# What is you preferred internet-browser?



## Alain De Vos (Oct 25, 2022)

What is you preferred internet-browser?


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## Alexander88207 (Oct 25, 2022)

Firefox


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## CuatroTorres (Oct 25, 2022)

The default pre-installed: Chrome for Android, Edge for Windows. Firefox for Linux/FreeBSD. Lynx on console when there is no X. Pragmatism.
Telemetry always off.


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## Cthulhux (Oct 25, 2022)

Emacs’s Gnus. Except for the web, it covers most internet services pretty well.


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## wolffnx (Oct 25, 2022)

talking in FreeBSD , chromium and secondary firefox


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## kpedersen (Oct 25, 2022)

Honestly? Out of the feasible ones for today's web, I dislike them all.

Even Firefox which is potentially the less creepy out of the sh*tty bunch has obnoxious default settings such as:

Recommend extensions as you browse
Recommend features as you browse
Block dangerous and deceptive content
Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
All justifications for giving you a trackable fingerprint and renting this to ad-providers. Even if you turn all this off, there is still so much traffic heading straight to Mozilla's servers.

I think the technical communities should take a stand and specifically target the simpler HTML4; normalize access by browsers written by normal people (i.e netsurf, elinks, etc) and never go back to where we are now.

Even these forums would ideally be replaced with something that simple community projects like netsurf can render.

</rant>      <---- I should stop using that tag too since it isn't in the HTML4 standard!


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## shepper (Oct 25, 2022)

I like to run several browsers all of which I've setup to delete cookies, history, etc with a single click/keystrokes.  I don't provide a consistent fingerprint.
Ungoogled-chromium

Pulls patches from Iridium and Vanadium to remove Google Tracking
Upstream updates frequently
Just ported in OpenBSD
OpenBSD port is integrated in Chromium build - when ever Chromium is updated, ungoogled chromium also updated
OpenBSD patches allow it to run along side chromium
Open Settings -> Privacy and Security -> Clear Browsing Data -> Advanced Tab and select every category to delete for all time. Bookmark (ctl-D) before Clearing data.
Firefox-esr

Go into More Tools -> Customize Toolbar and add "Forget History" to top bar
Vimb/webkitgtk4

Key :cl =cleardata
To completely clear, I have an OpenBSD key map that executes a script to blank out all files
Slightly unstable in OpenBSD - core dumps on busy sites


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## Cthulhux (Oct 25, 2022)

kpedersen said:


> Honestly? Out of the feasible ones for today's web, I dislike them all.



The question clearly states "internet browser" (hence my answer above). Most of the internet is pretty solid.


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## Alain De Vos (Oct 25, 2022)

Iridium is not bad.


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## kpedersen (Oct 25, 2022)

Cthulhux said:


> The question clearly states "internet browser" (hence my answer above). Most of the internet is pretty solid.


Not quite sure I follow. Most people these days use internet browsers to browse the web.

The internet may be solid in parts but the browsers themselves are flakey as hell!


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## Cthulhux (Oct 25, 2022)

kpedersen said:


> Most people these days use internet browsers to browse the web.



Internet browsers can not necessarily be used to browse the web. Technically, even your e-mail client is an internet "browser" (by a quite stretched definition of "browse" though).


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## kpedersen (Oct 25, 2022)

Cthulhux said:


> Internet browsers can not necessarily be used to browse the web. Technically, even your e-mail client is an internet "browser" (by a quite stretched definition of "browse" though).


Right, I get you.

Yeah true. I suppose the openssh client is also pretty good too if that is what the OP meant


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## CuatroTorres (Oct 25, 2022)

Town Council model by Alan Cox vs Bikeshedding by Poul-Henning Kamp.
Go!


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## Whattteva (Oct 25, 2022)

Truthfully, I wish I can do away with web browsers, but it's impossible these days unless you are a hermit that lives under a rock.
IMO, all of the major browsers suck (both Firefox and Chromium-based ones). They all jack up your memory by the gigs like nobody's business even if you're using them lightly. It doesn't help that so many friggin' "native" apps now even come in Electron.

