Rise of the feature browser

With the major browsers all tending toward one or two rendering engines, and the advent of Web Assembly reducing the importance of any JavaScript engine superiority – though, again, many browsers also reuse the same JavaScript engine – the question does arise as to what differentiates browsers today.

We’ve already covered a key difference, and that’s privacy. Simply not being Microsoft or Google should be an attractive feature in itself. There’s a group of browsers out there that utilise the Google

Blink engine and the V8 JavaScript engine, but offer a set of unique extra features to lure users in.

The original alternate browser is Opera. Still going strong, it switched from its own Presto engine to Blink around 2003, maintaining both options for some time. Opera has retained a 2.5 percent market share for most of its life, from the mid1990s, so has a dedicated following. Brave is one of the new generation of modern browsers. Its schtick is partly privacy, partly a shared ad revenue system, and it leans on the bonus that protecting privacy enhances device battery life and extends your data plan. It’s based on the Blink and V8 engine.

Vivaldi was launched in 2016 by the co-founder of the Opera browser, who wanted to reclaim features of Opera lost by its switch away from the Presto engine – though, ironically, Vivaldi uses the same Blink and V8 engines. It pushes a unique streamlined interface that many find refreshing and intuitive.