 What are the top five free and open source web browsers as of 2022? Well, in my opinion, I'm going to give you what I consider the five best free and open source web browsers. And I really think these five web browsers really stand above the rest of the crowd because literally we've got dozens of free and open source web browsers out there. But I think the group I'm going to discuss today, they really differentiate themselves from the crowd. So coming in at number five on my list is Mozilla Firefox. You really can't talk about free and open source web browsers without talking about Mozilla Firefox. Mozilla Firefox has been around for something like two decades now. It's really the most popular free and open source web browser on the planet. It's one of the most popular web browsers, period, on the planet. The problem is Google Chrome has more than 80% market share as far as the browser market share. So that one browser pretty much has like 80 to 90% market share. And then all the other browsers are really just fighting for that, you know, 10 to 15% scraps, right? Well, the good thing is Mozilla Firefox has the bulk of those scraps. And I think that's important because Firefox has its own web engine that's not chromium based. And a lot of people worry about the Google monopoly. And Firefox is kind of that hope, right? That's our one hope fighting back against the Google web monopoly. Firefox has a ton of features. It's very feature rich as feature rich as Chrome or any of the Chrome based browsers can be. Of course, you have extensions if you go into settings and go into extensions and themes, you can search for something maybe like a new block origin for those of you that need a good ad block and you could click on it. And then I didn't already have it installed. I'd have an install button here instead of a remove button, but you can go to the add ons.mozilla.org site and you could search for all kinds of extensions and themes literally just countless thousands of extensions for this browser. And that's definitely one of the selling points with Firefox is it is extremely customizable, maybe more customizable than Google Chrome even. And one of the things I really like about Firefox, if you go into the settings and go into Firefox settings and privacy and security, there are a ton of different options here in privacy and security. And by default, I would say Firefox is a little lax in privacy and security settings. They don't have everything ticked on obviously. But if you wanted to, you can really lock Firefox down to where it's a really secure web browser. One of the biggest selling points for Firefox for me is that Firefox is cross-platform meaning it's available on all three major desktop operating systems. So we're talking Windows, Mac, and Linux, right? And those of you that use all three operating systems, if you want a consistent experience between all three platforms, Firefox really is your answer. And on top of that, Firefox is also on both major mobile platforms with Android and iOS. And I've actually used Firefox on mobile as my browser. And it's all right. It's not fantastic or anything. But again, if you want a consistent browsing experience across multiple devices, multiple operating systems, Firefox is what you're looking for. Really, the only downside to Firefox is the fact that it is not chromium based. And because Google kind of dominates the web, Firefox maybe doesn't perform quite as well as Google Chrome. It uses a little more RAM, at least that is what some people complain that it's a little bit more RAM intensive. And some people do complain that it's a little slower rendering web pages than Google Chrome, especially certain sites which are rather optimized for Chrome. Sometimes Firefox does struggle with those sites. So let's talk about a chromium based web browser. So what if I want to use something that is Chrome based, but I don't want to use a proprietary web browser like Google Chrome that has a bunch of built-in spying and telemetry built into it. I don't want Google to know every move I make in my web browser. Is there an alternative for me? Yes, there's actually several. And at number four, one of the best of these privacy oriented Chrome based web browsers is un-Google chromium. So un-Google chromium is essentially your standard Google Chrome. Actually, it's really a fork of a free and open source version of Chrome called chromium. Except even the free and open source version chromium has some built-in Google telemetry built into the free and open source code. And a lot of people really want to just break all ties with Google altogether. And how you get around that is with un-Google chromium. Now, one thing about un-Google chromium, it's still kind of a niche kind of product. It may not be, for example, in your Linux distributions repositories, how I typically install it, it is available as a flat pack. Those of you that are using either the Nix package manager or the Geeks package manager, it's available in those repositories as well. But other than having those ties to Google being completely severed, un-Google chromium is essentially just chromium. If you go into the menu, everything is here. You go into settings, everything looks just like it would in chromium. If I go to extensions, there's no extensions installed out of the box, but we could go to the extension store. If I go to Google.com here, you see I'm not signed in into Google in any way here. And now I'm going to search for the Chrome store. Let's go to the Chrome web store. So this is one important feature here. Let me search for a plugin. I often install the tabless plugin in my browsers, whether it's Firefox based or chromium based, really cool extension as far as like a stark screen extension. If I click on this, there is no button here saying install this plugin. Because of course, by default, with the chromium web store, you need to be signed in. You actually have to sign in to your Google account. And of course, the point of using something like un-Google chromium or some of these other web browsers, I'm going to talk about today is to not actually have to sign in with a Google account. You don't want to be tied to Google. So is there a way around this? And yes, there actually is a way for you to manually load chromium extensions without having to sign in to your Google account. And what I'm going to show you is not just for un-Google chromium. This will work on any chromium based browser, which will include some of the browsers I'm going to talk about here in a minute as well. But especially for un-Google chromium, you're going to want this GitHub repository here called the chromium-web-store. It's basically a way to side load these packages from the web store. It's going to be an extension that will enable the install button without