Eyedust

I've tried a few of the FOSS branded apps on F-Droid from the same dev, I believe. I like FOSS Calendar. It's just simple and does what I need. I don't need syncing or anything fancy.

Yeah, that's what I've noticed, anyway. There's a massive amount of settings to mess with, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if you could change it to work. But that would just make it like any other fork, so I mainly stick with Fennec.

Zen is still buggy, unfortunately. It was great when it was hot off the press, but they slowly pushed UI changes. They'd give you options to roll back the changes, but I would have preferred if they made the changes and gave you the option to opt into them.

I checked it out again the other day, and the newest update caused compact mode to disable every time I restarted the browser. Now I just use Floorp with in-line tabs activated. I love having one hybrid URL and tab bar, but I've never been a 100 tabs kind of guy so I have the room. I don't save my previous tab sessions.

I gotta check out some TUI browsers someday, I like the idea of being able to browse through my terminal. I've never heard of Pale Moon! I'm excited now and will be going to check it out ASAP.

There's a good amount of Firefox forks to tide us over, plus you could always check out QTWebEngine browsers. I hear Falkon has a decent reputation, and as a Vim user I love Qutebrowser. I got curious and just tried Falkon. The integrated adblock is quite good and I got a greasemonkey script that at least silenced and blacked out ads (it did not skip them, though).

Ah, no that's not it at all. I gotta see if I can look back to what happened. I think it was the Brave Rewards auto-contribute, though I'm seeing things like it accessing webcams without explicit permission. Ah, wait, it was the VPN. In 2023 they made an update that installed a paid VPN service on user's computers as well as turning on telemetry even for users that had turned it off. That caused a huge stir.

They also have a long loooong history of putting ads into their browser and their homepage and keeping the revenue, selling scraped data, and leaking DNS queries in their built in TOR browser from what I'm reading here.

Yeah, Floorp is my go-to right now. Its incredibly lightweight and has a lot of customization for how smooth it is. I am liking Librewolf though, just from how completely stripped down it is. There's barely anything unneeded in the options, its crazy. I think I'll still mainly use Floorp, though.

I almost forgot about Waterfox, which is strange because it was one of the first if not the first Firefox fork, if I'm remembering right.

I'm on vanilla Arch as well (btw), but I had similar experiences on NixOS and CachyOS. I think its hardware related when it comes to Vivaldi. On Windows I'd BSOD and I had huge memory leak issues on NixOS.

I have to mess with Zen a bit more and see if its something I can fix. The lag isn't bad, its bog-standard for a browser, but after using Floorp and now Librewolf, I can definitely feel it.

I've been meaning to check out Jellyfin. I've been dabbling in Stremio lately and did look into Kodi for a bit. I think Plex is now pulling some shady business? So my next stop is Jellyfin.

Oh, no I doubt that as well. Like I said, the communities I ran in were all praising it and recommending it at the time. I've seen the graph charts for browser downloads. The top 3 are monoliths. But Brave did stand out for a time.

The closest thing I've found to Vivaldi tab management without installing a bunch of custom CSS and extensions is Zen Browser. Zen would be my favorite browser if it was a little lighter, but it's worth checking out if you like Vivaldi, imo.