(Alternative title: Bell complains about Chromium for 39k characters)

The original title I wanted would have been too long, so I'll just dump it on the first line: The world has had over thirty years to make a good web browser catered towards tab hoarders / neat freaks, and the only accessible browsers for that are built on glass.

That sounds pretty pessimistic, but I quite literally mean that we've had 33 years since the start of NETSCAPE to get our shit together, and all that we've accomplished in those thirty plus years is make the browser market a perfect metaphor for monopolies: two big beefing giants that aren't your heroes, and a bunch of small, scattered developers copying the big game's homework.

Nowadays, the five biggest browsers (mostly) in the Browser Market are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera and Firefox.

If you can understand or guess the problem with the browsers I just listed, congratulations, you get a badge for being a part of the elitist master race. Now please stand back, that's all I needed you on the stage for.

For everybody else who didn't understand, let me say it in this megaphone: FOUR OF THOSE BROWSERS ARE ALL CHROME.

The "Chromium" Race to Market Domination

Blink is the nickname for Chrome's browser engine, sometimes also referred to by the name "Chromium", which I will sometimes call it by through this guide due to the "Chromium Embedded Framework" name it has on a more technical scale. It is also in almost every modern application nowadays, thanks to the rise of Electron, as well as technically being in all Tauri apps thanks to Edge.

Now, I have my qualms with Chromium, and quite a lot of them. Most of them have pretty spotty sources and aren't well documented, so I'm going to try my best and provide links to anything I talk about if I can... But just know that the sources can be hard to find, and I'm struggling to find sources to back up my gospel as much as you think I am. Just please bear with me.

Google ruined the fun of Chromium for more money

Chromium is owned by Google. Well duh, it's called Google Chrome for a reason, though that implies many things. For one, you have to remember Google makes most of its money from Ads, not from you using their browser or by searching, or by buying Google Drive space. Google owns AdSense, one of the biggest ad forces on the internet, and literally bought ad companies even back in the day over this. Ads make companies a lot of money nowadays. You can even browse their revenue reports yourself.

So there is, naturally, incentives for Google to fuck over adblockers. While they didn't do a lot about it, most of their competition did so by whitelisting some ads whether you wanted it or not, and AdBlock Plus especially liked to fuck the companies over on top of the users by also requring websites to pay them to get ads whitelisted if they made more than a specific amount of attention from ads, among other things. If you ask me, that's not very adblocker like.

They do this to YouTube too, have been really cracking down on adblockers since about 2023. Google also really wanted to accelerate the process by bricking Manifest V2 in favor for a standard that makes adblocks less effective, which killed uBlock Origin on Chrome, and required browsers to literally forcefully support it with witchcraft, even going out of their way to host it on their website or else, because the extensions are for sure not on the store anymore!

Now, any browser that is not Google Chrome usually has a backup, and we'll get to that later. But for now, let's focus on the big picture: ad blocking for all of Chromium is dead. Not like it mattered anymore, considering Firefox has potentially superior dynamic filtering and might potentially also be able to actually block stuff on pages before they load, where Chrome does so anyway...

That would explain my poor Chrome adblocking experience, actually. I wonder if modern Chromium browsers worked this out. Well too bad I'm not finding out anyway, because-

Is it so hard to implement vertical tabs that are "tree style?"

Oh my fucking god. I have never been so pissed at such a random, obscure thing before. Please, let me rant about this stupid niche for a minute.

For those who are Chromepilled, Tree Style Tabs (Sidebery pictured but a simple version with the name mentioned exists too) is the name for a really awesome style of Vertical Tabs exclusive to Firefox that, with a single extension, allows you to have Vertical Tabs on crack. It's (the extension of the same name) spiritual successor Sidebery has workspace-like tab groups that make this even more fun.

Now, there are many problems with this. Firstly, it's Firefox only, making it tied to a browser with horrible stability issues and the reputation of being the browser with an elitist user base (myself included, whoops). Which means your tabs can disappear, because Firefox is a horrible browser management wise.

Secondly, you usually have to hide the other tab type manually with some CSS magic, unless you use a browser that has a similar feature baked in. For some people that is kind of a non-issue, but for many people that will be a huge big deal and might even drive them bonkers. And will annoy some for sure.