All my older computers become near-unusable when I boot up any of the browsers. Kill the browser and they're all snappy and usable again.


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## hunter0one (Oct 25, 2022)

Until Falkon or Qutebrowser gets Ublock Origin, I use Firefox.


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## hruodr (Oct 25, 2022)

Till now I used firefox, but now there are some websites only usable with chrome. I do not decide what browser to use.

In some cases of overloaded web sites w3m is very practical to extract text.


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## SirDice (Oct 25, 2022)

In my early FreeBSD days I used Netscape Navigator, then switched to Mozilla when it first became available. Then progressed to Firefox, which I'm still using to this day.


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## hruodr (Oct 25, 2022)

SirDice said:


> In my early FreeBSD days I used Netscape Navigator, then switched to Mozilla when it first became available. Then progressed to Firefox, which I'm still using to this day.


I also, but before netscape I used mosaic. I think also lynx, but sure many telnet services, and of course, gopher.


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## SirDice (Oct 25, 2022)

hruodr said:


> but before netscape I used mosaic.


My first browser was on the Amiga (yes, I used my Amiga to get on the internet, 14K4 dialup), used AMosaic there.


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## freezr (Oct 25, 2022)

We do not have many options, we have 4 classes of browsers:

TUI browsers that for definition cannot display HTML(5) properly; they cannot at all display CSS or interact with JS.
GUI Browsers, mostly based on WebKitGTK (Midori, Badwolf) or WebKitQT, that are unable to render properly modern HTML5
Mozilla Browsers Family, the only viable alternative to the Chromium based browsers; recently is struggling on handling JS.
Chromium Based Browsers: Chrome, Edge, Vivaldi, Brave which are available only on Win, Mac and Linux but Chromium which is shipped without Google APIs...
I recently alternate across Firefox, Badwolf and Sea Monkey on FreeBSD and OpenBSD but hardware acceleration on both is a shit! I put my daughter playing on PBSKids on my FreeBSD and the CPU was exploding and animation and sound sluggish...

I do not really care I would bury modern HMTL for ever...


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## hunter0one (Oct 25, 2022)

I really like Konqueror but KDE ruined it by removing profiles and making it require a Dolphin kpart for the file manager. In TDE (KDE 3 fork) its in its former glory but the web browser portion is so far behind. In either case I need uBlock Origin since I avoid Google ads like the plague.


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## SirDice (Oct 25, 2022)

freezr said:


> I do not really care I would bury modern HMTL for ever...


You should have seen the crap they put up on Geocities back in the day


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## mer (Oct 25, 2022)

I'm with kpedersen my opinion firefox seems to be the current "least of all evils", but I turn off a bunch of stuff.
The performance seems to go up and down with every other release but at the moment, 106.0.1 on 13.1-Release is reasonable (seems to have fixed things from 105).
Chromium for some $WORK related things.


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## freezr (Oct 25, 2022)

SirDice said:


> You should have seen the crap they put up on Geocities back in the day




I think I was on Win95...


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## shepper (Oct 25, 2022)

Cthulhux said:


> Internet browsers can not necessarily be used to browse the web. Technically, even your e-mail client is an internet "browser" (by a quite stretched definition of "browse" though).


mail/geary essentially uses webkit to retrive/display emails which is a good reason to use something else.  On the other hand I've never seen anybody browse the internet with fetchmail and mutt.


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## Cthulhux (Oct 26, 2022)

freezr said:


> I think I was on Win95...



https://www.wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/content.php?theme=3&music=2&url=www.freebsd.org


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 26, 2022)

freezr said:


> I do not really care I would bury modern HMTL for ever...


"Modern HTML" is a lot better than the 1990s version.

What will the next thread be? "What's your favorite color?!"


