Chromium browsers

1 Google Chrome

Google Chrome is the closed-source version of the Chromium project. It’s famous. It’s a dominant standard, so many things often work well and are well-tested. But…

2 Chromium

Chromium is the open-source browser at the core of Google Chrome. It’s missing some Google widgets and the sync technology. I’m not sure how much it spies on us.

3 Vivaldi

Vivaldi Browser:

It’s similar to Brave but with more UI tweaks and features such as a built-in email client, calendar, and feed reader.

It claims to be privacy-respecting, but I haven’t researched this in detail. It also has many features I like, such as syncing browser sessions without going via Google, so I can task-switch between browsers and between machines.

The price is that it’s buggy. Features sometimes break; there are many weird edge cases when navigating all the features, and sudden unannounced feature or performance regressions are common.

For example, in a recent update, Vivaldi went from being smugly excellent at handling many open tabs to being totally useless with more than a handful of open tabs. A couple of weeks later they worked again. What will break next week?

The included feed reader is nice in principle, but if you have a few hundred feeds like I do, the browser uses all the RAM on the computer and becomes unresponsive, even when the feed reader is closed. So it’s useless for me.

There is this lovely feature called tab stacking to organise your tabs better. However, I have grown to hate it because it is so sensitive that once there are enough tabs open it becomes impossible to open a new tab without accidentally dragging an existing tab into a stack. Like, I cannot just click on a tab to switch to it when the tab bar is sufficiently crowded. I must pause, breathe, and then gently caress the trackpad just so. If not, it does not switch to the tab I want but instead stacks it with a neighbouring tab and now I cannot find the fucking thing.

Anyway, there is something fun about this crashy flaky browser; the thoughtful UI ideas compensate for the lack of reliability in UI idea implementation. In my headcanon the authors are all up late drinking club maté and trying to outdo each other with new features, and I like being in the vicinity of that imaginary fun.

I reckon they have bought about 3 months of goodwill from me before I get angry and switch to Brave or Arc.

4 Brave

Hyped upstart Brave tries to block the conventional ad economy and privacy nonsense, replacing it with cryptocurrency-backed privacy-compatible advertising. It’s mostly Google Chrome compatible, supporting most of the same plugins, etc. It claims that blocking the tracking economy overhead makes it faster. Using it has been smooth so far.

Weird quirk: on Linux, after each upgrade the emoji break in different ways. Sometimes it helps to reinstall colour emoji

sudo apt-get reinstall fonts-noto-color-emoji

Sometimes it helps to remove the outdated Unicode 9.0 Symbola font.

sudo apt-get remove font-symbola

Some XML configuration may make the problem go away.

Brendan Eich, the CEO, has been controversial.

5 Arc

Arc, from The Browser Company, is getting a lot of hype (Windows and Mac only)

Whereas other browsers now mainly exist to track you around the internet (in order to better target ads), we built Arc with you in mind — to save you as much time as possible when you use the internet every day. To bring order to the chaos of your online life, stuck between rows and rows of tabs. We do that within a gorgeous interface that respects your privacy and was built with care.

In other words, Arc is to your ex-browser what the iPhone was to cellphones. Or as one of our members said “like moving from a PC to a Mac.” It’s from the future — and just feels great.

Don’t just take our word for it: The Verge says that Arc is “the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for,” a famous YouTuber said it was “the most beautiful and well-designed browser I have ever used,” and Fast Company declared “Arc — not Chrome — is the best browser out there” because it’s “more elegantly designed” and “easy to organise tabs by project and context.”

The company also has an AI browser, which—for some reason—is a separate browser: Dia Browser | AI Chat With Your Tabs.

6 Comet

The Perplexity browser. I was going to try it, but I can’t even face the privacy ambivalence of a Chromium browser with ubiquitous off-site AI integration right now.

7 Backspace for backspace, not back-one-page

In Chrome, AFAICT, this is no longer a problem. Google disabled backspace navigation because it appears to be causing frequent data loss relative to intentional use. There’s an extension to disable the shortcut if we’re on an old version of Chrome.

8 Privacy

We should make some privacy-related tweaks. See browsing confidentially.

9 Claude browser MCP

As noted elsewhere, Claude Code has browser integration but only for Google Chrome. And they do not intend to fix that. I am not a fan of Google Chrome because it is creepy and gross. Firefox is not at all well supported, but many Chromium browsers can be forced into working.

Whether it’s wise to let your browser traffic flow through Anthropic’s servers I’ll leave as an open question; they already have your intimate thoughts from all that Claude usage, so why not get some extra value, I guess?

Anyway, there are community-supported hacks to get non-Google Chrome browsers working at stolot0mt0m/claude-chromium-native-messaging). I like Vivaldi.

Macos setup:

git clone https://github.com/stolot0mt0m/claude-chromium-native-messaging.git
cd claude-chromium-native-messaging
/opt/homebrew/bin/bash setup.sh

Take care before running this; for all I know it sends your API keys to Macedonian script kiddies and plays the sad trombone sound.

10 Searches

Chrome magically supports the search option on almost any site that uses the tab to search feature.

11 Incoming

Tamperchrome — edit the requests our browser makes. Super nerdy.

Viewimage fixes Google search.

Miscellaneous Chrome command line switches.