Web Browser

[smhardesty]

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I know a lot of guys are now using their phones to do all their digital tasks, but there are still a bunch that prefer using a laptop or desktop computer. I use a laptop almost exclusively and one of the things I am always after is a web browser that is quick and secure. I've tried a bunch of different browsers. Some were good and some not so good.

I recently tried a new one that is showing promise. I've been using it for 5 days now. It's Waterfox and is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. I run it on Linux Mint and it is definitely faster than Firefox. I have yet to find any real problems with it. Something might pop up in the future, but right now it's performing very well for me. Below are a link to the Waterfox site home page and a link to the download page. If you're looking for something a little faster and more secure than what you have now, you might want to try it out.

https://www.waterfox.net/

https://www.waterfox.net/download/

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[7394]

I'm still hanging with the Fox, on my PC desktop.

 

[StarTech]

I think I'll stick with FF too, beside I am from those days of 1200 baud so 50 MBPS is pretty darn fast to me. Even at 33.5KBPS things seem slow as I would had took a week to download some the files I now download in a couple minutes. It is the upload speed limit by my carrier that is a pain.They got me throttled at 12 MBPS.

Just wish my multiple download program was still compatible but the latest FF doesn't support it for some reason that is only known to them.

To be fast really depends on a lot things. One is having the latest and greatest which I don't. I am still running Win 7 here. And I have no mobile phone. That is proving to be a major pain in the asset as everyone is now demanding me to have one. They all have forgot how to do simple things without the latest and greatest technology.

 

[bertsmobile1]

FWIW, I have 3 sim cards & 2 mobile phones ( long story )
One of the sim cards is a $ 5 / month limited use deal designed to cripple you with excess calls/data fees
This is the phone number all the sticky beaks get given and as the sim was only in the phone once, it will appear as a genuine phone number but of course never get answered unless I have to turn it on to verify something .
The monthly sales tax ( called GST down here ) can only be submitted via a mobile phone app or via a tax accountant $$$$$$ .
So a lot of people I know do the same thing, pop in the "government Sim on their never used phone, submit their tax return then pull the sim out & turn the phone off which of course forces the tax office to contact them by snail mail as the email address they give is also on the phone .

 

[StarTech]

Just wish the Government types just a tad of a brain....I have been fighting with our Idiot Ran Service for two years trying just get my name spelled correctly so I can cash my refund checks. The advocacy got things supposedly straighten out in December to only some idiot undo it again. I have even bother to start on this year's taxes yet. Usually I like to just get it done and out of my hair asap.

I pretty given up on counting them to get things fixed but I pretty darn sure if I owed them they on my doorstep in a heartbeat.

 

[smhardesty]

Hey, I wasn't trying to convince or persuade anybody to try Waterfox. I just know that Firefox is painfully slow at certain things and uses a huge chunk of system resources. I just offered the info about Waterfox in case anybody is having issues with Firefox.

I started out long before there even were any personal computers. My first "PC", if you want to call it that was one I "built" using parts and pieces from the Tandy Corporation and it was built on a piece of plywood. I went through every stage of communication over phone lines and then via wireless and cable modems. Truth be told, I enjoyed the days of using BBS (electronic bulletin boards) a whole lot more than I like what we now have as the Internet. I had contacts all over the world and we traded all sorts of information and software. It was kind of like having a little, private club of guys that met at different times during the day and night.

I hated anything and everything that Microsoft created and threw at the public. I never used Internet Explorer, ever. I used Netscape Navigator which, in a certain way, was a precursor to Firefox. The one thing that pretty much every operating system and every piece of software does over a period of time is to add all sorts of bells and whistles which are really nothing but bloat. I therefore am on a never ending quest to find software that at least attempts to reduce and resist the bloat. Firefox was once one of the fastest browsers in existence. Then, like so many other pieces of software, it became a hugely bloated and resource hungry monster. That is what I try and avoid and this Waterfox I am running is definitely much faster than Firefox. I have no idea if I'm going to run into any problems down the road, but so far, so good.

