually forward this web browser and so while I'm not going to go into it into depth in this video um there was a a a good deal of reporting that was done by a couple of uh YouTubers and and a and a a longtime Linux and open source Enthusiast um Brian lunduke around uh some of the publicly available um Financial records that you can go and look into when it comes to Mozilla um because the reality is is that Mozilla as a as a corporation has or as a foundation and a corporation it's a bit complicated there has um quite a bit of Revenue shall we say and the majority of that Revenue as far as it pertains to Firefox comes from uh basically search engine uh Primacy from Google so when we think about Firefox as a competitor to Google Chrome specifically and we look at the fact that it Prime funer the way that it gets the majority of its money is from this section here royalties uh that funding is primarily Year on-ear from Google so for every user that Firefox has they are exposed to the Google search engine first and foremost and Google writes a big fat check every year to Mozilla to keep that the case and that's the majority of the budget then you can have a look at some of this other stuff like subscriptions and advertising Revenue that would be the stuff like the pocket integration and and also uh the things like uh contributions or donations now ultimately when you go through and and start looking at uh where some of this money is spent it starts getting a little unclear as to how it ties directly to the development of uh Firefox and to be fair Mozilla is a foundation that tries to be relatively transparent with how they spend their money but it just starts getting a little weird and I'll let you investigate that a little bit further if you like but it does raise the question for me back to the fundamental question of uh how does this affect the browser's priorities it's pretty clear that through mozilla's downtrend or the the fact that they're shedding users um pretty quickly year on year they uh they lost a decent chunk I think they went from 3.6 to 3.2 or something like that uh percentage of market share overall over the space of a year it's pretty clear that that mozilla's priorities are probably elsewhere and that a lot of members of the community sensed this coming some time ago go and ended up uh creating an alternative in Libre wolf Libre wolf of course is a sort of a community-driven customized version of Firefox that you can uh download and Firefox being um licensed under mozilla's uh open- Source licensing means that people are free to do this and so Li wolf does present a decentish option uh when it comes to some of the other questions about uh where the browser is funded from and how active the development is the the development from the team that's on their website their core contributors is pretty active they manag to stay up with recent releases of Firefox pretty well uh the challenge though is that when we come to uh fundamentally this browser's existence is always going to depend on firefox's existence so the longevity and the stability of the project overall depends on members of the open source Community maintaining it and also it depends on Mozilla keeping Firefox around so this started me questioning some things well if Firefox is uh potentially not really a priority for Mozilla and if a alternative to Firefox is only dependent on a few core contributors in the open source Community well then what other options are there because at the end of the day developing a feature-rich web browser is a tricky thing to do and it does take proper development time and money to get that right so then you start looking around at some of the Alternatives and when we look at things like Google Chrome and even uh Microsoft soft Edge these browsers when we start looking through these fundamental questions again what are the defaults like well they're all going to be defaulting to their own search engines that are owned by their big tech companies that are designed to sell advertisements that's what they're there to do and while they support basically all the platforms that are out there and while there are decent amount of information available about the development of the browser and how many releases it has the frequency and rate of development is definitely not up for question the funding of these web browsers is unquestionably from Big tech companies and they are designed to make money uh so the browser's priorities and it's pretty clear when you start looking around at some of their release notes and some of their features that they uh experiment with they're always going to be uh a way for these tech companies to push their their different services and products they offer um to try and monetize you as a user and ultimately like that's their end game now we could basically lump Google Chrome and Edge in the same boat here however I would um buy virtue of just a bit of digging around and uh and look honestly some of these web browsers have fantastic little comparison charts that you can use to you know compare the the default features of said web browsers uh but while we could you know split the beans here on who does what better I think it is fair to say that uh from my research anyway Edge does seem to be a slight more secure option out of the box than what Chrome is but Chrome being the industry standard has very little reason to change its course of action because at the end of the day most people just download Chrome because it's the market leader and that's what it does so then that leads us to some of the Alternatives that are based on chromium or the the web engine that powers Google Chrome and Edge for that matter and while you could use the vanilla chromium uh web browser uh which to be fair is a is a decent core web browser uh chromium is pretty lacking when it comes to uh features and at the end of the day there is going to be no incentive for the chromium project to at all uh Leap Frog or develop at a uh more intentional Direction than what Google Chrome is uh chromium exists to support Google Chrome therefore Community versions of chromium exist but they seem to come and go fairly quickly they kind of uh easy come easy go kind of situations then there are other web browsers that are also based off this web engine and the The prominent ones that we see around the internet today are Opera the Opera web browser um and Vivaldi now Opera has an interesting history in that Opera as a web browser um I remember using it uh on Windows as an alternative and uh and I thought it was quite performant I thought it had its own Presto web engine that was quite unique uh and it gave a lot of transparency to the user about like how much data any given website was using it had a cool feature that would allowed you to compress the data although that had some security concerns and that kind of leads me to where we are with Opera today overall my recommendation with this one is just steer clear as far as some of the big fundamental questions that I alluded to before uh with how many platforms does it support how much transparency is around it where how is it funded all that kind of thing uh operate feels the shadiest um and when you start looking at some of the uh security spoofs shall we say that Opera has had in recent times while there are a great amount of cool features that Opera has uh and they have uh you know built in vpns and a few other things to try and make it seem more secure uh the Opera definitely seems to be kind of the sketchiest one um in that it seems to be all marketing polish and very little