The native side of the debate

However, literally every chromium user and their grandmother cannot even figure this out! Most chromium browsers only have implemented Vertical Tabs for unknown reasons, and the best they could come up with were the horrible one level Tab Groups that pisses me the fuck off, and some browsers have created Workspaces which is pretty much just the tab group feature of Sidebery as a standalone feature. That's as close as tree style tabs as you get.

Except, even some browsers fuck this up! Brave's Workspaces are in beta (even when the feature was rejected several times in the past and was never implemented back in the day), and even if you go through the process of going through experimental settings and turning it on, they fucking suck! They're pretty much screenshots of your tabs, they don't visually separate your tabs into groups like Vivaldi's does? ???

WHAT THE FUCK WAS THE POINT OF ANY OF IT. What genuinely was the fucking point. At that point, take your side groups and fuck OFF. Even Vivaldi has side groups, and I preferred those! And I have plenty to rant when I actually get to ranting about the browsers themselves!

The extension side of the debate

The extension side is literally worse. Some of the options are pop-out and don't permanently stay, because developers were lazy I guess. The other half is full of scumbags making money off customizations, because why not?

Wanna know what puts the cherry on the cake? No chromium browser I know of actually lets you hide the tabs at the top. YOU ARE ALWAYS CURSED TO HAVE MULTIPLE TABS. I tried on Vivaldi, you could hide the tabs there but there was no dedicated sidebar for the tabs. Supermium didn't hide them. Brave was horrible to use. Genuinely what is the point if nobody can do it right???

Okay, but actual opinions on Chromium browsers

Okay, well, that's a lot of yap for a post about browsers sucking... Not many receipts being brought to a dying market. Maybe we should talk about every browser I just mentioned, and do a real deep dive?

This feels like an idea we've already visited, but sure, we'll bite the bullet!

Chrome is "vanilla" in both potential, and literal sense.

Google Chrome in all honestly, is a pretty big nothing burger. As I've said before, it's owned by the wonderful villanous company Google, it does the bare minimum (already a big "no"), and has no protection rackets against Manifest V2 being gone. So basically, you're already going to get an inferior ad blocking experience with no luxurious features to pad out the problem or at least give any "pseudo-power users" any chances to really redeem yourself.

This is also rivalled by the fact it has such a big market base, mainly because of the popularity of the horrendous Chromebooks that schools hand out to people. Though this can also be chaulked up to internet practices that are outdated, out-of-touch and incredibly dangerous. It is up there with people using uTorrent, TLauncher and Avast for me.

I don't even think I've heard anybody make an argument for Chrome being good, if anything. Considering it's famous for eating RAM (yet Firefox does it twelve times more) and being forced onto devices as powerful as two potatoes. If anybody can argue how Chrome is better than any other browser, minus the fact it's simpler, I'll pin your comment. Just be aware what kind of trophy you're signing up for.

Edge suffers both historical problems, and store problems.

Edge is quite honestly the same, though with a couple of big asteriks. Edge is carrying the bags of a shell that used to be infamous by protesters for starting bullshit in the computing space in the 90s. This problem, technically started in the literal 90s.

For anybody unaware, Windows Refund Day was a day in 1999 where Linux users protested about Windows making computers more expensive. It failed, however the important detail is this was around the same time that Windows 95 deeply integrated Internet Explorer into it's browser with no easy install button, making users report it ran better with it uninstalled, and Microsoft went all out by integrating it so badly that it was basically super invasive and might as well existed just to kick out Netscape. Ensue this mad bastard making a website all about it.

For reference, it would be like if to browse your family pictures, Windows opened up a copy of Microsoft Edge in explorer, and made you navigate a fancy electron applet to browse your files. Something something, people are already trying this, or equivalent. These are probably not electron applets, but I'm sure you get my point, imagine if an app as bloated as Discord was used to browse your files.

Thirty years later, Microsoft Edge copies Chromium's homework, and is forced to continue to hold up the Internet Explorer integration, because even Microsoft can't unlike this garbage. Why else do you think we had IE compatibility mode?

Considering Edge can be traced back to an earlier version deeply dug into Windows, it is already insane how little it works. If you still aren't confident, you shouldn't be, it is already disgusting that Laptops are being sold that struggle to run even the OS, let alone Edge too.

