this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
1281 points (97.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
9971 readers
2423 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'd be happy to switch away the moment someone recommends me a better chromium based option.
Firefox just doesn't work for my use case. I know it's pithy, but their dev tools suck, and the history menu is dogshit. And since my main use case is pulling up recently used pages, that's a huge impediment for me.
I'd switch to vanilla Chromium, but it's (reasonably because of what it is) super feature poor. Not having a good way to device sync on Linux basically makes it a non-starter for me.
So what's my alternative? What browser should I use? It's a genuine question, as I've tried several, and Brave is the only one that's remotely usable for my use case.
Have you tried Helium Browser?
I haven't used it myself as I use Firefox, but it looks promising. If I had to use Chrome on my device I'd try this one. It is still in beta technically, though
Looks pretty good. I may give it a shot.
Being in beta worries me, and I'll have to investigate if it has cross browser sync, though I assume it does through Google accounts or something.
Doesn't hurt to give it a spin though. Thanks for the rec.
It looks like the first pipelined release was in August, so I'm not surprised I hadn't heard of it, lol.
Thorium, vanadium, et ceteraium. Do some searches and you'll find plenty of chromium projects that are reasonable replacements even if they aren't 1-to-1 feature sets.
Last time I looked, any other Chromium alternative had me making negative feature tradeoffs.
I may circle back and look again, as it's been a bit since I cut over to Brave.
Have you used those and can vouch for them having inter-device history sync? Cause not having that is a hard blocker for me.
I don't rely on that feature at all so I couldn't say with confidence which alternatives have it that are still chromium based. The two I suggested are both excellent for differing reasons. Outside of chromium, I'm reasonably sure Firefox has it but again, I don't use the feature.
Going to any different browser will have positives and negatives, but if that feature is a sticking point you are certainly limited in your options.
I can't use Firefox unfortunately, as my main use case hinges on the history menu being remotely usable.
But yeah, that was kind of my point. When evaluating trade offs, at the time I switched, Brave was the only real browser that checked all the boxes, which is why I use it.
Can't any browser do that if you sync the profile folder somehow?
Sure, notionally. I could also write my own browser from scratch and make it to my exact specifications.
I've lived in "cobble together everything I want using a combination of half a dozen browser extensions and bash scripts" land before, and I'm old enough now to realize that maintaining systems like that is almost never worth the time or effort.
It's worth it if that's your hobby, but I have more interesting projects to work on than getting a baseline Chromium or whatever up to a usable state.
So when there's a 95% answer for my use case, it's a hard sell to get me to switch to an 80% solution where I need to jury rig the last 15% to just break even with the out-of-the-box option.
I don't care about my tabs being synced, I just use kdeconnect if I want a link on another device and most of the time I keep their content fairly disjointed. I just happen to know multiple people who did it that way and haven't complained yet.
I do believe LibreWolf lets you use Firefox sync for tabs and history if you want to.
Also I have no idea what your setup is. If you already have a NAS setting up a shared profile could take less time than installing the browser.
You asked for options, then mentioned a problem you had with those offered and I just gave you a solution that works for all of them.
Also doing "15%" (the features a browser offers on top of basic functionality are so much less 10% and I don't need half of them) myself is usually worth it for me in exchange for privacy, a more permanent foss solution, and ethics. Though to be fair I have never needed more than an hour for that for any software other than my text editor. Mostly it's the last "4%" of things I'd like that take longest
I don't actually care about tab sync. I mostly care about this for machines I use as browser based media players, which means I need my history synced.
Main use case is using machine 1 to watch YouTube, then resuming where I left off, via the history menu, on a separate machine.
The Firefox history menu is absolute trash, and there are no extensions to make it behave in a way that's remotely usable.
But my whole use case is not "keeping my content disjointed," which kind of is my point. If my use case was your use case, then sure, your setup is reasonable. But it's not.
And I don't maintain a personal NAS anymore. I realized I just wasn't getting utility out of it, and it was one more thing to get set up again after a move (it wasn't an off the shelf NAS, but a Pi set up with an external storage array.)
Well yes then the things I mentioned indeed likely won't help you.
If you watch on YouTube though, doesn't it keep track of what you were watching in your account? The timestamp isn't ever in my browser history, Is it the frontend you use?
No, YouTube does track that internally. I meant that I don't wan to have to sit down, open up YouTube and search for the thing I was watching again.
This is particularly egregious if you were watching something in a playlist, as YouTube won't suggest a playlist on the front page, just the video you were watching (and that only if you stopped in the middle of an episode, which is rare), so you have to search the channel, click into it, go into playlists, and potentially scroll down a bunch to load them all if there are a lot, just to find the playlist you were watching.
There's also streaming platforms like Dropout that make getting back to where you left off similarly onerous. Because you have to search the show, swap the search to "series", find it in the search results, switch from season 1 to whatever season you're actually on (if you remember), then scroll down to find the episode.
And sure, this is probably only around a minute's worth of work every time, but when it's a daily or more occurrence it becomes frustrating. Especially when the alternative is just having the history page pop up as your launch page and clicking something in the first few options.
Whatever your perception of percentages and ease they don't want to do extra legwork. Glad it's an option for you but they obviously don't care to do it.
Ultimately they are content with their browser and only want to switch if they can maintain equivalent features without the hassles of tweaking it.
I suppose that is just not an expectation I've ever had or fully understood. I've never had a machine that did what I wanted from the start.