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Comment by jug | Hacker News Reader

I recommend forner Firefox users to take a look at Vivaldi. Its only downside is that it further boosts Chrome's dominance by being based on Chromium. On the other hand, Chromium is a damn fine, standards-compliant renderer.

Anyway, I have really enjoyed Vivaldi's user-first view, like Opera before it also got too much of a Chrome envy. There are browser settings galore and a generally customization-positive view by the developers and you can feel how it oozes "classic Opera" mentality.

Also, they do none of those Firefox shenanigans as of late with bundld third party software or ads. They are simply focusing on becoming the best choice for a power user.

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>Its only downside is that it further boosts Chrome's dominance

It's other disadvantage is that it's proprietary software. Rather than disagreeing with this from a security point of view (which is valid), I'm going to say that I don't like using software that I can't look at if I get curious as to how it works.

I've looked at the code for Firefox to see how certain things were done that fascinated me. I can't do that with Vivaldi.

Problem is no other browsers has anything close to the ecosystem of Firefox.

Chrome extensions seems (with a few exceptions) to be just locally stored web sites.

A better alternative to Firefox might be Palemoon which is just an older version of Firefox with security patches. I am not in a position to judge if it is safe enough for anyone to use but I like it.

Does it have "Slaughterhouse" (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=929539 and http://bholley.net/blog/2016/the-right-fix.html) ? This is not the only incident where Mozilla people have suggested hiding bugs until an old ESR goes end of life BTW.

Palemoon is not a viable alternative; Firefox and Mozilla, with all of their resources have failed to ship a fix for the most security relevant feature in the browser - a sandbox (it's coming, finally). Palemoon has eschewed the advanced necessary to get the Firefox codebase into condition to support a sandbox.

Beyond that, unless something has changed, Palemoon doesn't have anything that resembles a security program, other than taking up security bugs from Mozilla that are likely increasingly less relevant as the code bases diverge.

After uninstalling Firefox I did look at Vivaldi, but went with Maxthon: http://maxthon.com. It's available for Linux and all major platforms. Fast too.

Maxthon has some glitchy Javascript behaviour.

https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js/issues/501

I'm the reporter there. Same user on Firefox (natch) doesn't cause the same errors. I also don't see those errors from any other browser. It's always Maxthon.

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