I really do not have any trust in Edge, because it is just a fancy looking Chrome. They did do Vertical Tabs first, sure. But their extension store is god awful and filled with shovelware garbage, and with the current state the Chrome Web Store is in, it's just not worth using. Sorry, Microslop.

I genuinely cannot think of another good argument for Edge, other than the fact it's Chrome, but run by a "lesser evil". If you can call it that.

Opera is (allegedly) owned by a chinese company, and lied to their users about that

It should be noted that Opera, very technically, is Chinese run. While they were founded and have headquarters in Norway (as per their Twitter statement), they very technically are mostly shareholded by a Chinese entity, so... Very technically China. Fun.

Opera has made statements on this before, many times, however why they chose to defend their use of Google as "they allow users to choose between a variety of search engines", however the fact they do not mention that Google is the default is a little ignorant. If Google is your default, then there is still "data collection" happening, just not by you. And don't get me started on trying to defend Google after what we talked about today. They alone have not touched the loan apps, which leads me to suggest they probably don't want to look bad on that front. Still quite suspicious.

Anyway, morality and spyware debate aside, Opera used to be a good competitor in the space, as along with Internet Explorer's Trident, there was Firefox's Gecko, Chromium's Blink (a fork of WebKit), Apple's WebKit (used by most of your appliances!) and Opera's Presto. However, Opera in July 2013 decided to go Blink, once again splitting the monopoly into WebKit/Blink and Gecko.

Nowadays, it is once again, just a Chrome fork. However, the browser decided to give people heart attacks with a boot-up screamer in November 2023. If that doesn't scream 'I care more about gimmicks and stunts than the user's safety!' then I don't know what does. Also, the company acted incredibly immature over it, another reason you should genuinely not trust whatever Opera thinks they're doing.

That aside, the gimmicks mostly were just to worsen your own browsing experience, just because you don't like the idea of closing your god damn web browser during play. Yes, the RAM limit in practice is cool, but the limiter barely worked unless you enabled the hard limit, which was over sensitive! You should really not open your browser during play anyway unless you have the RAM. You're crippling potato devices, and for the working class you'll be wasting RAM when you could close it and just lock in on your Overwatch push.

I don't know who the hell is running their twitter and posting their responses, but there is quite a few holes here. And it is still an inferior option.

Vivaldi is the "better" Opera, in a way

This is about as close as we are going to get to Equilibrium, unfortunately.

Vivaldi is a web browser project run by Opera founder and former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, and is the spiritual successor to Opera. While it still uses Blink (again...), it is known for being highly customizable web interface wise, being redesignable, even a little bit with CSS. It kind of crosses the streams between Firefox's CSS customizations, and Chrome's web engine.

It is a pretty good browser for the former CEO of Opera. However it is still held back by the fact it is based on Blink. This means it suffers the same problem that it has to use the Chromium Web Store (no adblocking on a professional level), it has to use Manifest V3 purely, and unlike Brave, it did not do anything extraordinary to support uBlock Origin.

I understand that an embedded ad-block engine can be more powerful, I heard great thing about Brave Shields. However, Vivaldi's blocker is so unhelpful, basic and uncustomizable that it is actually the one part I hate about the browser the most. It historically did not block ads well, and I don't know how it was built. But I do feel that Vivaldi is setting me up for failure in terms of ad blocking, and is on the same page as everybody else, including Opera. Even Brave and Helium are going pro on this.

Vivaldi is still quite better off though, even if the adblocking is horrendous and restrictive like Chrome. It has a far better UI that I like a lot, it has workspaces and tab grouping that can barely emulate Sidebery enough to not be immediately eye turning. However, the groups are one level only and feel terrible to use. So in the long run, it is pretty much a transitional browser.

You need to be Brave to use this browser

Brave is the opposite problem of Vivaldi. They did great with ad blocking, have fine mobile apps (aside from iOS. Ugh. what cancer.), supported Manifest V2 as long as they could, and allowed you to use uBlock Origin (the main extension) instead of Brave Shields if you so really wanted.

However, unlike Vivaldi, it is run by people go lucky obsessed with crypto. This makes sense considering they try not to rely on Google and ads for money, but... Come on, Leo AI is a sign that they are chasing the same trends everybody else is. It cannot be convenient to rely on crypto if they're also going all in on the AI trends.

