Chromium browsers
2017-04-19 — 2025-10-31
Wherein Chromium’s offspring are catalogued, and a note is made that some, such as Vivaldi, are shipped with built‑in email, calendar and feed‑reader features, while Arc is kept Mac/Windows‑only.
It’s a web browser engine used in many modern browsers, most famously Google Chrome. But Google Chrome is a privacy mess, so we like to consider alternatives in the hope they’re better.
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…
1.1 Google Chrome privacy
Chrome is famously invasive. Here are some notes I found that explain why.
- Understanding Google Chrome’s Security and Privacy Concerns: A Comprehensive Analysis – Finite Technologies
- Is Google Chrome violating your privacy?
- Is Chrome’s lack of privacy a big issue? : r/browsers
Various settings can mitigate the privacy invasion, but why don’t we try one of the other browsers that are designed to be better by default?
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
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, 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.
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
Sometimes it helps to remove the outdated Unicode 9.0 Symbola font.
Some XML configuration may make the problem go away.
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 off-site AI integration.
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 Searches
Chrome magically supports the search option on almost any site that uses the tab to search feature.
10 Incoming
Tamperchrome — edit the requests our browser makes. Super nerdy.
Viewimage fixes Google search.