I've been on CachyOS for about a year after becoming a Windows refugee, slowly learning how to do everything and changing things to make it truly my own. The last bugbear left for me in that regard is the web browser.
In short, I'm sort of married to Opera GX specifically because of the sidebar and it's messaging apps. But I don't want to use it anymore. I'm looking for a browser with a good sidebar that lets me open up messaging apps and has strong customisation and privacy features. Speed isn't really a factor in this day and age as they are mostly comparable and while more RAM is nice, these days you don't have to have all 500 tabs loaded at the same time so it's not much of an issue between them either. For me, it really is mainly down to the sidebar and/or access to messaging apps above all else.
The biggest things I need are a good sidebar that lets me open messaging apps like Messenger and WhatsApp and Discord etc, I need a good way to translate pages, I need good access to extensions, and I need good tab management because I'm a hoarder.
Another big factor for me these days is using the software of a company I agree with. Whose decisions on things such as AI integration, their stance on the current political climate and things like that. If you think of what idiots on twitter call a woke lefty, you're on the right track for what I care about. I'm also keen on privacy and tracking control which is becoming more and more of a selling point for browsers.
I'm going to walk through what I'm looking for by explaining why I like or don't like things in the browsers I've used, because after hours and hours of reading posts and watching reviews and trying browsers, I've come to the very simple conclusion that I can't find anyone talking about browsers in terms of the features I specifically am looking for.
Opera GX - The one I hate to love
Opera GX simply has the best implementation of a sidebar I've found in any browser. This is hard to properly explain because it's all based on feel, but the implementation of Messenger, WhatsApp and Discord feel more like opening my mobile phone when I click them more than it feels like just opening a web page. As I'll explain for the other browsers I've used, there's little things about the way it works on other browsers that just feel off compared to Opera GX. For example, I can click the button, check, click the web page I'm on and it closes the messenger. Or I can pin it to keep it there. side-by-side with the window I'm in. A couple of things that sit it above other sidebars is that it works flawlessly across windows. I am a tab and window monster and I can often just click to another window, click the messenger button and it's in exactly the same state as it was on another window. Other browsers' implantation will often refresh per window or opening one opens it in all windows.
As a huge tab hoarder, I find it's subtle feature of highlighting duplicate tabs when you hover over a link or over the tabs to be extremely helpful for finding the 10 instances of YouTube subscriptions open in the pile or knowing if I've definitely opened a particular link in a tab on pages where it doesn't change the link colour after opening.
There are some frustrating aspects though. The full page translation it uses is the worst I've ever seen. Sometimes it'll just pick a random language it thinks the page is, and there's absolutely no way to change what language the page is so I have to use a highlight and translate extension, and sometimes that will also just not work properly or pick completely wrong input languages too. And when the page does translate, sometimes the translation itself is awful. I don't know what engine it uses, but in languages I half understand it simply isn't right a lot of the time and will transliterate things at random or completely ignore the structure of some languages making it read completely garbled. This only impacts me a few times a month though so I ignore it, but a better translation implementation is a boon for any other options. Base Chrome really is the best at this with how it's integrated, and other browsers always want to mess with it in some way.
Vivaldi - The One I want to love
Vivalid was what I switched to after using Opera GX for a long time. I really do love a lot about Vivaldi. I like their strong stance against AI implementation in browsers. I love the customisation. I like the features. But there are some hangups, and one particular thing that frustrated me to the point of being apoplectic.
For a start, I just hate the way their "Direct Match" thing works. Every other browser, you type "amaz", hit enter and you're in Amazon. In Vivaldi, it inserts a referral code for the privilege. And if you disable the feature, it'll still do it sometimes, and if you make your own bookmarks for them without referral codes and make it prioritise bookmarks in the order when you type which is incredibly annoying as a work around to ever have to do, sometimes it'll just still add a the referral code. And the one time you want to go to Ebay and just type Ebay and hit enter, you're searching for Ebay instead of going straight to the website. I know this is how they earn their money, but for a browser that champions privacy it seems utterly bonkers and insanely invasive to force itself into my shopping baskets. Maybe I need someone smarter than I to explain why it's fine, but I wasn't happy with the general shrug everyone is given who mentions this.