Not like that was the worst they did, anyway. They steal referral links for their own gain.

Also, Brave started through YouTube ads. I'm pretty sure in ~2021, they started as some weird low quality budget ads, then progressed to professional ones later. Just saying.

Though putting some of the hate aside, the PC version can be enhanced with this cool debloater, and lets you hide yourself from Brave's statistics. However, it won't save you from screaming team Brave in the browser polls. You'll need a user-agent for that.

My only real complaint is that you can't do this on Mobile. Don't like all the AI and Crypto in your face? Shove Brave's entire foot up your ass! There is no UI hides, ever, unlike PC. Another argument for mobile content addiction,

Generally, Brave is the best ad-blocking browser (aside from Helium; we'll get to that in a bit), but the fact it needs a debloater to get close to my goal, and has no good implementation for tree style tabs, again, is the main reason NONE of the Chromium browsers can come close to the fox.

Also, Brave Origin has the ability to purchase a License. So they're trying to make money off the privacy audience, while giving Windows user an equally questionable experience. Not like any of their users care, I'm pretty sure most people either use Brave over Firefox because they want the easiest option, or because they want to stick it to Firefox users.

Helium is a pretty suspicious option

I won't sugar coat it, I absolutely hated Helium as soon as I looked at it, and thought something was really fishy. On their homepage, they compare to Firefox without using an adblock on Firefox, which is at best misleading and clumsy. At worst, they did this on purpose to look better, and tried to manipulate uninformed people. Have they tested the performance on Firefox, with uBlock Origin? Or are we also too lazy to do the bare minimum, and I don't know... Test with the giant? Properly?

They are featured on FMHY which automatically means they probably to some degree are safe, and I won't doubt that this browser is safe, I'm sure it is! But this simple comparison was so competitive and disgusting, that I am immediately turned away from this browser. Permanently. They are already testing with the Chromium build of uBlock Origin most likely, which is ineffective considering Blink is believed to handle pre-fetching assets differently than Firefox ever did. Do your own testing and see what happens. See who has a worse ad-blocking score, and who is faster. If Helium wins both competitions, I'll go fuck myself with a rusty spanner some time.

I'm sorry, but Helium has nothing over Firefox. Helium is basically just a Chromium instance with some UI edits anybody can make in 5 minutes, it does not have workspaces, it does not have tree style tabs, they do not specify how they block cookie banners (meaning they could be hitting 'accept all' for you for who knows what), nothing.

So while they don't actually go into detail how they do any of this, they lie to your face about how it blocks ads, when you could do the same in Firefox in like two extra minutes. At best, these people were lazy, but more likely they decided to downplay Firefox for a few extra downloads.

Arc

I do not have many comments for Arc. I found the tabs were built like an Edge Webview app, and the design choices looked almost AI driven. Whether it was, I don't know, I don't care. Do your own research, I didn't waste my time with Arc as soon as I felt the performance suck more than everybody else.

Lightning round

Before we move on to the king, let's go through some quick browser mentions.

I've also tried Maxthon a few years ago, which was chinese owned and mostly just a UI facelift back in the day. Nowadays, it's just square Chrome.

All those 'search engine browsers' owned by DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and whatever... They are mostly junk. It is all Blink, and I haven't heard of anybody using a single one. If you can make a case for one of these browsers, I will genuinely pin you.

Now that I think about it, I'm willing to make a follow-up blog for anybody who can make arguments on anything I've said so far. Let's see about it.

Also, any browser bundled with an anti-virus is shovelware garbage and just is supposed to give people a false sense of security. It's not any more secure than Chrome is. Bite me.

Firefox is the only competitor, and that doesn't say a lot!

Well, that was a lot of Blink! And the only competitor is... Oooh yikes, Firefox. Bad look, but unfortunately it's all we have, so bear with me and just stay for the first half.

I'm going to be so real, Firefox is a pitiful competitor, and it is horrible in many aspects. But it is the only option when it comes to fighting the Chromium curse. I don't like Firefox as much as the rest of you, but the argument of Firefox being 'for old people' really does not add up when it MOGS everybody else ad blocking wise. And it's no competition either, it's a landslide win.

The underdog being paid to compete wins by doing nothing

No, really. Firefox crushes the others, and it's no competition.

