You’ve got your classic web browsers with the biggest chunks of market share. The Statcounter website gives us a picture of those with what seems like decent methodology:
They’ve all got their fans. A bigger influence on these stats is browsers that are pre-installed or built-in to operating systems. Chrome is default on Android. Safari is default on Apple-anything. Edge is default on Windows. Samsung Internet is default on Samsung phones. Firefox is default on some Linux distributions. People tend to leave defaults alone.
But what else is out there?
Let’s take a look at browsers with much less than 2% market share. They are based on the open source engines that power these other major browsers (except for a few we’ll mention at the end), but do unique things on top of those engines. It’s an interesting space to watch, as browser software is big business with how many potential users they are, so even niche audiences can build good businesses.
Heads up: Not all of these are particularly new, but hey, they might be new to you as some were new to me while poking around at this. I’ve focused here on desktop browsers, although many of them have mobile versions of themselves.
Arc
Arc is my personal daily driver. I really like it for a bunch of reasons. Turns out I really like the sidebar tab structure, multiple workspaces, split view, and the command bar to name a few. Arc did a great job of showing the world that real UI/UX innovation could happen around browsers while using an existing engine.
But Arc, while still getting updates for engine versions, is largely abandon-ware. I tried switching away (but failed). The company behind it is now working on another browser called Dia of which little is known aside from… more AI?
💰 Free (“Max”, the AI features used to cost money but not anymore?)
⚙️ Chromium
Horse Browser
The big thing with Horse Browser is that your tabs are in a sidebar and nested. They call that “Trails”. If that clicks with you, you’ll probably love it. If it doesn’t, there really isn’t any reason to use it.
💰 $60/year (7 day trial)
⚙️ Chromium
Zen Browser
Zen Browser is essentially a shameless replica of Arc, only free, open-source, and Firefox-based instead of Chrome. Hopefully they can keep up the momentum long term, find a business model, innovate beyond what Arc did, and find a way past the inability to stream stuff.
💰 Free
⚙️ Firefox
Orion
From the team at Kagi (the privacy-friendly search engine), this browser also has various privacy-friendly features. Like Horse, it’s going for that nested tabs in a sidebar thing, with new-window based tab groups. Another notable feature is that it supports Chrome and Firefox extensions as well as WebKit extensions — which seems entirely unique.
💰 Free
⚙️ WebKit
Vivaldi
Vivaldi seems to be able lots of features and lots of customizability. Put your tabs where ever you want them. Full on theming. There is integrated email, calendars, VPN, and even an RSS reader. With stuff like “command chains” and “mouse gestures”, this is power user focused.
💰 Free
⚙️ Chromium
Wavebox
It looks like the big play with Wavebox is that it uses big square icons for your tabs (“apps”) and you can group them together “just like your phone!” with notification badges and such. Then you have profiles you can switch between, so the drive is configuring your own job-specific home bases. Other features like “focus mode” and time tracking make is squarely a “this is for work” browser.
💰$100/year (7 day trial)
⚙️ Chromium
(Not to be confused with Wave browser which is weirdly similar?)
Surf
I haven’t been able to use their alpha, but from the video on their homepage, the UI looks a lot like Arc. It’s “context” instead of “workspace” and “stuff” instead of “library”. The AI feature where you ask questions based on the open stuff in your context seems straightforward and kinda smart. I like where it gets weird and you build your own sloppy homepage full of random rectangles.
💰Unknown
⚙️ Chromium? Probably?
Shift
Shift is definitely in the category of “browsers are for work, and work is apps, so here’s your apps.” Like many (most?) of these browser alternatives, it has workspaces, which means you can be logged into all those apps with your work accounts, switch workspaces, and be logged into all those same apps with different accounts (like a different client or your personal life or whatever).
💰$149/year (14-day trial)
⚙️ Chromium
Brave
Brave was launched in 2016 making it likely much older than most of these. It’s one of the big classic alternative browsers and has always been a bit controversial. It’s got a commitment to privacy, but isn’t fully open source and literally monetizes through ads. It’s got Brendan Eich at the helm who is controversial. It’s gotten into crypto stuff with Basic Attention Tokens, Brave Rewards, and Brave Wallet, and clearly not everyone is hyped on crypto. The UI is nicely polished and certainly has a lot of fans.
💰Free
⚙️ Chromium
DuckDuckGo Browser
DuckDuckGo itself is a privacy focused search engine using Bing’s search index. It seems the entire browser feature set is focused on privacy/protection and ad blocking (except their own).
💰Free
⚙️ WebKit on macOS / Blink on Windows
Opera GX
Of course there is Opera, which really used to be one of the main browsers, and sort of lost that distinction when it went Chromium sold and generally got weird (long story). Opera GX is “for gamers” which seems largely aesthetic, but hey, I can’t blame them. Seems like a niche worth serving.
💰Free
⚙️ Chromium
Colibri
The whole deal here is no tabs. Like forces you not to have tabs, so you’re doing “one thing at at time”. One of those things that’s either going to click with you or it isn’t. The “Links” feature is the additional thing to help you get back to things, which is… just bookmarks.
💰Free
⚙️ Chromium
Other Notable Entries
- Polypane isn’t intended to be a daily driver style of browser, but it is a browser that is designed for web developers and has tons of cool features specifically for that.
- If you’re specifically interesting in privacy-focused browsers where the feature set is largely “more privacy”, you’ve got:
- Mullvad, the VPN company, makes a browser because even they say “Using a VPN isn’t enough” if you want extreme privacy.
- Thorium is a Chromium browser specifically tweaked for speed. Related: ungoogled-chromium.
Very notable are the organizations trying to make entirely new browser engines, and browsers on top of them. Those are:
Godspeed.
Mirror Browser?
Looks like you mean: https://www.mirror.work/en/
I hadn’t seen that before, but totally fits the bill here.
Thanks for the Polypane shout-out Chris, I appreciate it! I just released a new version yesterday with a ton of cool options like video recording and a new 3d view that shows z-index and stacking contexts.
A long list, longer than we would think.
I use Brave but the last couple of years, I’ve faced plenty of situation where pages won’t load, features won’t work, etc. I suppose it’s its feature of blocking some tracers, ads, actions considered as invasive that causes it, so I have a Firefox beside for support but it’s very frustrating.
Sometimes I think ad services do things on purpose to be blocked, generate issues on pages to generate this frustration and push people to “go back to Chrome”. I’m still resisting but it’s hard sometimes…
I tried to stick with Safari for a long time, embracing the ecosystem. However, it feels significantly slower compared to other browsers. I’m not sure if it’s just that WebKit is slower than Chromium, but Edge feels like it’s on nitrous compared to Safari for my usage.
Some of the latest features and flags seem to arrive a bit later on WebKit and Safari, but this isn’t a huge issue since I can use Technology Preview for those updates.
I’m not sure if I should mention Developer Tools, but I haven’t found any courses available for Safari’s Dev Tools. 😅 There are aspects I like about Safari, but the speed of Edge ultimately wins me over.
Additionally, not being able to set video quality on certain video sources (including Frontend Masters) is a disappointment for Safari. While I hope that Safari improves so I can continue using it, Apple usually takes a long time to do something about stuff like that (if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it ~seems to be the logic).
I’ve been using Floorp for a year and I enjoy a lot.
https://floorp.app/