What Is Your Preferred Web Browser?

LibreWolf... I guess you could count it as Firefox, but it's like... deGoogled Chrome but deMozilla'd Firefox.

Yandex

Microsoft Edge as primary, with Firefox as secondary.

Vivaldi. Most configurable out of the box (which means I can theme it to match the colors of my channel), has good privacy and security (it has a nice configurable built-in adblocker), and is pretty fast. My only real complaint for Vivaldi is it's not completely open source.

Brave as a backup.

Firefox is shit; owned by facist, far-left, evil, anti-freedom Mozilla. Firefox used to be good, but over the years it has been corporitized and trashed by Mozilla. Mozilla also added hidden telemetry that is not disabled when you "disable" telemetry... and they also added ads to the browser. Adding to this pain is removing features users wanted to keep as well. It's also slower in general than chromium based browsers.
I would prefer to see all linux distros not include a browser and just simply make a GUI where users could pick an alternative of their choice.

Opera is now owned by a Chinese company and is basically spyware. I do use Opera GX on Windows 10, but only because I can cap resource usage whenever I stream (my internet sucks, so the bandwidth limit in Opera GX is nice). The original CEO left Opera and eventually went on to make Vivaldi.

Chrome and Edge are also spyware. Both of these are owned by big tech companies who make lots of money off of data harvesting.

I like Epiphany as a lightweight browser (which fits right in with the Gnome/Budgie stack, unlike Falkon), but it's not in the repos anymore?

FanboyStudios no more epipany in Solus. I miss it too. Flatpak has Epiphany/Eolie/Midori (the same gnome variation trilogy) but not configurable (themes) like Solus had.

FF out of the box: agree with you.
FF hardened: could not disagree with you more. you can harden that thing where nothing dials out and all the garbage disabled. May take some about:config time, but very doable if one is eager. You can make it better than libre wolf, pale horse, whatever forks...
Falkon not bad but brings too much kde stuff in for my tastes.
As for your conclusion about MS and Google browers, it goes without saying

FanboyStudios I would prefer to see all linux distros not include a browser and just simply make a GUI where users could pick an alternative of their choice.

You're totally right. I'd rather choose the best option. But maybe your Mozilla opinion is excessive although It's not the best browser option so far. I'm going to change my main browser to Vivaldi. You convince me, guys!!

brent

Perhaps theming flatpaks may be possible with Kvantum?

I hate KDE also. I've been distrohopping on a spare drive this past week or so. With distros running KDE, I'm able to easily run into bugs and get crashes just setting it up how I "kinda" want it.
Budgie IMHO is where it's at. Stable, and customizable enough to my liking.

Firefox is just something I'll avoid because it's slower than chromium... and Mozilla is evil.
If Mozilla changes (quits being an evil far-left communistic company, stops getting in bed with Google, brings back features users loved, etc.), then I might reconsider using it... as a backup browser.
Vivaldi works great for me (the company hasn't gone woke, the browser looks exactly how I want it, etc.), in addition to the multiple layers of tracking protection I use (PiHole with my own custom-made massive blocklist).

FanboyStudios Someone suggested I try an appimage program called 'appimage manager' to manage my appimages....kinda like a flatpak program to theme flatpaks. Overkill to me....I try to smartly cull as little packages as I can outside of our repo. but you need what you need sometimes.
I let un-maintained umatrix do all my blocking and it basically shuts every website down at its default setting. A DIY block list is novel since it's not phoning home all the time (like to easylist and whatever else one enables in ublock origin).
Makes me worry about how much dial-out power our extensions really have....anyways what you are trying to achieve with DIY blocklist I am trying to achieve with umatrix and a loaded hosts file.
No way to measure the effectiveness of a hosts file though....

brent

TBH, I prefer appimage over flatpaks because appimages are easy to store and backup.

They also tend to not autoupdate, which is good for security (autoupdates are a conduit for a malicious party to push out malicious updates) and making sure you get to keep the version you want (in case a free, open source program gets acquired by some shitty company who then decides to put telemetry and paywalls in a update).

joluveba I ran into bugs with KDE. It's not just on Solus OS, but KDE distros in general.
I do have crappy NVIDIA though, and do try to customize the DE with the built-in options.

Microsoft Edge

Firefox, Librewolf, Zen and Tor all in that order

Chromium on Solus and Zorin.
Firefox in Windows as it seems nice and snappy.

I've been using Vivaldi for a long time ago, probably since 2015. However, I am currently testing Zen Browser and it's a very pleasant surprise because it work very well.

JoshStrobl I was a browser hopper, but over the years it went from Chrome -> Opera -> Firefox -> Edge -> Vivaldi -> Back to Firefox

Firefox is my preferred personal browser, and Edge is for working on my school assignments.

Brave is for personal use. Chromium flatpak for work.

joluveba I've been using Solus Plasma since beta on all my devices. The only bugs I've ever encountered were the shutdown bugs. Ex: update, try to restart from the GUI and it errors and doesn't shut down, can only shut down/restart from terminal, then it's fine. Have yet to have this bug in the Plasma 6 though, hoping they squashed it for good.

I don't have a favorite web browser, but Firefox is the one hate the least. The same with email user agents and Thunderbird.