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## CuatroTorres (Oct 26, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> "Modern HTML" is a lot better than the 1990s version.
> 
> What will the next thread be? "What's your favorite color?!"



I support bringing the forum to life in low hours. Was it time?


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## Cthulhux (Oct 26, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> "Modern HTML" is a lot better than the 1990s version.



Unless you succumb to the mandatory JavaScript support.


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## smithi (Oct 26, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> What will the next thread be? "What's your favorite color?!"



How about "What's your favourite way of spelling colour?"


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## gpw928 (Oct 26, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> "Modern HTML" is a lot better than the 1990s version.


Well, I remember compiling Mosaic, and wondering how I might best use it (apart from reading the Mosaic documentation, which was resident as HTML files in the file system).  Getting an Internet connection helped in that quest, but that came several years later...


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## Sergio Arana (Oct 26, 2022)

Alain De Vos said:


> What is you preferred internet-browser?


Brave, but I haven't been able to get it installed on FreeBSD. So, I am using my second best, which is Firefox.


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## Sergio Arana (Oct 26, 2022)

smithi said:


> How about "What's your favourite way of spelling colour?"


Both, color and colour are correct. Color is used in the USA and colour is used in the UK and on most parts of the world.


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## freezr (Oct 26, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> "Modern HTML" is a lot better than the 1990s version.
> 
> What will the next thread be? "What's your favorite color?!"



I respectfully disagreed, I have bunch of old laptops that can't open the majority because: trackers, misuse of javascript, excess of CSS, then we have a thousand of HTTP requests every second, and websites are bombarding by CDNs which should make content faster while instead inject other shit!

Today we need a computer just to run a browser, actually we have OS that are just a browser.

Internet was designed to be fast and light today is fat and slow, I don't see where it is any better...


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## SirDice (Oct 26, 2022)

freezr said:


> I have bunch of old laptops that can't open the majority because: trackers, misuse of javascript, excess of CSS, then we have a thousand of HTTP requests every second, and websites are bombarding by CDNs which should make content faster while instead inject other shit!


This has nothing to do with HTML standards. Blame the developers of those websites, not the technologies they used.


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## freezr (Oct 26, 2022)

SirDice said:


> This has nothing to do with HTML standards. Blame the developers of those websites, not the protocols they used.



This is because you interpreted "modern HTML" as a matter of standards when I was referring the way the majority misuses it!

Also in my humble opinion XHTML was better than HTML5, eventually the whole point of HTML5 was resolving the failure point of Flash/Silverlight to inject DRM into the HTML...


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## Alain De Vos (Oct 26, 2022)

Html,xhtml is something, but javascript is a different beast.


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## W.hâ/t (Oct 26, 2022)

Sergio Arana said:


> Brave, but I haven't been able to get it installed on FreeBSD. So, I am using my second best, which is Firefox.


linuxulator-how-to-install-brave-linux-app-on-freebsd-13-0.78879


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## kpedersen (Oct 26, 2022)

SirDice said:


> This has nothing to do with HTML standards. Blame the developers of those websites, not the technologies they used.


True enough but I notice some of the worst web developers jump on new gimmicks as *soon* as they come out. The growing HTML specs seem to nurture this kind of "greedy fat kid" behavior.

So I think to fix things we need to limit their "creativity" to ~HTML4. That way the worst they can do is shite mouse trails.


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## freezr (Oct 26, 2022)

Alain De Vos said:


> Html,xhtml is something, but javascript is a different beast.



Sure, but "today" we referred to HTML5 as HTML5+JS+CSS3, once we used the terminology AJAX; without JS many website don't work.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 26, 2022)

Cthulhux said:


> Unless you succumb to the mandatory JavaScript support.


The topic was HTML and JavaScript has nothing to do with HTML.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 26, 2022)

freezr said:


> the whole point of HTML5 was resolving the failure point of Flash/Silverlight to inject DRM into the HTML...