StarTech, the speed of your Internet connection provided by your ISP is completely different from the speed of the browser. A browser can not make your connection any faster or slower. Likewise, a faster connection won't make your browser faster. The speed of the browser is how fast it can render the data fed to it via the Internet connection. Then, things like opening new tabs or new widows are a product of the browser. The reason I started looking again is because the last few updates to Firefox have caused pages to be rendered a lot more slowly. I only use webmail for all my different email addresses and about 4 or 5 months ago Firefox started taking as much as 5 seconds just to log me in to my primary email account. I can load that page quicker using Tor, but I don't like using Tor for everyday tasks. I usually only resort to Tor if I have intentions of visiting websites I've never been to or if I'm going to hit a few places on the Dark Web. So, Waterfox seems to be providing what I need to do my daily browsing.

If anybody is interested in trying Waterfox and needs a little assistance, just give me shout. I run Linux, but I should be able to help with Windows based installations. I'm not too sure about helping with macOS. I just never got involved with any Apple products.
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[StarTech]

Since I use TB for my email accounts I rarely ever login via the browsers. It is set to auto check the pop accounts every 10 minutes and I let IMAP accounts do their thing. Haven't any webmail accounts in a long time.

 

[smhardesty]

I gave up on T'bird and all the other email clients long ago. I used to do the same thing you mentioned. I just got tired of screwing with all the intricacies of the clients and having to save all the emails, logins, password, etc, etc, etc, every time I wanted to do a fresh install of whatever version of Linux I was running. Switching to all webmail accounts saves all that fussing. All I have to do is click on the bookmark for each account and read my mail.

I used T'bird for a lot of years. It served me well. I just decided to uncomplicate my computing and reduce all the software bloat on my systems. When I do a new install on a freshly wiped hard drive, I spend about 15 minutes doing the actual install, then another two hours, give or take, removing unwanted/unnecessary programs and packages from the installed system. That time also includes all the performance tweaking I do. I run a couple of scripts on my laptops to monitor just how much of my system's hardware resources are being used by what programs/tasks. This laptop I'm on is the first install of Mint XFCE 21.1 I have tried. There were some glitches with release 21.0 that caused problems on my laptops. All but one of those were resolved in 21.1. I expect the one remaining hiccup I seem to be experiencing will be resolved in a future update.

I'm back on Firefox right now. I've been bouncing back and forth between it and Waterfox trying to determine just how much quicker Waterfox is. On a lot of the sites I visit regularly, Waterfox is a lot quicker. So far, no site loads slower than when using Firefox. I did find one thing that kind of bothered me. There is no real forum for Waterfox, or at least I haven't run across it yet. I guess I need to login to my old Mozilla account and see of there is any help there. I'll have to go back and read through some of my old password lists. It's been so long since I've logged into the Mozilla site I'm not sure which password I used there. The pitfalls of getting older, I guess. LOL!

 

[7394]

I think I'll stick with FF too, beside I am from those days of 1200 baud so 50 MBPS is pretty darn fast to me.

Our internet provider bumped us up from 350 mbps to 500 mbps, so I'm flying.. I can still remember ages ago having 'dial up'.. LOL Start PC, go eat breakfast, & come back to wait some more.

 

[bertsmobile1]

so you are better than 10 times over me
Download speed right now is 4.45 Mbps upload is 0.64
I some times think dial up is still with us .
This is our wonderful universal high speed broadband which in OZ was supposed to be universally available 100 Mbps , except for the 72,000 locations where it isn't

I get twice that speed if I use my mobile phone as a personal hot spot but of course I only can do that with the 3 Gb of total data / month .
We were supposed to get fibre to the door but as what usually happens in Australia, politicians come along and mess everything up so in the end it gets done 5 times at 50 times the price of doing it properly once.