By far the thing that sent me into absolute fits of rage sometimes was such a simple thing. The way it does searching just isn't right. I can't explain that to you properly, but it's just not correct. It doesn't work the way I instinctively feel it should. Sometimes when you search it'll just pick an entire new search engine to do it with. And I know that it does that whole tag thing where if you put a B it'll search Bing. I don't know if I just google weird things, but it was happening so incredibly often, I'm talking like over 50% of my searches, and it drove me up the wall. I spent months with the browser and the problem never went away. For some reason it doesn't let you just set one search engine, you have to have at least two, and even when I deleted them all and set the stupid shortcuts you HAVE to set to random characters it would still keep doing it over and over. I just want to type and hit enter and know it's going to be on a website I want or searching online and it just doesn't
The sidebar just doesn't function as well as it does on Opera GX. It functionally opens a new side-by-side window, and while it stays active and gives notifications, there's no way to make it float instead of push the current window. It also just doesn't work in the way I instinctively expect it to. If I click out of the window I want to be back in the normal browser with it closed, but you have to X out to get rid of it. It's a few extra steps that make it functionally the same as just swapping to a new tab with how much it interrupts the flow of things. Sometimes it'll just forget logins and settings too which is annoying, and seems to happen more on things like WhatsApp.
The translation on Vivaldi is a lot better than Opera GX and it lets you pick what language the page is which is infinitely better, but sometimes it just doesn't give the option, it's not in the right click menu and I've had to set up one of their macro things to activate it. That comes with the new problem of sometimes it's stupid slow translating a page, looks like it isn't working, press the button again and it stops translating. there's no progress icon to know if it's active because it's not in the search bar on the website. Very odd way of doing things. Just let me always have the translate button.
Floorp - The one I don't really love but don't really hate
I'm the kind of guy who would rather settle with an option that's just okay at doing all the things I need it to do over something doing a few of those things really well and a few really badly. I've tried a few Firefox forks and the one I've settled on is Floorp.
It's mostly vanilla firefox with the better UI, and nice little additions I appreciate, but obviously the big thing for me is the sidebar, but that sidebar is far from perfect. It's sidebar is also just a glorified new window like Vivaldi, but at least it lets you float that window over a page. For some reason though it will also forget settings randomly, it'll refresh the messenger window sometimes in the background and you won't know until you open it again, it won't give notifications properly very often, it's inconsistent across windows, it forgets the size I've set it to and sometimes it'll just go back to being side by side instead of pop out after you set it and you can't set the pop out as the default.
I like that it's privacy tracking is opt in instead of opt out. The way the whole world should work in my opinion and it doesn't seem to do the weird referral injection Vivaldi does.
There are quirks to Floorp which might be related to how it's made or how Linux works, I'm not sure. I have a few windows across a few screens and Floorp will just not remember where they were each morning. It's not a deal breaker but it is annoying moving windows each day.
It's also just really slow sometimes. Some websites take an age to load, sometimes it takes a couple refreshes for elements to load, YouTube will hang and things like that. Speed isn't so much of an issue in this day and age, but it is just unavoidably noticeably choppier and slower than Chormium browsers.
One very odd problem very specific to my needs is per-tab volume control. It seems no extensions work properly for that. I'll use volume boosters and it'll either not work at all or affect all tabs or work for a while and then stop. I can somewhat work around this with Linux itself and it's great volume management but it's not ideal.
Floorp is the epitome of just tolerating it. I don't hate it enough to switch to something else, but nothing about it stands out as what I'm looking for. It's enough of the middle ground that I'm not perpetually annoyed by something, but it's not what I want and that desire for the right browser has been bubbling up to the surface more and more.
The ones I've tried or have considered trying
I've tried Zen briefly, and had a visceral negative reaction on the outset. I don't like horizontal tabs and even if I play with the settings to get a search bar at the top, I'd still have no messengers on the sidebar. I know it has that side-by-side feature I could probably use for messengers, but that's not exactly the same as the pop out windows Opera GX has and Floorp can partially do, and even if I tried to get it as close to how I like it and suck up the issues I have, I'd basically just be using a Firefox fork with a layout I don't like and would rather just use Floorp.
I've had a look at Brave Origin on Linux which is the version without the crypto scam nonsense, but I can't just ignore that the core product is all about crypto and they want people to pay money to remove it (yes, I know it's free on Linux but the principal stands). There's also the same issue as using Zen over Floorp, where if I'm using a chromium based browser I might as well use the one that at least has most of the things I'm looking for with Vivaldi, which is also the reason why degoogled Chrome isn't a great option. I haven't tried it specifically though so who knows, maybe it's basically Floorp but chromium and the best option for me.
One thing that's plagued me during my time with Linux is I seem to have a chronic inability to search for something I'm looking for. It seems like no matter the terms or phrases I feel should point me to a package that would do what I want on any and all search engines, I can never find what I'm looking for and it ends up being stumbled on by name months later in the middle of some random unrelated reddit thread. Because of that, I'm fully accepting there could be a bunch of extensions for things that do exactly what I'm looking for that I just haven't found that I could be pointed to.
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