I was curious why Firefox is bundled with most Linux distros. It is because it is open source and that supports what Linux’s values are.
That makes perfect sense. It however is not the only game in town nor the best one. Brave is also open source and in my experience a much better browser. The first thing I do when I install an OS is download Brave. It is one of the few apps that I install on a computer. Almost always I leave everything in the cloud, and it is been a wonderful experience for me.
Why am I sharing this? I am curious. They didn’t do much research to only decide that Firefox was the best choice. For a long time, Firefox has been slower, less feature-filled, and didn’t show pages correctly. At one point I used it full-time until it started having issues and then I had to look for something else. I spend 100% of my day on the internet, so I am very motivated to use the best tool for the job.
What struck me first about Brave was the speed. By blocking all the garbage by default it was incredibly fast. My daily experience is that web pages load instantly. This is also helped by my 1 GB Fiber optic connection. However as incredible as it may seem, you can have slow browsing even at that speed by using less efficient browsers. Your tools and software do matter.
There was an article recently that showed that extensions significantly slow a browser down. I only have two extensions. 1Password and Grammarly. With this setup, I am browsing as fast as I can click on a link. I love it.
I shared a few weeks ago that my internet failed and I was forced to use a 5G hotspot. That was fast until I got to my data cap at 10GB and then it was slow at 1MB a second. I never thought I would say 1MB was slow. However, when you haven’t gone that speed for more than 20 years, it feels incredibly slow. More importantly, the slow speed timed me out of using things and it was frustrating to even be able to do basic things. For example, I couldn’t get to my website to add articles because it is protected by Cloudflare and that said I was going too slow for the authentication to work. I had to reboot and only run that website instead of multitasking like I usually do.
First world problems am I right? Save yourself time, increase your security, and use Brave browser instead.