Vivaldi - built in ad blocker, the creator is a nice guy, transparent business model. It might be rough around the edges, but it's much better from every alternative imho.

…and Chromium under the hood.

Firefox.

is it as greedy as chrome for the ram?

In my recent experience: definitely yes, though not significantly worse. Unless you have [many] hundreds of tabs open (which I do as I have neither executive function nor organisational skills), or have a machine with very limited RAM, I don't think you'll notice a difference.

This is anecdata, of course, take with a pinch of your preferred flavouring powder.

Chrome on Windows is running with thousands of tabs "open" over dozens of windows, but it does practically max out on a certain number of tabs per window (not just the GUI, but something in the memory architecture), and it does stack fat cache which will crash the whole thing if it digs deeper than your available space.

Windows even runs (semi-playably) 2020's shooters in this condition, though you need to kill any windows close to the tab limit that are full of recently opened tabs.

[Yes, I know, the horror]

Yes: https://www.phoronix.com/review/firefox-chrome-2026/4

> Chrome also came in at slightly lower memory consumption across all the benchmarks with total memory usage on average at 4.67GB to Firefox at 4.83GB.

Does it allow me to play youtube on locked screen on mobile?

You can play yt video in firefox with locked screen but you need to use desktop mode

Yes, actually!

Well, it does require you to install an extension[0], but it can be done.

[0]: <https://github.com/mozilla/video-bg-play>

Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.

You don't install software on your machines that didn't come pre-installed/configured?

They're literally asking for a paid YouTube feature to be free "out of the box". Lol wild.

Nah I want general media playback in the background. Doesn't matter if its Youtube or any other platform. I dont want giga corpos to monetize my attention. Youtube does well enough from ads anyway ;)

It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.

Why should a browser be policing YouTube’s ToS for them?

Agreed, this sounds strange indeed. Much more likely is that Google found a reliable way to detect the screen status using a standard feature and Mozilla just implements the standard neutrally

Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.

You want to have your cake and eat it too, I think the best solution in your case is paying for youtube

Or I just keep using brave and not pay for the biggest media corpo that just passed Disney in revenue.

Was Brave pre-installed on your computer or did you remember to install it?

Even youtube's app itself doesn't allow that unless you pay. I suspect they've nobbled most browsers into not allowing it, either by technical measures or (more likely) the strong-arm tactic of saying “if you don't block this we'll find a way to make the entire of youtube practically unusable on your browser”.

I've been using Grayjay recently which does allow that, amongst a number of other useful features (integrating other media sources, lack of adverts every few minutes in some content). Might be worth considering as an option.

Kagi’s Orion browser on iOS is able to play YT vids in the background.

I suspect that if youtube's metric show that enough people are doing that (without paid accounts) it'll stop by default for the same reasons it stopped in FF.

Why not simply use NewPipe [0]?

You also get ad filtering and you can download Audio/Video streams from within the app.

[0] https://newpipe.net/

It allows you to play youtube without ads with ublock origin.

I used ublock origin for a while, but I kept having issues with it on Youtube due to Youtubes anti adblock measurements. Brave for some reason always had a fix for it pretty quickly, so I never experienced these issues with it. Maybe I could try a different browser again on my next machine.

In iOS kinda yes; you have to request desktop version, and once you activate the lock screen for the first time you have to press “play”. Then it just plays and auto plays in the background.

Don’t know about android, but there is also an extension there that blocks the visibility page api for YouTube.

Yes. That's the primary reason I use it, but you have to install an extension called "Video Background Play Fix".

Tubular app does, and it blocks ads

Brave origin on linux looks pretty solid now. Now I'm using that and Librewolf.

I will never use Brave after the debacle where they injected content into sites downloaded over HTTPS to pretend people were promoting their crypto token and adding a "donate" button on the page.

That made me avoid it for a long time but there hasn't been more concerning behavior since, so some point, we can move on.

Did they ever address it? It's still the same company with presumably the same ideals. I was using it daily at the time, maybe it's better now.

Brave is a series scam company. Always has been, always will be.

I just checked it out, but it removes Tor access? It would pretty much downgrade the regular browser

I think using tor in brave just makes you stand out more - stock tor browser is probably a better setup. Whonix even better.

It helps if you're doing mundane things and want to help people who need to mix their sensitive traffic with it.

More people "legitimately" using Tor makes it less likely to have its exit nodes outright blocked, as well, and assuming all traffic from them is malicious.

That's charitable, but even then you probably want to avoid fingerprinting...

Brave it's spyware, keep going with Librewolf. You can disable some fingerprinting support for WebGL -but- you need UBo for sure (and JShelter).

I still use Firefox. It does all I need with no ads. That's nice.

Currently using Helium.

This one looks neat, is it also based on Chromium?

Yes.

Safari

Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it's not getting active development anymore.

I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.

I heard Arc was abandoned and not getting any more work because they were moving to their new AI browser. So, Zen has replaced it for me, and it is based on Firefox which is nice to avoid the chromium

Konform Browser

Mullvad Browser

Tor Browser for those occasions