I Left Chrome and So Should You

I'm tired of Chrome eating up all my RAM all the time. Doesn't it know I need it for gaming? And with how expensive it is nowadays? Well, I've had it. I'm going to find a different, better browser that doesn't beg me for more RAM every time I click a button. Now, you might be thinking, Betty, just use Firefox. Oh, if only it were that simple. You see, the RAM thing's not the only source of beef I have with Chrome. I'm also beefing with Chrome for stalking me. I mean, no, it's not really a surprise at this point. Google's been harvesting our data to sell us ads for a long time now. And they even nerfed Ublock Origin, everyone's favorite ad blocker. Coincidence? I think not. But I want to at least feel some level of control over my data. You ever see a random ad that just doxxes you right up front? It's like I need to enter a witness protection program. The first step towards my lofty goal of privacy in this day and age is choosing a better browser. It's something that we use every day, so why not put some effort to find the best one? But there's a lot of options out there. Firefox, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera. How much different are these browsers really? Or are they not even that different at all? That's what I'm gonna find out. Of course, the most obvious one I tried out first is Firefox. It's the most common browser I see pre-installed on Linux distros. And if you're old enough to remember, Firefox came out in 2004 and it's existed longer than Chrome has by a whopping four years. It's evolved a long way since then to keep up with the competition. If you're making the leap from Chrome, they even greet you with open arms, letting you import all your bookmarks and history with one click of a button. And it's got themes, extensions, and look, Ublock Origin can work at its full power. Welcome back, old friend. Not only that, but there's actually a pretty robust section in the settings that lets you change a lot of privacy and security settings, like restricting trackers and cookies. There's an option here that'll tell you websites not to sell your data. But for some reason, this option isn't enabled by default. Kinda sketchy. Especially since Firefox advertises that your personal data isn't for sale. What's even more more sus is that when I kept on scrolling, I found this section called Firefox Data Collection and Use, and all those options were on by default. I did not consent to that. I thought I could trust you, Firefox. Okay, it's a perfectly functional browser, but it doesn't really meet all my standards. A lot of websites and web apps are designed for Chrome by default. So if you're familiar with keyboards, the VIA app, for example, can't be used in Firefox at all. So you just have to do the walk of shame and open up Chrome again. And sadly, Firefox isn't even that better than Chrome in the RAM department. So it was on to the next browser, Microsoft Edge. Now I'll be honest, I wasn't really expecting much using Edge. I'm trying not to be biased here, but we all know the ritual of using Edge just to install another browser, most likely Chrome, on a fresh Windows machine. I wasn't even surprised at the barrage of ads and clutter that greeted me when I first opened it. It's Microsoft. The bar's pretty darn low. I popped open the settings to see what I could do about this crime against my eyes insanity, and immediately I will say the UX, the user experience, is already worse than Firefox. I don't know about you guys, but I liked when Firefox gave me all my settings in one page over making me click through different buttons like Edge is making me do. Anyway, as I went through the privacy settings, I found some interesting things. The do not track request was off by default, similar to Firefox. But unlike Firefox, Microsoft actually turns off optional diagnostic data by default. But I guess they already have what they need from you anyways with the required diagnostic data they need to keep Edge secure and up to date. Yeah, I'm sure that's all you're using that for. Then I took a look at the cookies section and found something that gave me a laugh. Not a good one. I hadn't even opened a single page, but there were already cookies from a bunch of different websites, not to mention the suspicious ones like ADNXS and Scorecardresearch.com. What is that? Probably more stuff to serve me ads. I'll take a guess. And MSN has a whopping 21 megabytes of cookies in my browser, and I haven't done a single thing. Boy, my expectations were low, but somehow I'm still disappointed. But then I found something that did surprise me. A silver lining in the cloud of spooky cookies and MSN news feeds. And that was that Edge actually uses not only less RAM than both Firefox and Chrome, but it also uses less battery life. Holy smokes, I just had to find out why. Apparently, it uses something called sleeping tabs that just turns off the tabs that you aren't using. Not only that, but Microsoft Edge has these performance settings that actually limit how much RAM you let it use. I have to put out a disclaimer, though, that this performance setting only works on Windows. Sorry, Linux. Did you know there's one thing you almost never think about upgrading, but it makes a huge difference? Your floor mats, of course. These are custom fit floor mats from our sponsor, LastFit. And today, we're throwing them into our videographer's Subaru Crosstrek. Now, before we swap them out, take a look at his old mats. They're worn down, floppy, and sad from repeated use. Poor mats. Luckily, today, they're getting upgraded with these bad boys. 