Let's be serious for a minute though, Google is ABSOLUTELY in bed with Mozilla. Google might as well be paying Mozilla to compete with them, considering they are paid millions by Google, mainly to promote google as their main search engine, like every other browser right now. If you think that's bad, it's said that 86% of Mozilla's money is from Google, and they literally cannot live without Google's money as much as they might imply.

It is fucking CRAZY to think about, that Google pays Firefox to be the default search engine, and pretty much be the only Chromium competitor.

And they still fucking win. Not only is the adblocking experience recommended by professionals, ESPECIALLY since the developers of uBlock Origin themselves say that their lite version is "practically useless" against fighting sites. Want to block new ads that have been invented? Shit outta luck, no instant updates for you, because Google has broken the Chromium market.

On Firefox, it's business as normal. You could get the fix within hours. On Chromium, it might take literal days because of Manifest V3's restrictions. That is only one reason alone how Firefox trumps Chrome, because-

Tab management's best experience is Firefox only

Remember when I was talking about Sidebery?

Yeah, Firefox only. So the choice is literally between adblocking and tab management, and having a better, lightweight web browser engine being destroyed by an ad-block mass surveillance censorship effort. I think I'll stick with the underdog, thanks, your Vertical Tabs fucking suck.

Really! I can open up a lot of tabs during browsing, and when the tabs are at the top of the screen, they are REALLY hard to click on. And it's already insane the Browser market didn't migrate to Vertical Tabs until...

Edge did it in 2021? And rolled out a beta version by 2020? Okay, fair but Google waited until 2026 to permanently implement them, so let's pretend the mass rollout didn't begin until 2026, because it's a more serious number.

Please bare with my bad research, Microsoft does a horrible job at preserving versions, and I didn't wanna force you guys to all scroll all the way down a previous versions page to find the version I wanted your attention at. But if you wanna do the research yourself, Vertical Tabs were in public Edge by build 88.0.705.50, that's January 2021, you can figure it out I'm sure.

Chrome alone not having implemented BASIC vertical tabs until April 2026 is already impressively slow. Considering Edge did it first, in fucking 2021. But this is on top of the fact that nobody else on the market has tried Tree Style yet. At all.

Alone, I have opened a lot of tabs researching for this blog post, considering this is one of the most research-important blog posts I've made yet. And if this was just horizontal tabs, that journey would become pain real fast.

With regular vertical tabs, maybe it'd be faster to check all the tabs... But the representation of where the web starts from Sidebery is just a beautiful site, and I love how it ends up practically.

I get adblocking no matter what flavor I pick.

With Chromium, there is the big issue of picking the damn flavor. I like my dynamic filtering, and no custom filters prevent me from using a cleaner filter, so... Pretty much, my choices are Helium and Brave. And considering that might as well be picking between Lucifer and Satan, I'd just rather take the punching bag.

If I had to pick between a company purposefully fumbling their browser because they're paid to look like they're doing something, and between the company and all of it's followers who all chose to follow the footsteps of Google, I'm going for the idiots. Because no matter if I pick Firefox, Waterfox, Earthfox, or any of it's million smaller forks, I am getting the same thing every time: Firefox with changes that don't make Adblocking any different.

You pick a Blink browser, adblocking changes drastically between everyone. You pick a Gecko browser, you can just install uBlock Origin if you don't like it. Plain as cake.

If Firefox is what Chromium can't be, how come Firefox is as bad as Chrome?

That sounds like quite a mouthful, sure! Lots of minimal, yet valid arguments for me to hate everything but Firefox and it's cousins.

Unfortunately, to call me a "Firefox fanboy" is stretching those words very thin, considering I hate Firefox as much as the Brave users do. Why exactly? Well...

The profile system, while better structured, sucks.

Firefox just cannot do a single thing right for the life of it, except Adblocking and not shilling for ad money.

Firefox's profile folder structure is completely different to Chrome's, holds so much potential, yet gets completely fucking roasted. Compared to Chrome, you can actually partially browse and "technically" delete some website data right from the file explorer. You also have the ability to make a user.js file which lets you automatically force preferences from about:config to be set to whatever you like whether Firefox wants it or not.

That's great! Except, it's a pain in the ass to work with.

