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Cover image for What is your Favorite Browser?
Andreas
Andreas

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What is your Favorite Browser?

I assume most of the web developers out there have many browsers installed for cross browser testing.

What is your favorite browser for personal use on desktop and mobile? I'm also curious if/how your opinion changed over time and what features you prefer.

Plus: The one who can first comment the correct names of all browsers of the cover image in the correct order (left to right, top to bottom) gets a little christmas surprise from me... 🎁🎄

Top comments (57)

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lallenfrancisl profile image
Allen Francis • Edited

Firefox is my favorite web browser. It's fast and performant now. And more than that it cares for my privacy.

The web browsers in the cover page are:

1.SeaMonkey 2.Palemoon 3.UC Browser 4.Safari 5.Chromium
6.Cốc Cốc Browser 7.Google Chrome 8.Firefox Quantum 9.Opera 10.Microsoft Edge 11.Mcent 12.Maxthon 13.Yandex 14.Internet Explorer 15.Vivaldi

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devmount profile image
Andreas

Awesome Allen, you got all browsers right as first! 🔜PM!

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kurumeii profile image
Kurumeii

wait you used cốc cốc ? what a champ

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esanctorum profile image
Evandro Santos

At home I use Brave Browser, which is Brendan Eich latest endeavor which is based on chromium so still feels like home, while at work I usually navigates between firefox Developer edition and the chrome standard edition

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khunnaball profile image
Kieran

I'm using Chrome because I guess I'm just too used to using it that it would feel weird not using it now.
I've thought about moving to something else but I honestly can't think of a better alternative tbh.

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jimmymcbride profile image
Jimmy McBride

Try Brave out and you'll feel right at home.

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khunnaball profile image
Kieran

What are the advantages to using Brave?

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jimmymcbride profile image
Jimmy McBride

Brave has all the advantages and feel of Chrome with all of your favorite Chrome extensions (it's based on Chromium, the open source version of Chrome). It comes pre-installed with the best privacy first experience with any browser I've yet to use. It is built to be more preformant than vanilla Chrome as well.

They even have a brave rewards system where the only real ads you'll typically see are from them and viewing and interacting with these ads will let you earn points that you can do things with, like give them to your favorite content creators on the web to support them.

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard

Are you using Chrome on Android too?

I would suggest to start using Firefox there
play.google.com/store/apps/details...

For me that was a game changer compared to Chrome/Android

  • Ads and privacy issues are much worse on mobile
  • I can install an ad blocker on firefox mobile
  • I can install i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/ on Firefox Android
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devmount profile image
Andreas

I was using Opera for many years. I switched to Vivaldi (because I really liked how I could customize it), but due to performance issues, I switched back to Opera which was running more smoothly on my system (I should try Vivald again now, I was really new when I tried it out).

Currently I'm testing the new chromium based Edge browser (beta) which felt surprisingly fast and isn't using so much system resources as Opera or Vivaldi. I found, that when my laptop is in battery mode, it lasts much longer when I use Edge instead of Opera, although both are built on chromium. Is anyone else experiencing this?

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joshuas profile image
Josh Smith

My favorite browser is Firefox. Mozilla has demonstrated their commitment to delivering a customer and privacy oriented product. It is fast, has lovely dev tools, and takes a fairly aggressive stance on blocking trackers.

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fibric profile image
Denny Trebbin

Firefox + uBlock Origin - because privacy is important to me. I consider ads to be a privacy threat because Facebook and Google sell ads in
in real time auctions. When advertising campaigns know less or nothing
about me, real-time auctions wouldn't work at all.

Brave + React DevTools - because for some development tasks I need a Blink/V8 environment.

On iOS I use Safari and Mozilla Focus - again, because I care about privacy.

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

Desktop: Firefox
Mobile: Firefox (integration with desktop Firefox is very nice) / Brave (adblocking)

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filips profile image
Filip Š

You can use uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android.

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pavelloz profile image
Paweł Kowalski

Thats right. I guess i dont need brave anymore. :)

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gprograms profile image
g-programs

I try to dabble in a few browsers but my go-to is definitely Chrome. I'm really getting a chance to dive into the capabilities of the inspector when maintaining sites on the job.

TL;DR - 1. Chrome, 2. Brave if I didn't need to monitor several sites for performance


When QA testing, there is the need to dive into other browsers (Safari, Firefox, Edge, unfortunately IE -- yuck) so I find that they all have some similar features but their dev tools do differ slightly (element selection, folding, minimizing by selector etc.).

I went to Brave for a brief time but I ran into an issue where I wasn't getting a true look at a website when troubleshooting it's performance due to the privacy settings of the browser. Don't get me wrong, it really comes in handy, because you can view a website without tracking kicking in or even a malicious script kicking in aaaaand you can also toggle the blocking.

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jimmymcbride profile image
Jimmy McBride

Brave is my favorite browser. It's fast, performs super fast, clean and professional. It comes out of the box with probably the best privacy first add blocking package. The brave rewards system is brilliant, to see adds you choose to see and getting rewarded for it (instead of feeling harassed by adds) and using those point to give you your favorite content creators on the web. All the chrome extensions. Was a huge fan (and still love very much) FireFox, but Brave has stolen my heart.

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fieldmarshallvague profile image
FieldMarshallVague

I'd be interested to know what it was about Brave that put you off. I'm using it as a replacement for Chrome and I'm reasonably happy, but don't use any of the rewards features. I'm not aware of the ethics/behaviours you mention, could you elaborate?

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