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It's a type of upgrade that you don't think about, but once you do it, you realize what's been missing in your life. So if you want to upgrade your car and take it to the next level, pick up the last fit floor mats in the link below. You can find your exact car model and use code SC20 for 20% off. So on my quest for a perfect browser, I found one that kept getting mentioned for even better privacy, and that was Brave. So naturally, I downloaded it and tested it out. It's also default on Zorin. In a complete 180 from Edge, the expectations for Brave were way up. Brave touts security and privacy as one of its top priorities on its website. It even comes pre-installed with its own ad blocker. And look how clean it is when you first open it. Ah, no ads. But wait, what's this thing here? Brave Rewards? Get paid to see private ads you see in Brave? Isn't that itself an ad? I'll take a look later, but now to the settings. Brave by default blocks ads and trackers from websites for you in the shield setting, which is really nice. They are following through on their promises of security. There's even a content filtering section down here with a huge list of blockers that are considered popular by users. When I went to test out those settings, the first thing I noticed when I put in a search was that Brave doesn't use Google or Bing as a default search engine like Firefox and Edge. It actually uses its own search engine called Brave. Now I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while, in my efforts to break away from Google's hostage situation, but sometimes I'm not very happy with the search results and I have to usually go back to Google for something very specific I'm looking for. The Brave search, on the other hand, was decent. Now I can find my memes, I mean very serious tech discussions, easier. I tested out Brave's blockers on sites like AP News and Fandom Wiki. Since those are pretty notorious sites for just bombarding users with non-stop ads, look at the difference. I compared this to Firefox running uBlock, and while the results are comparable, Firefox on uBlock loses out just a teeny margin with this cookie consent pop-up. Now if you don't know by now, cookies are a lot less fun than they sound. These are bits of data that websites keep on you to remember information if or whenever you come back. Say you log into Amazon, and if you logged in for the past 30 days, they remember that it's you and they'll even remember what you might have put in your cart if you're not even logged in. But some of these cookies are bad and evil cookies that track you and your browsing history to serve you tailored ads, and who knows where that data might be going. But there was something else I found while testing Brave's built-in blockers. You see, there's this pretty helpful feature enabled by default, which is this pop-up that shows how much RAM a specific tab uses. With my blocker on, the wiki site uses about 150 megabytes of data, and when I turned it off, it shot up to 450. That's more than double the memory, which isn't an unexpected thing, but the unexpected thing was that Firefox, running the same page, used only 300 with uBlock off. And when I opened my task manager, I was shocked to see a bajillion Brave processes. Why? I searched for an answer, and what I found is going to be disappointing to a lot of you as it was for me. In the browser world, there's this thing called Chromium. Basically, it's the code upon which a lot of these browsers run on, including Brave and even Microsoft Edge. Not Firefox, though. They're doing their own thing. And as you might be able to guess based on its name, the Chromium code is developed and maintained by Google. That's why Firefox only shows me one process, while Brave and Edge are shadow clone jujitsuing all up in my task manager like how Chrome does, which is unfortunate since the rest of this video is going to be over Chromium browsers. There's one final thing I needed to look into, and that's this Brave rewards thing. Apparently, Brave is in cahoots with the cryptocurrency and NFT business. If you accept to see some specific ads that Brave sends you, they give you money in the form of Bitcoin or Ethereum, which then goes into a crypto wallet, which you can use to buy NFTs or from Web3 apps. Kind of sounds sketchy if you ask me. At the very least, you can just hide all away these icons and just pretend they don't exist. Overall, Brave is a decent option, but it is a little weird that they've got so many of their own things going on, like Leo AI, Brave Rewards, and that crypto wallet. While uBlock does a lot of the heavy lifting and blocking ads in Firefox, Brave's built-in blockers make things a lot more simple. In fact, it might even be better, but unfortunately, the memory usage still leaves things to be desired, and with their own ads on top of being Chromium, it's just shy from being my default browser. So while on my search for a better browser, I had a genius idea. The EU has better standards of privacy than other countries, so why not look at a European browser like Vivaldi? This browser is developed by a European company based in Norway and Iceland. While their website looked pretty lackluster, the welcome process came with a lot more bells and whistles. Too many bells and whistles, even. I had to click through a bunch of pages, and they even prompted me to sign up for a Vivaldi account? Not even Microsoft Edge asked me to do that. Well, maybe they don't because they're Microsoft, but either way, I was a bit annoyed. I wasn't sure what to expect going into Vivaldi, but the first impressions were