When you even factor in Firefox Sync, it doesn't migrate some of your Extension data (specifically userscripts and themes). It doesn't migrate your user.js changes. It doesn't migrate a whole lot of things; meaning you either have to copy the profile fresh from another folder, or just do without!

And for some unholy reason, in the time I started this project, I managed to lose my profile data because Mozilla made duplicate profiles connect as "another application using it" if you directly copied the data. For unknown, unholy reasons.

Welcome to 'brick your install 101', here's how to do this at home- Oh, wrong show!

It does not hold up to Chromium

Firefox, in all honesty, runs like complete ass. Blink beats it out because it is well optimized, has roots as an Apple product, and has millions of people crowding it and finding bugs really fast.

Meanwhile, Mozilla slugs on adding anything useful, and spends half of their time adding AI. So while Chromium gets faster and more efficient, Firefox just sits doing fuck all and playing with AI generated trains and toys. And Firefox has earned the reputation of being occasionally 'less secure' than Chrome over this. Yes, really, according to some.

This is also applied opportunity wise. Instead of offering rivals to the likes of Opera GX functions like RAM limits, integrated mailing and calendar function, bringing back RSS and creating a new innovative extension style (or even Chrome compatibility to bridge the gap a little, like their forks are doing), Firefox is doing fuck all and adding AI Agent integrations. For what?

So Firefox just sits around, being bulky and competitively rubbing egos with Chrome for disk and RAM space, while everybody else implements stupid gimmicks and advertising slogans that fish their other potential users away.

Mozilla is severely out of touch. Saying that Firefox is better than Chromium is only true on a moral standpoint unfortunately, considering Chromium outperforms it in every way.

Looking into Firefox's forks

Well, there's not like there's nothing to it's name. A lot of people have made forks, whether to improve Firefox or just give it a facelift! And I also want to quickly draw attention to some of those options.

Waterfox

Waterfox is an independent fork of Firefox that has been around for a long time. It has a pretty corny and basic name, although it outdoes Firefox in the way that it is run by a slightly more capable company, that I don't know shit about. At least, that's what they claim.

Waterfox has tried to innovate in a few ways such as offering experimental Chrome Web Store support and integrating the legacy Tree Style Tabs directly into the browser. While I no longer have a use for the Tree Style Tabs extension, it did start my journey into fascination with the technology as a whole. So I have to thank Waterfox for that!

Outside of that, it's not very notable. They did offer a Waterfox Classic choice a good while back that resembled Firefox before it's Quantum update, however it was not very useful aside from being a cool conceptual thing, like Basilisk and Pale Moon. It's pretty much just a Firefox with a different logo and some extra integrations. Good to branch away from Mozilla, but otherwise not very useful.

Zen

Zen is kind of not my territory either. It has design principals that seem similar to Arc, however it boasts it's advantages as it is far more capable than Arc ever was.

Unfortunately, I think the UI was awful, and opted for classic Firefox. However, I applaud anybody who uses it, and I love that Firefox has reached a new audience of people in this way. Even if it's UI was pretty bad to use.

Librewolf

For privacy nuts, you've heard this one before. Librewolf is a hardened fork of Firefox that overdoes the privacy and makes nothing permanent to make it harder for advertising companies and trackers to pin you down.

Pretty overkill, and pretty much is the nuclear option. But for some they really like this, and it does have some optimizations over Firefox making it unique. It was too overkill for what I wanted (full control & speed), however it is still a good browser, and you can optionally unset all the traps if you have to. It is mainly designed for paranoid nerds, really.

Floorp

Let me rant for a bit about the single saving grace right now.

Floorp is a Firefox fork owned by Japanese entity Ablaze. It is the only fork that natively will hide the topbar, without any CSS hacks or user made snippets. It has heavenly customization with the ability to switch between eras of Firefox's tab and frame UI (even if impractical; but some are more condensed than others), and in general makes improvements to Firefox with more experimental features available to use.

Floorp also does not resolve the bloat with Firefox's UI, despite being optimized at the compiler level. The result is the browser sometimes loads SLOWER or as slow as Firefox when carelessly misconfigured, and the browser in general does not fix the problems Firefox has (especially with the "browser VPN" debate. ugh), and sometimes even leans INTO it.

