In this blog post, I will not be mentioning Chrome, Firefox, nor Safari — the three biggest browsers by market share. Instead, we’ll be going over what I like to call “boutique browsers” that have their own special place in the internet browser hierarchy. Let’s get into it.
Before we go into my three recommended browsers, I want to lay out a bit of context as to how I am rating these, what I find important, etc. I’ve tried pretty much every browser under the sun: from power-user specials like Librewolf and Canary to bizarre experimentations like Opera GX (which I actually tried out live on stream!). I feel like its worth constantly experimenting with browsers because so much of my workflow is built into them —even more than any productivity tool.
When I evaluate a browser, three things need to be there for me. The first is that it needs to have Chrome extension compatibility and, thus, be a Chrome-based browser. At this point quite a few of the extensions I use on a daily basis either are Chrome exclusive or have development priority on the Chrome version. I know there’s a subset of people who are dedicated to the death to not letting Google have any access to their data, but I’m just not one of those people. Convenience is always the number one priority for me, and if I have to exchange some data to make my life easier, its an exchange I’m willing to make. This means that for you privacy-focused individuals out there, these recommendations aren’t for you — fortunately there’s a whole dedicated “deGoogling” niche that you can find which will solve most of your problems.
The last two things kind of go hand in hand. The first is that I like a browser that is highly customizable, and the second is that I want one with very little bloat. Can you see why I like a customizable browser? Because, if the browser really insists on having its own email client or cryptocurrency, I can at least hide it so I can keep my browser minimally to what I need. Less bloat also means more tabs, and — as a person who has sometimes had up to 800-1,000 tabs open, mostly just to chronicle stuff into a database for later — this is a big sell. Small productivity features such as customized buttons and homepages can also be beneficial when done correctly.
With that all in mind, let’s go to our three browsers.
Brave
Brave is technically number four in the “big three” — it’s not at the same size as Chrome/Firefox/Safari, but it’s getting there. And honestly, I think the hype is deserved: privacy features aside, this thing is just fast. Remember when I dropped that insane 800-1,000 tabs mention? Well, to be perfectly honest, I’ve only been able to hit that max number while using Brave and removing all optional elements. Brave does have a lot of schlock connected to it (a cryptocurrency, a video call service, a premium “Brave Shield”…) but to be fair all these things are removable so that you can focus on just having a good browser.
I will also say that its built-in adblock and free VPN is more helpful than you’d think. For some reason, Brave is the only browser where I’ve ever been able to get an adblock and VPN running in incognito mode — arguably where its needed the most — and while I haven’t needed the built-in TOR browser support it is still a cool detail for a browser to have. Shows that they really do care about their privacy slant, and that its not just posturing.
That being said, there isn’t much “innovation” that’s going on here. Beyond these VPN features, Brave is more or less just a reskinned Chrome. For some people that’s a good thing, but others could be wishing for something more. So what else is out there?
Vivaldi
Vivaldi is a browser that came out of the creation of Opera, and while they now heavily distance themselves from their roots (for both legal and business reasons) it’s clear that Vivaldi has retained the good aspects of Opera while the original Nordic browser has fallen to the wayside.
It’s quite a shame, really. If I can go off on a tangent here: Opera was among the very first boutique browsers, and many features originating on Opera we now take for granted today: things such as Speed Dial (having a new tab with your most frequent/favorite websites) and many of the customization features now available to most browsers. Unfortunately, the steady bleeding of Opera’s profitability led it to make several poor design decisions (which likely caused the split off of Vivaldi) and eventually the company was purchased by a Chinese private equity who led the company to an IPO. It hasn’t really been the same ever since.
One of my favorite things about Vivaldi is its quick panel feature that allows you to almost “appify” certain websites. It’s something I mentioned back in my original Vivaldi review, but you can bookmark quick-use web apps like ChatGPT or Todoist and it will show up in a side panel so that you can easily do things like query the current page or add a todo item without actually needing in-app functionality.
My only real beef with Vivaldi is that its performance among the three I’ve chosen is the lowest. This is particularly sad given that, spoilers, the last browser on this list is an early beta browser made in Swift! To Vivaldi’s credit, its clearly aware of its performance issues as almost every single update involves some sort of performance patch, and its performance has gotten decently better since I first used it. But compared to something like Brave it will full scale crash at maybe 25-50 tabs at most — not even close to Brave’s record.
Arc
I talked about Arc in the same post in which I mentioned Vivaldi, and I honestly think it’s just gotten better. Since that post, it has now reached general availability on Windows, and while Arc Search is still not on Android (and likely will not be for a long time) it has still gotten to the point where it is my default browser on most platforms.
I think most of all I enjoy the vision of Arc. Instead of making just the old browser structure better — something that Chrome already has a monopoly on — they’re instead trying to recreate the browser from the ground up using today’s technology. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the golden age of Opera.
Arc is (or at least, planned-to-be) AI driven — but in a way that actually makes practical sense. The “browser that browses for you” is more of a web app of ChatGPT, where you tell it what you want — open up my news feed tabs, convert my layout into work mode, give me a few suggestions on good headphones, etc. — and it will pop up the windows and webpages that you need. If you want the pages summarized, Arc will do it — if you want to query pages for specific information, Arc can do that as well.
Arc isn’t promising anything crazy, which makes their claims more legitimate — everything that they’ve promised can be done with a ChatGPT API and some Electron/Selenium code. But you’re also getting the package of Arc — their moat is a sleekly designed and intuitive browser that uses minimal processing and works right out of the box.
And even if you don’t really care about AI, Arc still has features now that put it ahead of other browsers. I legit cannot believe no one has yet stolen the “right click tab, copy URL” that has now become a requirement for my workflow. I’ve done it a few times in Brave by muscle memory, only to realize it’s not there! I also appreciate how bookmarks in Arc (referred to as “Pinned Tabs”) feel like they’re more apart of your “active ecosystem” when using the app, so that they always stay top of mind.
However, not everything is sunshine and roses with Arc. While writing this, I had to move my Windows default browser away from Arc and back to Brave due to the number of bugs with the Windows version. While processing is usually fine, there have been occasional memory leaks that have damn near frozen my entire computer. In terms of tabs, Arc is somewhere in the middle — I can average ~100 tabs in the Windows version, with slightly more on Mac. The problem is that, whenever you hit this magical limit, Arc becomes pretty much unusable. The same cannot be said for Vivaldi, which while it has a lower limit it mostly just slows down in comparison to Arc’s hard crash. Finally, a lot of the pop-up window features for Arc on Windows does not work — for example, if you click a link in the app version of Discord, or something requires you to sign in via Google.
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Anyway, that’s my three recommended browsers. As a quick side note — I’m trying to get my ass into gear and try releasing regular blog posts on this website again, especially with all the fiction work now moved over into JBR. So hopefully you’ll be seeing more from me in the future — good old, classic, non-Youtube, non-AI writing. Cheers!
