After years of using Safari as my personal daily driver web browser, and Firefox Developer Edition for my software development work, I have started experimenting with other browsers.
Orion is the most interesting to me. It’s a WebKit-based browser by the Kagi team. I have recently from DuckDuckGo to Kagi as my search engine (per Daring Fireball’s suggestion), because I can pay them a small amount of money and be confident that they will can sustain themselves without having to try to show me ads and otherwise sell me as a product to others. Orion is ambitious in that the team is supporting Firefox/Chrome-style web extensions on top of WebKit. With the complicated way I set things up, it’s been a small bit crashy, so I hope that they are able to continue development and improve it.
Zen is an interesting open source alternative to Firefox (which has recently been adding a lot of AI cruft). I’m still quite happy with Firefox but I’m open to some new thinking around the browser user experience.
I have also been having quite a hard time with Google Meet video calls and Google Sheets spreadsheets. It seems that unfortunately they perform the best only on Blink (Chrome’s engine), but I don’t particularly want to have Chrome installed on any of my devices. So I have been trying out Brave which is an alternative privacy-focused browser based on Blink/Chromium. I’m happy with it so far although it has a lot of AI, VPN, cryptocurrency, and advertising upsells which aren’t a good fit for me, so I have been turning them off.
And way down the list is Ladybird, which I’m excited about but haven’t tried yet. It’s in a very early phase, but is taking the ambitious route of implementing a new browser engine. The web needs to have diverse engines to stay sustainable and independent of a small number of large corporations.
I’m now using Orion as my default, with Zen and Brave getting more and more of my daily use. Trying to cover the major browser engines while balancing privacy, performance, and good UX. I also want something with relatively-good iOS support.
