Web browsers

A Web browser is a type of Web client that enables a user to select, retrieve, and perceive resources on the Web. In particular, Web browsers provide a way for a user to view hypertext documents and follow the hyperlinks that connect them, typically by moving the cursor over a link and depressing the mouse button. source

What does /g/ use?

• Ungoogled-Chromium - chromium with less botnet. Not fully audited
• Firefox and it's forks:
  • Pale Moon - Legacy Firefox being updated by infamous furry known as Moonchild. Dubbed "Pale Meme" by some users, it has had some controversies with auto updates and add-ons as there is a blacklist set by default, along with the expected autistic manchild forum bs.
  • GNU IceCat - Firefox but by GNU. The best firefox fork for privacy, default add-ons are autistic and break majority of sites, doesn't provide binaries for new versions.
  • Librewolf - Continuation of Librefox. Documentation contains a list of much-needed firefox addons. Pretty much equivalent to Firefox+ArkenFox config in terms of unsolicited telemetry requests.
  • Arkenfox - Configuration file to harden Firefox, best template configuration for schizos.
• Brave - Chromium but directed by the same guy who directed the good versions of firefox. Also you can earn money (the company's crypto token). There are a number of controversies. Seems to have improved, but not to be considered trustworthy.

Free web browsers

Mozilla Firefox based

Good ole' Firefox

The Best Firefox fork ^{[citation needed]}

Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Netscape Communicator. It is known for its championing of the open web during Internet Explorer's reign of terror and its extensive customisability via add-ons and settings. Nowadays, Mozilla spends more effort on combatting fake news and funding antifa than maintaining the browser. Firefox's recent move to WebExtensions has deprecated many legacy add-ons, but remains more customizable than most other browsers.

Numerous forks and spin-offs of Firefox exist and are a common sight on /g/ and /tech/ given Firefox's perceived transition into a Chrome-imitating memory whore, for example:

• Pale Moon, its sibling Basilisk
• Waterfox, previously advertiser-owned but independent again since August 2023.
• GNU Icecat, a fully free, libre, open-source (FLOSS) fork of Firefox without its built-in DRM support and Firefox Hello. Icecat comes with LibreJS, an add-on which blocks out any non-free javascript on webpages. This also makes a lot of webpages break.
• Mercury, compiler optimised build of Firefox with UX/performance/privacy/security patches from Librewolf, Waterfox et al. Claims a 20% performance advantage over vanilla Firefox.

Chromium based

Google, de-botneted (a lie)

Chromium is a free and open-source web browser botnet known for its extremely fast JavaScript execution and multiprocess security model. Upon release, Chromium was ahead of the competition by leaps and bounds in terms of raw performance. In the years that followed though, Firefox and Opera largely met and in some cases surpassed its performance advantage, although Chromium still tends to maintain a slight edge in UI responsiveness and JavaScript execution. While usually recommended for use, many users stay away from this browser as it has not been audited as much as Firefox has, and in protest of its (easy to disable) tracking features.

If you're thinking of switching to Chromium (Google's open source version of Chrome) instead, think again. For some time, Chromium snuck in a binary blob for voice recognition whenever you started it up. This has been removed by the project maintainers, but it should raise some concern over what else could be lurking in the code.

The Brave browser is a privacy-focused open source browser based on Chromium created by Brendan Eich, punished Mozilla CEO, with built in adblock, HTTPS protection and TOR web browsing. (although using TOR with this runs the risk of fingerprinting your browser, albeit Brave seems to attempt to counteract this). It's shilled throughout the web for being the best option in "Big Tech" society. (hence the nickname "Le shill lion") See above for its issues. Also pays out basic attention tokens (BAT) as a form of crypto for turning on brave ads on supported websites, however these can only be redeemed by making an account on Uphold, a known botnet exchange.

Iridium is a FLOSS fork of Chromium stripped of as many botnet features as possible. It used to phone home to Iridium's servers for development purposes, but it no longer does that. This is not where it ends, though. If you go to their homepage, and read what they have to say about the privacy of their browser, it reads: "Chromium (which Iridium is based on) is a very secure browser, yes. But it does call home to Google. And we did even more to enhance security to the maximum extent possible.". Smells like botnet.

Thorium, compiler optimised Chromium fork with a litany of patches to improve privacy and usability. Claims a 38% performance improvement over vanilla Chromium.

If you want a completely botnet-free and telemetry-free chromium experience, this is what you do:

1. Download Ungoogled-Chromium, ignore any warnings that you might get
2. Go to chrome://flags and change the setting "Handling of Extension MIME Type Requests" to "Always prompt for install".
3. Install NeverDecaf chromium-web-store
4. Install Decentraleyes
5. Install Ublock Origin
6.  ???
7. PROFIT!!!

