alternative web browsers

Look beyond the mainstream options, and you’ll find web browsers that offer many more features. Barry Collins examines three great alternatives

If you fired up Google Chrome today alongside the version that launched in 2008, you’d struggle to tell them apart.

The address bar runs along the top, there’s a row of bookmarks, a few buttons to the left, tabs at the top, and that’s it. Has the way we use the web really not changed in 15 years? There are alternative browser makers who would disagree.

Google pioneered the fuss-free, feature-stripped browser in 2008, and the rest of its mainstream rivals followed. But there’s a new undercurrent of “power browsers” designed to satisfy users who want more from their web browser: browsers with built-in email clients and feed readers; browsers that separate home and work life; browsers that don’t endlessly distract you from the task at hand with notifications and alerts.

The web browser is the most used piece of software on most computers. Shouldn’t it be better?

© GETTY IMAGES

© ARC,SIDEKICK,VIVALDI

THE MOOD FOR CHANGE

Jon von Tetzchner has form when it comes to creating alternative browsers. In the early 1990s, he co-founded Opera, a browser that regularly won fulsome reviews for the breadth and originality of its feature set. In 2015, von Tetzchner did it again, founding the Vivaldi browser, and continuing the same ethos of delivering a feature-rich, privacy-friendly browser.

Von Tetzchner thinks that companies such as Google and Microsoft don’t have to work too hard to make their browsers stand out because they have the inherent advantage of being able to bundle browsers with their operating systems. “For browser makers, the larger ones in particular, the point has always been, ‘We don’t need to differentiate; we just need to make it easy to switch. We have a distribution advantage... We want to make it as simple to change as possible.’”

There are other reasons why the big players don’t pack lots of extras into their browsers. “If you don’t have a lot of features, there’s less that can go wrong,” he said. “You can just focus on simplification, and then you can say, okay, if you want something more advanced than this, you have to go and get extensions.”

But in recent years, we’ve seen Microsoft begin to add features to Edge, and von Tetzchner believes that this is a consequence of consumers growing frustrated with the limitations of the browsers. “Microsoft has been trying to find a reason for people to use their browser, so they’ve been adding a little bit. Even Google has been adding features. I guess they don’t want to get into a situation where they don’t have any of the features and people actually start to move somewhere else.”

Yet, even if Edge—with its newfound focus on AI assistance—and Chrome are beginning to pad out a little, they don’t offer anywhere near the number of features and customizations you’ll find in Vivaldi or emerging rivals such as Arc and Sidekick (you’ll find full profiles of all three later in this feature). Yet all three of the power browser rivals are based on the same Chromium engine as the big two browsers.

Although the power browser makers must still be wary of feature bloat and its impact upon system performance, von Tetzchner believes adding features these days is less risky than it was in the past. “The speed of the network and the speed of the computer is less of an issue now than it used to be,” he said. “Most computers are fairly advanced, and obviously now most of the browsers are using the same core, so there will only be limited difference in speed, unless you do something different.”