Web browsers

Default web browsers are fine, but there’ll come a time when you’ll demand more from your online tools.

Web browsers

Remember when email, web browsing and working with office files were tasks handled by different desktop applications? While you can still use dedicated applications for each of these tasks, it’s now possible to perform all these functions, and even more such as watching videos, listening to music files or radio from the comfort of a web browser.

For most desktop users, the web browser is already the first application that’s fired up on boot. Firefox, Chrome, and even Chromium, have long been among the most popular browsers on Linux, and other OSes. Most desktop distributions, unless they’re geared for low-spec devices, offer Firefox or Chromium as the one of the first two as default web browser. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t alternatives that you can choose.

In fact, there are many different browsers, including some that are considerably lightweight and consume far fewer resources that Firefox or Chromium. There are also specialist browsers, such as Tor, designed for anonymity. Refer to the ‘Also consider’ section for these and other suggestions.

For this Roundup, we’ve limited our selection to full-featured alternatives that you can try if you find yourself getting tired with Firefox or Chromium.

How we tested…

Web browsers are among the most intuitive applications so we won’t test them on available documentation, even though this is an area where Falkon is severely lacking.

As always, we want a feature-rich browser that can suitably replace the default offering on your desktop. Since most users connect to the internet from myriad devices, at the very least you should be able to sync data across devices.

More importantly, we’re interested in the security and privacy features that you can expect from these programs. These features, however, should not come at the cost of usability. Of equal importance is the ability to access additional features through the use of extensions and plugins. We’ve also subjected the browsers to online benchmarking and standards compliance tools, such as Acid3 and the HTML5 test.

We’ve used pmap to assess the memory usage of the browsers. Although not scientific, the test should help decide the ideal candidate for PCs with limited resources.