actual transparency about uh how they generate Revenue how much they generate um and whether they're selling your data to advertisers or not it is is leaves a lot up for question so uh then from there we end up going with uh Vivaldi um actually before I get to Vivaldi I should mention brave because uh Brave is actually one of the fastest growing alternatives to the major web browsers out there and uh to Me Brave was always one that just kind of existed I've never really spent an awful a lot of time using Brave uh the reason being for me personally it just seemed like a slightly stripped down version of of chromium with some built-in ad blocking and a few other gimmicky features that I was just never going to make use of uh and so while Brave still has I think very very good and very user Centric defaults so when again we go back to those big questions about what are the defaults like the security the features the Privacy search engines I'd say Brave comes the closest to having the best defaults out of any web browser it does support pretty much every platform out there and there is a decent amount of transparency around the development of the web browser it's active it seems to be adding features although I would question the usefulness of those features and that's where this browser starts to fall over for me how is the browser funded while there is some uh transparency from Brave about how their browser is funded and what they intend to do with the browser moving forward uh it does seem like they are relatively experimental with uh what kind of features they want to use um so they will you know bring things in and phase things out relatively quickly um and so some of their features that you know might be cool maybe one day things like their crypto wallet uh the way that they manage giving some sort of compensation for users for for Content creators who have their information uh have their content online and they want to monetize it but they don't want to have ads displayed they can kind of get this Kickback crypto system but they have also been diversifying uh into other ways to to generate Revenue similar to what we've seen from Firefox although at the end of the day I think Brave is doing the best job in convincing people to switch away from mainstream web browsers and to try something else uh they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves so brave is definitely an option and it's one that I'm fairly happy to recommend people most of the time but it's it it for me anyway it's not perfect and unfortunately none of these browsers are the one that I'm trying out I'm trying to give some serious uh attention to and really kind of put it through the paces at the moment is Vivaldi uh and Vivaldi is a web browser that I have checked out in the past I've I've made videos about Vivaldi uh in the last I think 12 maybe 18 months and uh and what struck me about Vivaldi is the fact that the pace of development of the Vivaldi web browser and the quality of the features that they include in the browser uh for me personally anyway kind of useful and pretty impressive um the fact that in the space of 12 months even since I last tried it uh they've now got a web browser on every platform whereas for a long time since fal's launch in 2016 I think they only supported desktops and now they're they're pretty much fully featured on mobile as well um which is very helpful their approach to a lot of the basics for web browsing things like uh profile synchronization across all different browsers and platforms things like security and privacy defaults their welcome wizard that allows you to dial in which search engine you want to use all of that kind of stuff is uh all seems like uh a very user Centric approach and one that doesn't compromise uh the users's own agency in choosing what kind of experience they want to have when they browse the web uh so the fact that valal can do a bunch of stuff like uh it has a built-in email client and feed reader and and a bunch of other things um but you don't have to use any of that it exists and it's cool that it's there and for those who want that kind of productivity out of their one web browser that's great um but you can just use it as a strip down web browser and I appreciate the flexibility and the uh the options that they will surface that the V vality browser surfaces to the user on a first run uh now when it comes to the transparency of the development and also the funding of the development uh again this is something that I've been more impressed with now the biggest criticism that I hear around the internet about vdi is the fact that it's not open source and uh yeah that's true so like most of these web browsers that I've listed aren't open source the only exceptions to those are um chromium and Firefox and I think a fair whack of Brave is open sourced um and the same is sort of true for Val valdi in that uh the fair whack of it is open sourced and they've addressed this fairly verbose uh on their website about what components are what components aren't at the end of the day you can go and download the Val's uh source code and you can go and inspect it there's quite a bit more transparency there uh than other closed Source projects but by their own words they really have about 5% of their code 5% of their code being based on Vivaldi's UI and branding that is closed Source everything else from that the 3% of Open Source Development coming from them 92% of the browsers backend being chromium and that being uh open- sourced so the vast majority of their browser is open sourc but The Branding side and the UI side which what makes V valda unique is closed source and while they're not completely shutting the door on ever doing that ever um they uh they they try to make their argument about why um they have kept that percentage uh closed Source but what I like is the transparency and the effort that this project goes to to communicate what it wants out of its uh out of its project um and what they feel their user wants uh so at the end of the day while uh I'm very still early on this uh this kind of switch that I've made and I'm not entirely convinced that this will be where I opponent land forever this is the one that I'm wanting to kick the tires on uh for some time time and I'd encourage you to go and Survey the landscape about we just spend so much time in web browsers that it uh it it would be in our best interest to use one that has our best interests at heart and uh I'm just not as convinced as I once was that Firefox is the browser that's going to do that for me and uh and then most of these options out there are owned by big tech companies that are just wanting to make money on advertising and that's not really in my best interest either so the value is where I'm landing for now let me know what you think uh in the comments below there's honestly uh we could do the features comparison all the live long day there's plenty of YouTube videos out there that'll do that for you all of these browsers feel great performance-wise for me there's no real slug in this race anymore at least for me um so it really just comes down to personal preference let me know what yours is thanks for watching see you in the next [Music] one [Music]

Channel: InfinitelyGalactic

Views: 48,047

Keywords: infinitelygalactic, technology, linux, open-source, free software, ubuntu, alternatives to windows, alternatives to macos, distro reviews, app reviews, firefox, brave browser, chrome, chromium, edge, safari, vivaldi, opera

Id: YSs9C45OIlg

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024