Currently, I’m a Vivaldi user. My issue with Vivaldi is simple: it isn’t fully open source.
So what are my options? The obvious ones are Brave and Firefox.
But.
Brave has all the crypto crap, its sync feature sucks, as it doesn’t even save all my settings, the mobile browser version of it sucks even more, because I couldn’t find a way to access tabs from my laptop on the mobile client, and Brave mobile only supports the tab bar at the top (I want it at the bottom, phones are big, at least make them easier to use)
Firefox has the sync features, the mobile version supports tabs at the bottom, and sync is easy and works well, and on top of all that, it is either packaged by or preinstalled on most, if not all Linux distros BUT I have 3 issues with Firefox: Data collection is on by default (not that big of a deal, as it’s Mozilla, not Google, the data isn’t that much and can be turned off with a single toggle), Something very important for me is small tabs, and Firefox’ tabs are MASSIVE. I just want small tabs that look like Brave’s tabs, same colours, small and simple. And third, I want a better start page. Firefox’ start page doesn’t support custom backgrounds, and I want one that does. And preferably also has privacy statistics like number of ads and trackers blocked.
Lastly, it has to be based on Chromium or Gecko (Firefox’ engine) so I can use all my browser extensions.
Is there a browser out there that meets all my criteria?
You might want to look into Firefox forks—LibreWolf, maybe? Or Seamonkey, which is technically not a Firefox fork but might as well be. I use Pale Moon, but while it does have small tabs and no data collection that I’m aware of (even the code supporting it may have been ripped out in the ongoing efforts to get rid of unwanted maintenanace burdens), it uses the old Firefox extension framework that was deprecated some years ago, so you’d likely have to find alternatives to some extensions.
You can change firefox’ start page with addons.
Iceraven is a fully open source Firefox fork.
Ungoogled Chromium is the same for chromium.
But what about sync functionality on Ungoogled Chromium? Would I need to depend on Google for sync features? I use those quite often, and Google is certainly not someone I would trust with my tabs, if I can avoid it.
What exactly are you trying to sync? If it’s just passwords I recommend switching to a proper Password Manager like Bitwarden. There are plugins for both Gecko and Chromium.
I use sync for bookmarks and sending links berween devices. I could work around not having the latter, but are there any good options for keeping bookmarks synced between computers?
As for your firefox issues, thats pretty trivial to fix by adding some CSS in usercontent.css/userchrome.css
See here for some examples: MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
Firefox’ tabs are MASSIVE
You can change the tab size.
Go to about:config and change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
you can change how firefox looks by modifying userchrome.css and usercontent.css files easily, if the issue is how it looks maybe you can find a theme you like firefox css store has a lot of themes you can try, be careful with version numbers though
for example here is a video explaining how to modify the start page backgrounds using css files on firefox here
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=K3iSxljSo8Q
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