And you still can't because there is nothing in HTML to do that.



> Also in my humble opinion XHTML was better than HTML5


A lot of people will agree with you. Today you find a lot of people trying to replicate XHTML but call it React and Angular and other things. XHTML was built into the browser and you could do what you wanted with it. React, et al, you do what they say you can do and how to do it.



> I was referring the way the majority misuses it!


And can't even follow the standard to boot.


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## freezr (Oct 26, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> And you still can't because there is nothing in HTML to do that.



Before they made it simple and rationale:









						<video>: The Video Embed element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language | MDN
					

The <video> HTML element embeds a media player which supports video playback into the document. You can use <video> for audio content as well, but the <audio> element may provide a more appropriate user experience.




					developer.mozilla.org
				




But then became evil:



			Information about W3C and Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) - March 2016


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## knightjp (Nov 22, 2022)

I prefer Firefox because I'm not a huge fan of Chrome because I feel it uses a lot of resources & I'm not a fan of the Google connection. I don't want to use Chromium, but I have to. 
I prefer to have two browsers open on my system. One to watch youtube videos and the other for everything else. 
So I'm using Chromium for youtube, because I figure it would be the best for that and Firefox as my browser of choice for everything else. 

I would gladly use something else instead of Chromium, but I can't think of anything as good. I installed Opera or well "Linux-opera" and it didn't work as well. Felt buggy to me.


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## Whattteva (Nov 22, 2022)

freezr said:


> Sure, but "today" we referred to HTML5 as HTML5+JS+CSS3, once we used the terminology AJAX; without JS many website don't work.


Yeah, this is really annoying. Everyone and their mothers absolutely have to use JS and it's the root cause of why so many websites and web browsers are so heavy these days that you need gigs of RAM.


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## unbalancedskunk (Nov 22, 2022)

Falkon.


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## Argentum (Nov 23, 2022)

I have installed www/firefox and also www/chromium from ports. In general I tend to use *Firefox *more often.

Building Chromium from source takes a *long *time...


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## Profighost (Nov 23, 2022)

Firefox, only, still, yet.
That's why I'm watching such threads very carefully because I feel the need to switch to another browser:
- i don't really trust firefox to so protecting me and my privacy as the announce (feeling)
- with every new version firefox feels slower, more overloaded to me 
- and often enough comes up with a lot of new ....rubbish I do neither need, nor want nor use

Chromium to me is out of question, because it's google.

Iridium, Falkon,.... okay, thank you,...
...keep on! 
Thanks


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## knightjp (Nov 23, 2022)

I've tried Iridium and Falkon. They're both good. To be honest when it comes to watching youtube, Firefox and Chromium are better. I could not get the ad block for youtube working on Falkon. That is why I'm currently using Chromium at the moment. I would like to try something other than Chromium TBH.


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## shepper (Nov 23, 2022)

Google's deep pockets funded Chromium and you can make a case that it is more tightly integrated than Firefox.  Firefox features have been added on rather than "built in".  The problem is that Google was not being alturistic; they were looking to monetize the choices users make while browsing the internet.

Looking at cell phones is instructive.  If you "DeGoogle" android, you essentially double the time between battery recharges.  Restated, roughly 1/2 of the energy in your smart phone is working for Google.

Degoogled Browsers www/ungoogled-chromium and www/iridium take two different approaches to finding and removing Google's data harvesting code.  If I could only use one browser it would be either iridium or ungoogled-chromium.

The reality is that I'm not confined to one browser and the case can be made to use all three browser engines: gecko, blink and webkit with frequent deletion of cookies and other stored data.  You are tougher to fingerprint for targeted advertising and also force some competition.


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## yaslam (Nov 23, 2022)

Firefox or Chromium.