Non-free web browsers

Superior waifu browser not available on Freedom™ systems

Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a botnet proprietary fork of the free and open source Chromium project. While effectively offering the same browsing experience as Chromium, it integrates Google's "Pepper" Flash plugin, a Foxit-based PDF reader and controversial user-tracking capabilities. If you value your privacy or reputation on /g/ and /tech/, it's best to avoid this one unless you have a botnet fetish.

Opera

Opera is one of the oldest web browsers that is still under active development. Up to version 12.16, Opera was based on its in-house Presto layout engine and characterised by its customisability, innovation, broad out-of-the-box feature set (including a torrent client, email, IRC and FTP support) and respect for web standards. Several now ubiquitous features like tabbed browsing and speed dial made their débuts in Opera.

With the release of version 15, Opera development radically changed direction. Presto was discontinued in favour of Chromium's Blink layout engine and numerous features were excised, with the email client becoming a standalone program and GNU/Linux support and native 64-bit builds both being suspended (although the former has made a recent comeback). As a result, "Chropera" is often derided as a shadow of its former self, and a small minority of /g/ and /tech/ users fervently stick to the archaic old version. It now has a """gaming""" version and a """crypto""" version, both of which should be avoided at all costs.

Note: It was bought by chinks a bit ago, treat carefully if you do want to use the newest Opera.

Vivaldi

Vivaldi is made by the developers of classic Opera, who were apparently as frustrated with its change in direction as /g/ and /tech/, and attempts to bring back the feel and features of Opera 12.

Edge

Edge is the default web browser in Microsoft's Windows operating systems, previously known as Internet Explorer and based on Microsoft's Trident layout engine. Before IE version 9, Internet Explorer was infamous for its myriad security vulnerabilities, poor performance, disregard for most web standards and perversion of the few that it bothered to acknowledge. Since then, however, Microsoft had actively developed Internet Explorer into a tolerable web browser, and had even discontinued the brand name to distance themselves from its notoriety. Basically, Edge became Internet Explorer version 12. Has a new user interface somewhat optimized for tablets. Tons of new features were promised before Windows 10 was released, most were not implemented. It is the first browser to implement the very promising Chakra JavaScript engine. Microsoft has had enough of it. No more baking a browser. We went where all the market is at, Chromium.

Safari

Safari is the default web browser in Apple's Mac OS X. It is based on Apple's Webkit layout engine, a KHTML fork. Compared to Chromium and Firefox, Safari has a slow development cycle and is lacking in features.

Obscure hipster browsers

The chance that all websites will work with these browsers is low. Its just the way things are now. Not recommended unless you know what you're doing or don't require any website made after 2008 to run properly. Not all of them are that bad though.

Gecko

• K-Meleon is a free and open-source Firefox-like browser for Windows. It uses the Gecko rendering engine just like Firefox, but sports a native Windows UI and is absurdly configurable. It also runs very, very well on Pentium M era hardware and below.

• LibreWolf A hardened security-focused fork of Firefox with uBlock Origin preinstalled.

• SeaMonkey is a continuation of the Mozilla suite and descendant of Netscape Navigator. Unlike most modern web browsers, it is an Internet suite, completely bundled with an email client, newsreader, IRC, and web designer. Legacy Firefox Add-ons work with this, just don't use the add-on store. Has old internet written all over it. It's the only functional choice on early to mid 2000's computers, as Chromium based browsers won't work at all due to requiring an specific instruction set that older CPUs don't have. Could be worth considering on any extremely resource-deprived system, more so than broken browsers like PaleMoon.

WebKit

Warning: Some WebKit ports are considered insecure and a security risk. Before using a WebKit browser, make sure that it is not using a WebKit port that is insecure. Read more here

• GNOME Web a.k.a Ephiphany is GNOME's WebKit based browser. It's adding support for WebExtensions but it's still rather limited.

• Sleipnir is a proprietary Japanese weaboo Chromium fork with a superior, proprietary font rendering engine. However, it is only available on OS X and Windows.

• Midori is a lightweight web browser with a GTK+ interface. It is a component of the XFCE Goodies package.

• Falkon (formerly QupZilla) is similar to rekonq by being lightweight and using Qt except it has more features.

• Otter Browser is a project that aims to recreate and improve upon the features of classic Opera using the Qt5 toolkit. It is in development at the time of writing, and is thus unsuited for general use.