you actually being logged in. So just read the instructions here depending on the browser you're using. But essentially, what you're going to do is you're going to go to the releases page here. So if I go to releases and scroll down here, you're going to want this file here, this .crx file. Now that you've downloaded that CRX file, go back to the extensions tab here. Make sure you're in developer mode. Now that you've got developer mode turned on, I'm going to open up a new tab and I'm going to change the settings for extension-mime-request-handling. So this is in your chrome colon slash slash flags settings. Find the handling of extension-mime type requests and make sure this is set to always prompt for install. By default, it's going to be set to default. Make sure that is set to always prompt for install. Then I'm going to close that and I'm going to go back to this extensions page here and what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to open my file browser here, my file manager. I'm going to go into downloads because in downloads, I have that crx file that I downloaded from that github page and I'm just going to drop it right there. Add extension. It's going to tell me that the extension has been added and if this worked correctly, I should now be able to go into the chrome store and install extensions without being signed in. So let me go to the chrome web store here. Let's see if it remembers the chrome web store. Yes. As a matter of fact, it remembers the tabless page in the chrome web store that I was searching for earlier. And now look at this button here. Add to chromium. So I don't have to be signed in. Now I just click add extension. Tabless has now been added to chromium. And if I open a new tab, let's see. That is the tabless default page. And of course, you can add quick launchers, you know, links to favorite pages. You often see me use tabless and other web browsers, such as the brave web browser here. But I'm not quite ready to talk about brave just yet because I want to talk about my number three free and open source web browser. So it definitely makes the top three for me is cute browser. Now cute browser is really interesting because it's free and open source. It's based on chromium. So it uses the chromium engine, but it is mainly keyboard driven and it uses VIM like key bindings. And that's really nice for those of you that love key bindings, especially VIM key bindings to run things. For example, in VIM, typically to open a file, you would do colon O to open and then a path to some file. Well, here in cute browser, you don't need to worry about the colon. Just hit O for open. And then it remembers a lot of your history. Of course, you can set bookmarks or quick marks here inside cute browser. You can see I've got these quick marks with just one or two letters, letting me know that that's an abbreviation. For example, if I wanted to go to YouTube, I believe I have a quick mark for YT for YouTube. And that should just take me directly to my YouTube page. And the YouTube page is taking a little time to load there. And that's probably due to me being at the office. The network is not great here. Now being mainly keyboard driven, obviously HJKL the motion keys. So I could J for down or K for up or I wanted to, I could do shift H to go back, right? So H to go back, shift L would go back forward. And if you need to click on a link, of course, you could do it the traditional way with the mouse, but being keyboard driven, just hit F and you will get hints for various links all around this page. For example, the link to the subscribe button you can see is GG. So if I hit GG, it's going to ask me, do I want to subscribe to this channel? But of course, you have to be signed in to do that. But that was just an example of using F to get these quick links. Basically your key bindings essentially to follow a link. For example, maybe I want to go to the videos tab here. I can see that that is FH. And I just clicked on the videos tab, right? And I never had to touch the mouse. And really the reason Q browser makes the number three spot on my top five list of free and open source browsers is all because of the keyboard driven nature of it. Now Q browser does have some issues that I know will prevent some people from using it. For one, Q browser doesn't have good ad block. There is some ad blocking capabilities for Q browser, but it's not great compared to every other browser I'm talking about today. Q browser is the worst as far as ad block. That is a real issue for some people. For me, I don't mind occasionally having an ad shown to me. I understand some people on the internet, they get paid with those ads. I don't mind if it's a website, a news site or whatever it happens to be and a place I go and find useful information. I don't mind supporting them by watching an ad. But I understand some people really get annoyed with ads. And if that's the case, Q browser probably isn't the browser for you. Another negative or positive depending on what kind of person you are, Q browser can be configured with its own custom configuration file written in Python for me. I love that for many just regular desktop computer users that might not be great for you. Most people of course prefer just something in the browser itself, something web based where you can toggle on certain buttons. And Q browser does have that as well. But to really get the most out of customizing Q browser, you kind of need to play with that config file. And I know not everybody is going to love that. Now let's move on to number two on my list of top five free and open source web browsers. And now let's discuss Brave. I absolutely love Brave. Brave is typically the web browser I use anytime I'm recording videos. So this is typically the web browser you guys see me in. And the reason that is is because out of the box Brave has excellent ad block and ad block is so important for me as a video content creator is because even though I said personally, I don't mind watching ads. I understand people get supported by those ads. I also can't risk getting in legal trouble by sometimes recording my desktop and then maybe a multimedia ad plays. Maybe it plays with some music copyrighted music. I can't risk that kind of stuff. So I have to have all advertisements blocked anytime I'm recording my desktop just for safety reasons. And of course, many people just block ads all together. And if you're one of those people, you're going to love Brave. I love Brave because it's minimal. It's not trying to do everything. It's just trying to be a really good web browser, right? Look at the UI. There's not much to it. You've got your tab bar. You got the URL bar. This here will bookmark a page if you want to bookmark it. Other than that, I mean, you've got your settings menu where you