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## GGVL (Nov 24, 2022)

Decentr


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## Vull (Nov 24, 2022)

Firefox


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## knightjp (Nov 26, 2022)

Just had an issue trying to install Prime video on my FreeBSD box. It seems that somebody has come up with a solution since non of the standard FreeBSD browsers work.
It seems that Linux browsers are able to watch it and therefore someone came up with a solution of installing the latest version of any browser. 

https://github.com/mrclksr/linux-browser-installer

I have tested it in installing Brave and it works well.


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## RoGeorge (Nov 26, 2022)

Using Firefox, only because it has some addons that I need very much:  uBlock Origin, Dark Reader and SingleFile being the most important.

Sometimes I use other browsers, too, as long as they are not Chrome, for example Brave, or Tor.

I'm not fussy about the browser itself, just that I miss my favorite addons, mostly I miss the 'Dark Reader' (changes any webpage as if it would be a dark themed webpage).


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## Argentum (Nov 26, 2022)

knightjp said:


> I prefer to have two browsers open on my system. One to watch youtube videos and the other for everything else.
> So I'm using Chromium for youtube, because I figure it would be the best for that and Firefox as my browser of choice for everything else.


For Youtube I like to use multimedia/minitube. Matter of taste of course. It requires Google API key...


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## Argentum (Nov 27, 2022)

Hello!

I did some testing here. Took the first browser test I fount rom internet (https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/) and ran on the three browsers installed in this system. Chromium got the highest score. Here are the normalized results when Chromium is 100%:

www/chromium - 100%
www/iridium - 96%
www/firefox - 34%
Perhaps there are more comprehensive tests available, but now it seems that Chromium is much faster than Firefox. Any thoughts about that?
Iridium is essentially Chromium, just older version. User agent strings are the following:


Chromium: 
	
	



```
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; FreeBSD amd64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/107.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
```

Irdium: 
	
	



```
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; FreeBSD amd64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/106.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
```

Firefox: 
	
	



```
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:107.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/107.0
```


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## meine (Nov 27, 2022)

I used to be fond of www/seamonkey but it is not anymore in the ports collection due to some stuff I can't fathom (technically, understand possible security risks).

Switched to www/luakit but somehow there lives a nasty conflicting code in my box. Luakit is a very nice browser, like the fastness and vi-keybinds.

So I use www/firefox to surf to this forum and some things. www/surf is also a nifty piece of browser.


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## Argentum (Nov 27, 2022)

meine said:


> Switched to www/luakit but somehow there lives a nasty conflicting code in my box. Luakit is a very nice browser, like the fastness and vi-keybinds.


Tried to install it from ports. Builds OK, but gives an error when started. Seems to be broken.


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## fernandel (Nov 28, 2022)

I installed with pkg install and I got errors too:


> $ luakit
> [    0.040514] I [core/luah]: Loading rc: /usr/local/etc/xdg/luakit/rc.lua
> **
> ERROR:common/util.c:67:strip_ansi_escapes: assertion failed (err == NULL): Error while compiling regular expression ‘[\u001b\u009b][[()#;?]*(?:[0-9]{1,4}(?:;[0-9]{0,4})*)?[0-9A-ORZcf-nqry=><]’ at char 3: unrecognized character following \ (g-regex-error-quark, 103)
> ...


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## hunter0one (Nov 29, 2022)

Hopefully Librewolf comes soon. https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=258503


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## meine (Nov 29, 2022)

TNX all for testing with me!


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## MarcoB (Nov 29, 2022)

I'm the port maintainer of luakit and luakit-devel. A glib update broke both luakit and luakit-devel. This was patched upstream in the luakit-devel version (a sort of "rolling release"), but not in the "stable" luakit 2.2. So if you install luakit-devel from ports it should work fine (it does here). The "stable" luakit version 2.2 hasn't been updated so that one is broken until it gets updated upstream. Probably version 2.4.


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## fernandel (Nov 29, 2022)

MarcoB said:


> I'm the port maintainer of luakit and luakit-devel. A glib update broke both luakit and luakit-devel. This was patched upstream in the luakit-devel version (a sort of "rolling release"), but not in the "stable" luakit 2.2. So if you install luakit-devel from ports it should work fine (it does here). The "stable" luakit version 2.2 hasn't been updated so that one is broken until it gets updated upstream. Probably version 2.4.