not that great. Sure, they asked me if I wanted to block trackers and ads. Duh, I do. But the bar is higher than that now. Even the UI was kind of ugly. And where's my settings page? I feel like I'm on a whole nother planet. I found the settings eventually. What I see there doesn't impress me. There's a whole section on Google services enabled by default. Now, it's supposed to protect me from malware and phishing, but does that really have to be Google? And this broadcast IP setting being on doesn't really help my already poor impression of Vivaldi so far. I played around with the settings as I've been doing and saw that similar to Edge, Vivaldi has already stored some cookies. Less than Edge, not really high bar though. Maybe I'll find something that changes my mind the more I use it. Was my optimistic thought before learning that Vivaldi uses this search engine called Startpage, which right off the bat shows you completely unrelated sponsored results, wasting your time and space. I quickly changed that out for DuckDuckGo and tried to find any sort of redeeming quality to salvage Vivaldi. Even this VPN option offered by Proton. It doesn't work. Oh, wait, I need to make an account. Well, that's misleading, but of course, it makes sense. A VPN that doesn't make you sign up for an account sounds too good to be true. There was one thing left for me to do to see if Vivaldi was just a waste of my time and that was seeing how much RAM it uses. It's okay. I guess that since it's Chromium, just like Brave, there wasn't going to be much of a difference in how much memory it uses. The customization options that Vivaldi offers easily outdoes Firefox, Brave, and Edge. You can change pretty much anything. Where the icons are, what they are. I came across this because I was pretty annoyed at my settings being in the bottom left instead of the top right. But I'm not really someone who needs all that customization, so it's hard to say whether that makes up for the rest of the experience. So, first impressions, it's ugly. Just outdated. There's not many other words to describe it other than the UX is bad. The out-of-the-box experience, not great. Vivaldi is tied up with Google services and it's not really privacy forward. Now, I'm starting to get an idea of how the next browser will turn out. Another European browser, but this one is actually used a lot. Right after Firefox at 1.88% of people, according to StatsCounter. And this browser is Opera. If you're old enough to remember, Opera came even before Firefox and it was released in 1995. Wow, a year after I was born. I wanted to see if this dinosaur has evolved enough to stay in the game. I'm not expecting miracles, it's still Chromium. One thing that surprised me as I went to download it from the website was how many different versions of Opera there are. There's regular Opera, there's Opera GX, Opera Air, Opera Mini. What the heck, there's so many, it's like Linux. But for now, I'm just here for regular Opera. So, I downloaded it, installed it and it threw me into the fray right away with a page of suggested websites and forms. But I was used to that by now, so I went into the settings. Definitely turn the AI option off, of course. Why is there AI everywhere? Just stop it with the AI. If I want it, I'll get it. I turn on the ad and tracking blockers. Oh wait, wait, another VPN option? Hmm, but does it work? Or if we got tricked again? Opera uses Google as its default browser, which for some reason I'm less annoyed at than Vivaldi using Page Start or whatever the heck it was called. Maybe it's true when they say the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. But anyway, I tried it out and I noticed the pages were loading super slow, which confirmed that the VPN was working. What do you know? But it sucked, so I turned it off. So as I continued using Opera, I found that the built-in ad blocker doesn't even actually block all the ads. What also kind of sucked is that Opera seems to be doing the same crypto business as Brave, but it's hidden and enabled by default in the settings. Suspicious stuff, huh? Lots of crypto for some reason. And there's so many more browsers, but they're mostly Chromium anyways. And after a while, they all start looking and feeling the same. So by the end of all this testing, I don't really have a definitive answer that I sought out for. In terms of out-of-the-box privacy, Brave was the best out of all of them. If you can ignore the crypto business and the fact that it's run on Chromium, this browser might be pretty worth it for you. Now if you want your browser to use the least RAM possible at the cost of shaking hands with Microsoft and a questionable privacy standard, Edge is your guy. But at the end of the day, the one answer I could say confidently was that no browser is perfect without some tinkering. That's why for me, I think I have to go with Firefox. With some of the right extensions, I can prioritize my privacy and I can break away from Google. Some of you might have wildly differing opinions and that's okay. And some of you know that there are a million factors in how these browsers behave and what data websites get from it depending on your OS or what settings are on and off. But I have a feeling that this might just be a new rabbit hole. I'm starting to wonder what the best search engine is. More research perhaps? If you want an easy car upgrade that actually protects your interior, check out Last Fit Floor Mats. Installing these mats was super simple. You just take out your old mats and you put these mats in. And right now you can get 20% off using our code SE20. Links in the description.