If you're finally ready to leave Chrome behind, these are my top recommendations and when to use them.

The title is err, not correct because the top 2 alternatives Opera and Arc are based on Chromium engine. I have seen tons of people swear by Arc, but I am seriously asking (since as a Linux user I can’t use it), how much good can a browser be in this day and age if ultimately it’s ad blocking breaks and it will since Manifest v2 will go soon(unless Arc folks have a solution for it)

The rest alternatives are Firefox, Zen (FF fork but honestly Atleast this was something new I learned from this article) and Tor (which is weird since it is not meant for normal web browsing and using it will not only be slow but put additional strain on the nodes, correct me if I am wrong).

  • klu9English
    4·
    2 days ago

    IIRC major streaming services like Netflix and Prime do not offer 1080p or 4k streams to Linux browsers, mainly for technical reasons. You have to use some tricks (special extensions or add-ons?) to get anything above 720p.

    • kirk781@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      I think 4K is only available on Edge on Windows for Netflix. I never bothered with 4K since that’s above and beyond my device’s native resolution but I didn’t have too positive a experience with Netflix, IMO.

      I just want to watch something in full HD without intermittent streaming or buffering. Legal streaming services including Netflix treat one like a criminal by forcing them to watch in a Web browser with constant Internet connectivity forced upon them. I can use keyboard shortcuts to increase playback speed by 0.1x each time in mpv, does Netflix allow me to do the same? No, instead it gives me a dusty experience.

      • klu9English
        1·
        2 days ago

        Back when I used to watch Netflix in a web browser, I had a browser extension that gave me lots of different capabilities, including all kinds of playback speeds.

        I can’t remember the name of the extension I used then, but I see there are still plenty of extensions available. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/search/?q=netflix

      • klu9English
        1·
        16 hours ago

        IIRC it was something to do with the difficulty of getting the browser to use hardware acceleration/GPU in the countless variations of Linux, to the point where they don’t even bother trying because of the infinitesimally small market share of each distro.

        But I’m not 100% sure of that.