However, since Floorp 11, it has gone a long way and it is far better than it's been now. It is built on mainline Firefox rather than an ESR, making it far more advanced than the likes of Waterfox.

However, it is also going backwards by keeping aspects of Firefox that made it poor. So I pretty much traded Firefox to save a few trips when curating my experience. It did not fix the problem with profiles, nothing. I switched to an expensive toy.

Yet it's the best it's going to get. I cannot live without disabling the top tabs, and Floorp looks better with themes than any other browser does. It's pathetic.

Other forks, such as R3DFox & Pale Moon

Just a quick mention, as they exist. Specialties like R3DFox were never my use case, so I always avoided them, however for nerds in niche places (like Vista daily driving), you're on a good track so far.

Browsers like Pale Moon are based on old code. While it's cool for people who like minimalist solutions, it's not enough for me. Pale Moon alone cannot use WebExtensions which blocks my Password Manager Bitwarden, and is pretty much an ad-blocked browser without fancy whistles when deconstructed. Good for veterans and people who generally follow older internet practices, not good for a power user that obsessively themes and tricks everything up.

They do have good niche uses... But I am not any of those niche uses. So YMMV. The lack of extension support was a turn-off, it's VERY clear that they are specialized tools, and I don't need them in my toolbox. Others generally do.

Miscellaneous annoyances with web browsers

Before we wrap up this wonderful journey, let's rapid fire all the issues that mostly all browsers have not figured out yet! :D

Stored data on websites I only needed the data once for

There is modern problems with the browsing space. Why genius.com, and randomfuckingwebsite.com needs cookies and 10 megabytes of site data held on my hard drive is ludacris. I went there ONCE at best. Stop saving the data there by default, I don't visit it often.

The Firefox improving user.js project BetterFox makes improvements in this regard by allowing you to delete site data after leaving by default, however configuration is a little aimless at times, because there is no explicit implied difference between 'Allow cookies' and 'Keep site data when I close Firefox'. And no, Floorp does not improve in this aspect.

Chrome is worse than Firefox where it's data is stored nonsensically, but to be fair you have an easier time just deleting the "Cache" folder rather than guessing what is cache and what is permanent... Almost like they're sidegrades of each other!

In general, you just have to clear all your cache and pray. It's a fight you will never win. Ever.

Also, might I add, SpaceHey Firefox users will benefit from Betterfox Setup. No more disk cache, means a restart of the browser is more likely to fix your profile picture issues. Assuming you don't need a VPN in the first place. Iunno, I don't know what crack An smoked either.

Picture-in-Picture is inconsistent across a lot of browsers. All the time.

Self explanatory. Picture-in-Picture across every browser sucks.

Firefox sometimes will not show the PiP button, requiring you to do the right click trick to find the option. On some sites they block it, making it literally impossible to PiP unless you refresh and pray to whatever lord above that the button finally appears.

iOS Web Browser hunting might as well be the "turd vs crap" debate.

Also pretty self-explanatory. Everything on iOS is WebKit, making all of the options terrible aside from the Jailbreak centric Reynard porting Gecko, and the Blinker Fluid project porting Blink. Good to have alternatives, but they're not ready for casuals at all.

Aside from those two, nothing works well. Safari has horrible extensions and uBlock Origin Lite requires 18.4+ (guess why that's a problem. hint: google the advice for jailbreaking ios), wBlock is honestly terrible and overly blocks e-mail unsubscribe tracker links, Firefox Focus deletes everything as soon as you close it and requires configuring to block ads first,, Orion barely works, Brave freezes my phone when watching YouTube, and anything else is asking for trouble.

Firefox, Chrome and the like all do not have extensions on iOS. Making them all useless. Most of the time I just shuffle between Orion and Brave, hoping one day one will do better than the other. I'm debating honestly just deleting Safari off my homepage entirely and to never look stuff up on my Phone where possible. Extreme, but fuck phones.

Conclusion

So, Ladybug is far away from being finished right now and there is no other alternative. We're all fucked :D But in a more serious light, this post took a long while, and has succeeded my Windows rant. God help all of us.

I hope this brings some people perspective why people choose to stick with Firefox, and I hope Chromium developers use this post as an example of what NOT to do when designing. At least you're not the scumbags charging money for Sidebery functionality. They can go to hell!