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Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2017 6:25 am
by barbaz
Currently I use SeaMonkey. Its future is somewhat uncertain in light of this whole WebExtensions deal. So in case it doesn't work out, I'd like to have a Plan B - that is, using some non-Mozilla-based browser.

I use 64-bit Linux, mainly Lubuntu 14.04. Any suggestions for browsers to look into?

Must-haves include:
- ability to totally kill DRM support, or no DRM support at all
- ability to "just" write my own extensions for personal use (and a sufficiently powerful extensions system). This means no forced addon signing or the like.
- ability to make minor customisations to the UI, like with CSS
- no bloat. No social share crap, no bundling random 3rd party services, etc, etc.


Browsers I've already checked out:
- Pale Moon is a nice browser. But historically it hasn't kept up with supporting HTML5 features needed by the sites I visit. And (correct me if I'm wrong on this) their dev team might not be able to keep it going long term - they already had to rebase once on newer Mozilla code.
- Opera has become too bloated for me.
- Slimjet didn't work well at all in virtual machine. That's a deal-breaker.
- Can't tell about Chromium and Vivaldi. One or the other might be usable for my daily browsing with the right extensions.

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 2:51 am
by Thrawn
Whenever possible, I use Dillo, which satisfies points 1 and 4, but will abysmally fail 2 and 3...great for old hardware though :D.

I'm pretty sure that points 1 and 2 exclude IE, point 2 excludes modern Firefox, and point 4 excludes Chrome. Plus, the requirement for a powerful extensions system makes minor players dubious.

Maybe Chromium?

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Wed Feb 22, 2017 4:38 am
by barbaz
Thrawn wrote:I'm pretty sure that points 1 and 2 exclude IE,
Also excluded by the Linux64 requirement. :)
Thrawn wrote:point 2 excludes modern Firefox,
Well, I use the unbranded builds to deal with point 2. The main reason I switched away from Firefox in the first place, is actually point 4.
Thrawn wrote:Maybe Chromium?
Maybe. The UI is pretty usable OOB. And I'm able to run multiple instances with multiple firejails, just as I do with SeaMonkey.

The extensions are the tricky part there.

I know uBlock Origin and µMatrix already have Chromium versions, so that's cool.
Click-to-Play Manager functionality is basically built into Chromium, I think.
SQLite Manager - I can just allow the XULRunner version in the firejail sandbox.

NoScript might become available Image

Not sure (yet?) how I'd get the functionality of these addons:
- Advanced Cookie manager - Chromium has good built-in cookie viewer, but Advanced Cookie Manager allows editing cookies too.
- DOM Inspector (for the UI)
- Form History Control (for the editor field autosave feature only) ** EDIT This addon will go webext - [1] [2]
- Mozilla Archive Format
- NoRedirect
- Stylish - I'm on for writing my own addon there. Should be possible to port it for webpages, but not sure about the UI. ** Can be replaced by Stylus
- A custom addon that uses resource: URIs to create custom paths. It's for portability of extra files, contained in my profile, that need to be referenced by an absolute path. This is so I can just copy my profile between machines without thinking about it.
- My own addons for browser spoofing. Sure, it boils down to just one userscript and modifying a few request headers. But I don't know how hard it'd be to port.
- My own addons which log requests. I have one which logs requests made by each page, and another which logs every request the browser makes. Those addons were surprisingly tricky to get right on SeaMonkey.

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2017 2:24 pm
by yes_noscript
barbaz wrote: Pale Moon is a nice browser. But historically it hasn't kept up with supporting HTML5 features needed by the sites I visit. And (correct me if I'm wrong on this) their dev team might not be able to keep it going long term - they already had to rebase once on newer Mozilla code.
This was a "once, and not again" step because of web sits compatibility. Nothing more.
What for HTML5 did you have? I (under windows) can watch videos to 8k but then my PC die :mrgreen:
But i read that on linux you need to install/ config ffmpeg if i'm not wrong to get all that stuff. But i dont use Linux so i doesnt care about that

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2017 8:02 pm
by barbaz
yes_noscript wrote:This was a "once, and not again" step because of web sits compatibility. Nothing more.
It's still a concern for the long-term, isn't it? Look at the reasons for the rebase - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=11529
Has something changed there?
yes_noscript wrote:What for HTML5 did you have?
As you seem to have guessed, one example is that Youtube's HTML5 player didn't work in Pale Moon. And their rebase is on Gecko 38, where it only partially works. Do you know if they brought the MSE stuff up to speed on their end?

I know that wasn't the only problem, but I'm not remembering the others offhand.

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2017 8:14 pm
by yes_noscript
Youtube HTML5 player works fine in Pale Moon (i only use windows). MSE works good too.

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2017 8:20 pm
by barbaz
Cool! Knowing that, I might give Pale Moon another spin.

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 5:35 am
by barbaz

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 10:14 am
by yes_noscript
Pale Moon still provide a DRM-free browser in future:
We're aware that in-browser DRM is being pushed pretty hard by several big players (who, not-so-coincidentally, are also involved in editing and publishing the very HTML specifications that make this possible in-browser) and our approach is that "black-box" DRM content decoding modules have no place in an Open Source browser. It is even debatable whether DRM actually does anything to combat what it is supposed to be designed for.
In light of this, and also following the results from this survey, we remain firm in that, out of principle as well as our users' desire, we will keep the browser completely free of DRM. People who have commented that this approach was (one of) the main reason(s) to choose Pale Moon as their browser can rest easy in the knowledge that it will not find its way into this browser.

from https://www.palemoon.org/survey2017/

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 3:29 pm
by gorhill
It's fixed: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/is ... ?id=686430

I see a checkbox for "Allow sites to play protected content (recommended)" under the header "Protected content" in "Content settings..." in "Privacy" settings.

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 3:47 pm
by barbaz
@yes_noscript: Thanks, saw that. Right now it's looking very likely that I'll get back to using Pale Moon regularly, at least for some stuff. Just have to find time to set it up.

@gorhill: You're also on Linux, right? Which Chromium version are you using?

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 5:31 pm
by gorhill
barbaz wrote:@gorhill: You're also on Linux, right? Which Chromium version are you using?
Yes, on Linux. Chromium 56. Actually the EME issue probably does not apply to Chromium, as the proprietary EME blobs are not available in Chromium. In any case, I have a Google Chrome dev version installed for testing purpose, and I see the setting to disable EME in v58.

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Sat Mar 11, 2017 6:27 pm
by barbaz
In that case I'll wait for v58 before doing anything with Chromium again. Thanks gorhill!

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2017 2:31 pm
by therube
Dillo
If SeaMonkey should fizzle, that's where I'm at :-).

Image

Re: Good, non-Mozilla-based browsers?

Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2017 9:56 pm
by barbaz
This might be an interesting possibility - https://www.basilisk-browser.org/

Appears to be a fork of Firefox 52.0.3. Authors are the Pale Moon devs. And it sounds like they may be planning to make this browser support both WebExtensions and XUL extensions. Which would be perfect for me if so.

I took a quick look, and I wouldn't consider it suitable for my daily use yet. But when it's had more time to work bugs out (and support more of WebExtensions), I think it'll be worth revisiting.