Friday, January 19, 2018

Alternative Web Browsers

Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Chromium are not, by any means the only Web browsers in the world, nor are they necessarily the best browsers for every situation.  Some of the other alternative browsers may be better at some things and inferior in other areas, but there are plenty of choices these days.

Alternatives in the Mozilla "world": Firefox,

Iceweasel

(this will probably be disappearing; Firefox is once again available on some Debian-based distributions).

SeaMonkey

Seamonkey is an original descendant of the Mozilla browser family.  If you remember Netscape and the early Mozilla replacement, Seamonkey descends from that.

Pale Moon

 "Pale Moon diverges from Firefox in removing accessibility and parental control options, while modifying the default interface settings to be similar to earlier versions of Firefox — it has a bookmark toolbar and status bar by default. It also uses its own configuration directory, unlike Waterfox."  Version: 27.6.2 (64-bit) is the current version I happen to have installed and I am using it now.

Waterfox

 Until recently, Mozilla didn’t provide official builds of Firefox compiled for 64-bit systems.  I just checked; this is no longer true; I just re-downloaded the latest Firefox.  Waterfox is available on multiple platforms, including 64-bit Linux systems. All of these are decent Web browsers. Waterfox is quite a bit similar to Firefox and seems to have equal or superior performance.  It is not updated quite as often (nor are the others, so be careful if you are concerned about the latest security fixes.