• Luakit, Uzbl and qutebrowser are all minimalistic browsers with a keyboard-driven, Vim-inspired interface. Most are based on archaic versions of WebKit, although qutebrowser uses QtWebEngine in more recent builds.

• Surf is a browser developed according to the Suckless philosophy, which means it's effectively a WebKit frontend.

• Dooble is a web browser focused on security and privacy with many integrated features like support for advanced options and cookie management, Gopher support, a FTP browser, a file manager, a download manager, and many others.

KHTML

• Konqueror is a Web browser and file manager that was once a core component of the K desktop environment. Webkit and Blink are both descendants of its KHTML layout engine.

Terminal

• Links is a text-based browser that can display images.

• w3m is another text-based browser that can display images.

• ELinks is a text-based based web browser that runs from the terminal.

• Lynx is the oldest web browser still under active development. It strips pages of images, doesn't use javascript, and is great for just reading what is needed, like an article. It also utilizes other system programs, should you need to open an image file, for instance.

Keyboard Driven

• Nyxt - Uses webkit by default, but can be compiled for chromium or gecko. Ultra autistic for wannabe hackers that for some reason like configuring a browser with lisp.
• Qutebrowser - Uses chromium, configured with python and is not as autistic as Nyxt.

Other

• NetSurf is a fast, lightweight browser running on GTK and using its own rendering engine with no JavaScript support.
• Dillo is an even faster, more lightweight browser running on FLTK using its own rendering engine with limited (but improving) CSS support and no JavaScript support.

Common Plug-Ins

• Adobe Flash Player is required to play the flash video incorporated into many modern Web pages. It is infamous for being bloated, slow, and exploitable. While it is being phased out in favour of HTML 5 video, Flash is unfortunately still required in many cases. Flash should not be used on GNU/Linux systems, due to the fact that it is no longer being updated for that platform. This does not apply to Chrom* based browsers, which can use the pepperflashplayer.

For a proper alternative to flash on browsers that don't support the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) like Firefox, look into freshplayerplugin, a ppapi2npapi compatibility layer that allows you to use Chrome's pepperflashplayer.

• Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance.

• The Silverlight Plug-In is required to play Silverlight content. Silverlight was essentially Microsoft's answer to Flash, but it has failed to gain any significant market share. Like Flash, it is being phased out in favour of HTML5. Unlike Flash, it is not common enough to justify its use.

• The Java and Java Deployment Toolkit Plug-Ins are installed with the Java Runtime Environment. While the Runtime Environment itself is often necessary for the use of desktop Java software, these plug-ins are extremely vulnerable and rarely used. They should be disabled in all cases.

Recommended User Scripts

4chanX

• loadletter's 4chan X is a maintained version of MayhemYDG's v2. It lacks the controversial changes made by MayhemYDG in v3. It is a shorter script, and the only maintained fork that supports Opera 12.
• ccd0's 4chan X is the continuation of Spittie's/Seaweed's 4chan X.
• Aeosynth's 4Chan-X was the original version of 4chan X.
• OneeChan is a script for customizing the look of 4chan. Unlike Appchan X, it packaged no 4chan X features. Originally by Seaweedchan, its maintenance was continued by Spittie, then Nebukazar and now KevinParnell.
• Appchan X is Zixaphir's fork of 4chan X. It combines the features of 4chan X with the rice of the Appchan and OneeChan style scripts. Since January 2015, development is not very active, but pull requests are still accepted. Unsure if it still works

Other

• Anti-Adblock Killer prevents various anti-adblock methods from being effective. For best results, it must be used in conjunction with its set of Adblock Plus filters.
• Fuck Fuckadblock is a recent fork of Anti-Adblock Killer. Works with ublock origin.
• 4Chan Linkify changes plain-text links on 4chan into hyper-links. It is redundant if either 4chan X or the official extension are used.
• uBlock Origin is an adblocker that is very efficient on system resources. This is the original source, and works on Firefox and Chrome/Chromium.
• uMatrix is to NoScript and RequestPolicy what uBlock Origin is to Adblock Plus/Edge. Allows seamless blocking of local or cross-site scripts, images, cookies, and more in a slick, low-memory package. Generally recommended over uBlock for most things as it allows full control of what's blocked, although has trouble blocking ads from youtube by itself and will break many sites by default without tweaking them. Can be found on Pale Meme as eMatrix.
• [1] Removes tracking ids in URL while surfing the web.
• [2] Improves the privacy of Content Delivery Networks.
• SponsorBlock is an extension for both major web browsers, as well as kodi, mpv, youtube-dl, chromecast, android, etc. that blocks sponsored segments in videos (works on invidous as well).