I installed pkg luakit-devel and it works.


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## xk2600 (Nov 30, 2022)

/usr/bin/fetch
and surf.


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## Truupe (Nov 30, 2022)

I would say the one that gives me the least amount of grief when browsing a specific website.  Having said that, the state of the "web" is horrible these days especially on mobile devices.  My phone or tablet is large enough to handle desktop format but sites insist on pushing crapped up mobile formats that make the browsing experience horrific especially with all the embedded ads or pop ups.  And web browsers (desktop or mobile) seem to go through cycles where they all "work" for a period and then they all diverge where they don't work.  Lately I find that Chrome can't handle certain websites where Firefox can....or vice versa.  And for specifically Microsoft sites like xbox.com, I resort to **blech** Edge.


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## wolffnx (Dec 1, 2022)

Truupe said:


> I would say the one that gives me the least amount of grief when browsing a specific website.  Having said that, the state of the "web" is horrible these days especially on mobile devices.  My phone or tablet is large enough to handle desktop format but sites insist on pushing crapped up mobile formats that make the browsing experience horrific especially with all the embedded ads or pop ups.  And web browsers (desktop or mobile) seem to go through cycles where they all "work" for a period and then they all diverge where they don't work.  Lately I find that Chrome can't handle certain websites where Firefox can....or vice versa.  And for specifically Microsoft sites like xbox.com, I resort to **blech** Edge.



I agree, the problem is not the browsers, is the evolution of the web , I really wish to use light browsers like midori, but most of the pages are terrible rendered and looks ugly
and yeah, some sites works with firefox..others with chrome , from a blank page to everything rendered out of place(buttons,images,etc)
so..big/bloated develop frameworks are the cancer of the web to me and no one is taking care of follow a standar,is a big big mess


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## ralphbsz (Dec 1, 2022)

wolffnx said:


> I agree, the problem is not the browsers, is the evolution of the web ...
> and yeah, some sites works with firefox..others with chrome , ...


That's not my experience. As long as you stick to major browsers (Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox), the bulk of all mainstream web pages function correctly. Even though these days they use a lot of scripting, but the big browsers are all compatible enough, and good scripting techniques are now understood, scripting has become unproblematic.

And I'm old enough, I remember reading Ajax textbooks, and dealing with complex if statements in the scripts to deal with browser's idiosyncrasies. That's a thing of the past, as far as I know.


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## hitest (Dec 1, 2022)

I use Firefox on the BSDs, Linux, and Windows.  Safari on my iPhone.


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 1, 2022)

wolffnx said:


> some sites works with firefox..others with chrome , from a blank page to everything rendered out of place(buttons,images,etc)


Which sites? That should never happen anywhere but from "some guy on the internet" who doesn't know what he's doing.

For the rest of us who did this for a living, we would test in all the major browsers going back at least two versions. And we did that multiple times a day as we developed. Often multiple times while writing the markup and code.


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## wolffnx (Dec 2, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> Which sites? That should never happen anywhere but from "some guy on the internet" who doesn't know what he's doing.
> 
> For the rest of us who did this for a living, we would test in all the major browsers going back at least two versions. And we did that multiple times a day as we developed. Often multiple times while writing the markup and code.



sites from bad developers who dont code for at least the two major browsers...I dont keep a list of sites I browse


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## Black_N (Dec 2, 2022)

1 Firefox-esr
2 Chromium
3 Otter-browser
...
Without GUI - links


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## drhowarddrfine (Dec 2, 2022)

wolffnx Well then that's not a browser problem.


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## wolffnx (Dec 2, 2022)

drhowarddrfine said:


> wolffnx Well then that's not a browser problem.


I agree, I never say that was a browser problem


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