can get your bookmarks and your Brave rewards and your crypto wallet. And by wallet, that is your basic attention token wallet, your bat wallet, because Brave is tied to a cryptocurrency and that cryptocurrency is bat. Now me personally, I really don't do anything with bat. I don't even know that that crypto stuff is there because I have the ads turned off. I don't want to watch the ads that if I was willing to sit there and view ads inside Brave, I could potentially make a little bat. I don't care. The other thing is if you happen to have some bat, you can send it to your favorite content creators. So if you visit a particular site or like DT's YouTube page here, if you wanted to send me some bat through Brave, you can actually do that. And that is a really neat feature. Again, it's a feature I don't do much with. That's something that you actually want to explore. Fine. If you're one of those people that just absolutely hate crypto, because I know crypto right now has a lot of negativity around it because so many people have lost money. They just think it's a scam. It's not a scam. Things go up and down, right? Markets go up and down. You guys that got burned. Oh, well, that's life. Don't hate the Brave browser because you made some bad investment decisions. But no matter what you think about crypto, you don't even have to worry about the whole crypto thing using Brave. You'll never even know it's there unless you actually want to explore that stuff. For me, I think Brave is easily, easily the best chromium based browser out there. And one of the great things about Brave is it is cross-platform as well. Truly cross-platform, just like Mozilla Firefox, which I talked about earlier, and that it works on Windows, Mac, Linux, and it works on the big mobile platforms iOS and Android. I actually have since switched to using Brave on my mobile phone on my Android phone as my browser. I've used Brave on my phone for the last two years or so. And the reason is because I also use Brave on my workstation here at the office. And again, just for consistency sake, you know, I like it. And of course, it blocks all of the ads and the tracking. And that's great. It does that on the desktop. It also does that on the mobile phone as well. And that's probably even more important on mobile devices to block some of that malicious stuff. And of course, that leads us to the number one free and open source web browser here in 2022. According to DT, let me switch back over to my desktop. And I think that I have to give the top spot, if I can spell, to LibreWolf. LibreWolf is a fork of Mozilla Firefox. And you will notice that LibreWolf when I open it up looks very similar to Brave because I have the Tabless extension. I love this extension. So the start page extension called Tabless, I have it installed in both LibreWolf, Brave, and you guys saw me install it on un-Google Chromium using the Chrome Web Store extension so I could manually load it without having to be logged in. But what LibreWolf is, it gives you all of the best parts of Firefox and then gives you some extra security, some extra privacy on top of that. And being a fork of Mozilla Firefox, LibreWolf is in no way tied to the company that is Mozilla, which these days is kind of a positive because honestly, the corporation Mozilla these days, they're not in the best standing with the free and open source community because they have made some questionable decisions in the past few years. And I think that's part of the reason why Firefox is kind of waning and popularity. But I do have high hopes for LibreWolf as a fork. And I mentioned they're really focused on privacy and security. So if I go into settings, the settings look like your Firefox settings, right? So if I go into privacy and security, they've got a lot more stuff enabled out of the box turned on. And of course, there's some stuff going on behind this scene, some advanced stuff that they've got turned on. And one of the things with being so privacy and security focused, they've got things like some DRM stuff turned off out of the box, which could be a problem for those of you that want to say, watch Netflix in your browser, you can get Netflix working and LibreWolf just fine. But just note that out of the box, all of that stuff is turned off. Much like the Brave browser we discussed earlier, LibreWolf is very, very similar other than being Firefox based rather than Chromium based like Brave was, you get the ad blocking out of the box. Really nice. You get a lot of extra privacy and security features turned on out of the box. And really kind of like Brave, you know, LibreWolf is really focused on just being a good browser, right? We're not trying to be an entire desktop operating system with all this extra functionality that really isn't tied to being a web browser like mainline Firefox is. Mozilla Firefox, it's got so much going on more so than just being a web browser. They're adding all kinds of stuff with the VPN service and the pocket service. They're always adding new features and we're going to tie in all of this torrent stuff and email clients and you see what all of these web browsers are doing. They're adding all of this unnecessary stuff because no longer are they just being a good, fast, efficient web browser. They're trying to add all this extra cruft to it and it slows them down. And that's why I really love Brave and that's why I really love LibreWolf as well. So that is my top five. So again, number five, Mozilla Firefox, number four on Google Chromium, number three was Kube browser, number two was the Brave browser, number one, LibreWolf. I know that's going to be a controversial list. I know a lot of people are going to disagree with some of what I put in that top five. I know a couple of them are especially controversial. But guys, if you disagree with me, fine. Tell me in the comments down below what you think your top five free and open source web browsers are. Don't give me Vivaldi or Edge or Google Chrome. I don't want to hear about that garbage opera. They're all proprietary, right? Top five free and open source browsers. Comments down below. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Dustin Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Michael Mitchell, Paul West, Wyatt Bald, Homie, Alan Armoredragon, Chuck Commander, Ingrid, Iokai, Dylan, Greg Marsdrummer, Yon Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Vador, Polytech, Realiteats4less, Red Prophet, Steven Tools, Devler, and Willy, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This top five list of free and open source web browsers, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, I want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like free and open source web browsers, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.