Darvond: So we all know the big 3. Mozzarella Firefox, Gaggle Chrome, and Microsoft Shadow the Hedgehog (Ow the Edge). (And their basic variants.)
I just wanted to use this opportunity get on my personal soapbox and rant about the utter
arrogance of Firefox's developers.
Instead of working on features that people actually wanted, like, you know, better performance and more efficient use of resources, Firefox developers and the Mozilla Foundation instead saw fit to give us a built-in Skype competitor that no one wanted or asked for (from what I saw), unnecessary Pocket integration and a dubious
branding campaign. Of yes, and of course there was their attempt at creating an entirely new mobile platform, because those
always turn out so well.
Darvond: There's Vivaldi, which while Chromium based is largely different from Chrome itself, using an UI reminiscent of the old Opera browser because it's made by the same folks. The problem being that well, it's a very new browser and has yet to largely separate itself from the Chromium base.
Vivaldi's not so bad, and it actually seems to have been created out of sincere motivations (as opposed to cynically creating a startup with the only real endgame being bought out by a company like Google). The only problem with it is that it really feels like it was made for old-school Opera fans, which is great if you loved pre-Chrome Opera, but it doesn't really connect with me as I was never an Opera devotee.
My only concern is its long-term feasibility. I know Vivaldi's been trying to branch out by positioning itself as a "power-user's browser". But it still very much comes across as a niche market browser.
Darvond: Then there's SeaMonkey, which is less of a browser and more of an entire suite of applications. Retaining a look that might remind one of the days when Netscape still existed, this is also powered by the Mozilla team, and to be honest, I haven't touched this since the days of Firefox 4.
That's actually by design; SeaMonkey basically aims to continue the original Mozilla Application Suite/Netscape Communicator, except with developments, enhancements, bug fixes, and changes in step with other Mozilla projects like Firefox and Thunderbird. What's nice about it is that it has far better legacy support than Firefox. I'd be more amenable to using it, if there was an UI theme for it that better matched OS X.
Darvond: Oh, sure. There's TOR. But the way I see it, you only use TOR to advertise that you're up to no good.
*coughs* I don't know what you're talking about.
Darvond: So what alternative/up and coming browsers have you given a try to? For what reason?
I've flirted on and off with using
Pale Moon; it pretty much is the closest thing I can get to a modern day version of my long-lost browser love, Camino. The
OS X version is very mature (with just a few minor bugs holding it back from official status), and it enjoys both a passionate and engaged developer, and a very loyal and devoted community following. I would have switched to it full-time if it weren't for...
Waterfox. It's pretty much what 64-bit Firefox should be. After discovering that it had an OS X version with good legacy support, I switched almost immediately and never looked back.
Edit: The only caveat with using Waterfox is that it uses your existing Firefox profile, which is great if you wanted to do a seamless, wholesale switch (as I did), but an annoyance if you want to keep browsers on separate profiles for testing purposes.