Tried Vivaldi, the browser.
It seems like a super powerful browser with a fully customizable UI and integrated mail client, and calendar things. If I were a businessman or something, you get me, I would definitely like it because I don't need google calendar and Microsoft exchange and any other annoying things, I just need a powerful broswer.
But sadly I'm not that kind of person. I want a simple yet good enough browser where I can install the ad-blocker and call it a day. Frankly speaking, Chrome and Firefox give a pretty simple solution, which they don't offer too many options, but also not too few (I mean, safari).
Why it's so hard. I just want to browse the internet.
I would just stick with firefox for now and see what's gonna happen after mid-2023, when the manifest v2 is deprecated.
@skyblond have you tried ChromeOS? Not chromium OS, but full ChromeOS? It's pretty impressive when setup correctly.
Not yet. I'm still a Windows person becuase I use laptop, with Nvidia graphics card and a oversimplified bios from razer. Some linux distro just refused to boot.
@skyblond Yeah it's a pain to get it working, I went through a phase of my life testing different OS's out of boredom. MacOS was the hardest. I spent a whole month figuring out how it all works to get it to run great. After it ran perfectly, I uninstalled it because I know my computer runs Linux better anyway.🤣 I just wanted the challenge. Windows definitely has that game advantage though.
@skyblond Things got messed up with the idea of webapps. Entire applications that run in the browser. As I am a web application developer, I love this idea. But you're 100% right.
The majority of the web is not web apps. Giving the browser all these capabilities makes it massive. Also browsers tabs work differently than most people know. Each tab is another entire browser in duplicate, they do this so a page in one tab that gets frozen doesn't freeze up the other tabs. 85mb chrome with 5 tabs is 425mb of chrome. Sadly all browsers are built this way.
As the internet has become dynamic, it's time for browsers to become the same. A browser that loads resources only when requested by the page would be a massive performance and efficiency boost. Like there is chrome lite, it would be sweet to make a "lite tab" in a normal chrome browser.
But here's the biggest caveat, you mentioned ad-block. Extensions are psuedo applications. For it to be able to run one, it must be able to run them all. That makes the browser gigantic again.
There needs to be a divide. If there are methods of installing web apps, not using the browser, the browsers can go back to being ultra light and fast.
I want things to be not complicated.
I mean, the extension system is a good one, the purpose is to prevent browser from over-packing features and let user to install extension if they want something extra.
I tried some well developed web applications and extensions before. Those are really pleasant to use. With bad designed ones? You have to infer what's going wrong in code and avoid operations that will trigger the error. (I'm not a web development so I don't know what's going wrong exactly, I could only infer based on my limited experience).
The browser definitely need a way to load resources on request. Like if the website don't need to connect my wallet, why the wallet extension still running?
IMO, the browser works like the jvm for Java, where it serves the application by offering a standard interface. For java, they have a committee that release new standards every several months and let the vendor to implement the jvm, the one who actually run the program. Now we have oracle, openjdk, IBM, aluz, all different jvms that have their own special abilities.
I think it will be great if we have a standard yet open interface for browsers. So vendor like Google, Mozilla, Apple and others can do their own job while not screw up their users.
You're absolutely right about the browser working like a JVM, because it is one. It's powered by Googles Java V8 engine. JavaScript tells the engine what to do. 🙂
You're a smart person to have noticed that.
Hehe too many JVMs out there. I'm not a big fan of it anymore. People think it gives you native performance but it really doesn't. That would be C and C++ that give native performance.
There is a standard for browsers, established by Mozilla, called the MDN. For developers, they standardize through the W3 consortium. Next time they have a convention I should go there and do my political thing and influence them.
But you're right before, there should be a browser for browsing, and not possibly doing a billion other things. 👍
@skyblond I use Vivaldi every day and I've turned off the mail and calendar features. They can be toggled off so you never have to deal with it.
Maybe I'll try to set it up. It's still on my system.
And yes, I don't change most of the default settings. So I use gnome and it looks prettier than KDE by default, although I see people configured their KDE looks much better.
About five years ago, I configured KDE and other things too. But it also locks me into my current setup, which, if they stop maintaining or make breaking changes (give my tray icons bar back, gnome), or the settings I relied on are removed, I will be doomed. (And I will never upgrade to windows 11 because I can't put the taskbar vertically on the left of my screen unless MS gives me a 16:10 monitor to compensate for the space usage).