Right now FireFox. It's driving my insane though.
I was using Edge, but that just made me feel dirty.
Honestly, if Safari was available on Linux and Windows, I'd probably just use it at this point.
Discussion
Have you checked out Brave? Has crypto, torrent, Tor, and a bunch of good extensions like ad blocking, privacy and security all built in by default. Not only that but it's got a smaller memory footprint than Firefox.
Have you tried Librewolf, Falkon or Qutebrowser?
Falcon and Qutebrowser don't fit my needs as best I can tell.
I need to give LibreWolf another spin. The issue with most "privacy based" browsers I've found is they lack all the features I actually need and find useful in a browser.
I need the same browser to work on Windows 11, macOS, Linux, and Android at a minimum. Or at least, I need bookmark sync between all, and extension sync between all desktop.
I already handled the password end by switching to self-hosted bitwarden, but I have not found a option for bookmarks that was worth a crap.
Any ideas on that part?
I'm all Firefox, but maybe Vivaldi can help
I did leave one browser off from my list to try and that would be Epiphany aka Gnome Web, the problem with it though for Mac is it's severely outdated in MacPorts from what I can see and getting it to run on Windows requires enabling WSL and installing it via Flatpak.
So really other than that and or customizing FireFox/LibreWolf to make it look like Safari with this https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme/tree/master/src/other/firefox you're stuck and I can understand your frustration.
For bookmarks you could use Floccus or XBrowserSync. You can also consider Dashy if you want a dashboard/startpage if you have a spare server laying around or want to use Heroku for your bookmarks + apps.
That's my 2 #sats anyway, hope that helps.
Your help is truly appreciated. It’s not safari itself i’m worried about using, although I have to admit they’ve hit a really nice point of minimalist design. The self hosted bookmarks may help.
The overall experience of the web has just become ass imo over the last few years. There is plenty of blame to go around for my struggles. Some is the EU’s fault (GDPR), some is apple’s fault (safari only on ios), some is just plain weird (the fact that FOSS gave up and just uses chromium for everything, even Qt Webengine).
I imagine the fact that I use nostr just exasperates this. A truly good experience for me is grabbing any device and my bookmarks, extensions, and passwords being in sync. Just adding Alby into that flow makes a mess. NIP-07 on mobile? Nope, not unless you give up your other requirements!
It’s an interesting journey looking at these browsers again. I seriously cannot believe in the age of technology diversity that we’re in (BSD is even experiencing growth!) that there are only two legit choices - Chrome and FireFox - for the web that would offer the experience a normie user would enjoy. I’m far from a normie, and even I find it frustrating.
Give Mullvad & Orion a look, I’ve heard good things about both and been using Orion a lot on mobile recently. I was was on the Firebox bus in the early 00’s, was my browser of choice for a loonnngggg time. Like most though, using Chromium based browsers on desktop, mostly as I spend half my day in dev tools with some Chrome only extensions. Been using Brave, mostly for the ad blocking and internal wallet. Blows my tiny mind browsing the web with no ad filters on 💜⚡️🤙