Needed to run something in Chrome, didn't have Chrome on Linux, tried DLing Vivaldi because I heard it was de-enshittified Chrome. In addition to feeling a little slower than Firefox somehow, Vivaldi seems to have a lot of features (I hate features), there are smooth animations on things like opening tabs and menus (I hate animations), and there are toolbars on three!! sides of each browser pane with tiny hierloglyphic icons that give no clue to their function (I hate icons designed after 2012).

Is there a way to run Vivaldi while turning off the Vivaldi parts? I basically just want Chrome as it was in 2023 before Google started adding terrible stuff to it. It may be the case that the stuff Vivaldi added to Chrome is non-terrible, but I still don't want it

@mcc A browser for people with bad taste.

@mcc Just run https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.chromium.Chromium

Maybe I should be looking at ungoogled chromium, I don't know. That probably still follows the late-2023 redesign tho.

@yoasif Hm. Can I get a tab search icon with this? The "V" thing in modern firefox and chrome.

@mcc Seems to be present with Control-Shift-A.

@mcc CC: @Vivaldi

@yoasif thanks.

@mcc have you checked out Helium browser? https://helium.computer/ I use it as my Chromium browser. Super light and works well.

@mcc give a try to w3m is awesome. But really, you can remove all the creepy features.. the problem is that, I didn't find a way to save all options I wish to inactive, to apply them in different computers. (with chromium)

@quaff Does it have a feature for tab search?

@mcc I am in doubt about what you mean on "redesign".. UI is similar on all versions..

@mcc librewolf has been a fine browser lately since we're at the "needing an unmozilla'd version of Firefox" stage of Internet enshitification

@TaoExpression One, the "search tabs" menu, which I use heavily, was in 2023 moved to the far left of the screen, away from the other menus. This is minor but it did annoy me. Two, Chrome has removed full support for browser addons in an apparent attempt to kill effective adblockers, so I assume Chromium does also. Vivaldi works around this by building the adblocker directly into the browser.

@mcc hm by tab search, do you mean a dedicated search for just tabs? I don't see that.

But typing in the address bar shows me tabs that match the term I'm typing.

@mcc I found it pretty configurable, but I don't know if in the ways you want. And at any rate either you've done through all the preferences already and knoe the answer, or you haven't yet and I can't help.

But the main thing I like about Vivaldi is that the devs actually want to be making Vivaldi, giving me much higher confidence that they'll continue to make Vivaldi than some "I compiled without the bad parts" packager who is (in my experience) much more likely to get bored and wander away.

@quaff Yes, Chrome and Firefox both offer a little "V" button for this, although firefox's is a little baroque.

Another question, can you use UBlock Origin with helium or are you locked into Ublock Origin Lite as with Chrome?

@quaff @mcc Has the Chromium broken font rendering on Linux (at least) - not sure I get the point considering that Chromium will always be more up to date.

(I am not interested in anything but a secondary browser on Chromium).

@mcc Ah! I don't think it's on the tool bar by default, but I did find a toolbar action called "tab search". And yes! You can install uBlock Origin, in fact, I think that was the main reason the Helium devs forked Chromium.

@mcc @quaff Seems like they forked uBlock Origin and built it in.

@mcc@mastodon.social Does Chromium exists on that linux distribution? When I need to use something Chrome-y I usually just download Chromium from my distribution repository.

@yoasif @mcc hm not sure what you mean by broken font rendering. But things look okay on my desktop. Also, fair enough, for me, I use Helium for added privacy and use of uBlock Origin :)

@quaff @mcc Chromium doesn't respect the platform settings for font smoothing on at least Linux and Windows. Has been a problem for many years, but the browser is dominant, so people are used to the broken rendering.

For example, Windows: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/better-text-rendering-in-chromium-based-browsers-on-windows

They claim it is better now on Windows, but I hardly ever use Windows now, so I don't know.

Still broken on Linux, though.

@yoasif @mcc hm yeah. I'm not sure. Fonts in my Helium Browser look the same in my Zen Browser. As with everywhere else on my KDE desktop. I have noticed terrible looking fonts in the past. But maybe I've just gotten used to it 😂

@mcc no problem on adding adblocker plugin.. they try to remove that plugin, but you know.. developers don't care, so the plugin still working on chromium. I didn't understand the issue about the search.. I just setup some search engine by default and the address bar is used to search.. if you dislike to be monitored by google, try the unchromium, but that will give you extra work to install plugins.

@quaff @mcc Likely depends on your platform font settings, too.

I run a GNOME desktop, and I don't think font smoothing is too different across DEs, but your DE may have a different smoothing setting.

Also, high-DPI makes this less of an issue, since you can dispense with smoothing (but I have a lot of non high DPI screens still).

Not necessarily *terrible*, either -- just incorrect. I don't want web text to look different from text across the rest of my system.

@mcc Have you considered ungoogled-chromium instead?

@mcc ok, this was curious.. for years I use chromium and I never check that option for searching tabs.. is like something new to me..

@mcc in case your "add blocker" is not limit to youtube ads, you can use the /etc/hosts file to block most ads from internet.. you know this project? https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

@mcc You can disable everything in Settings (also, the first time it runs, it should ask you if you want to use just the browser, or also the e-mail client and other things).

@mcc have you tried @kagihq 's Orion browser?