Look beyond the mainstream options and you’ll find web browsers that offer many more features. Barry Collins examines three great alternatives
If you fired up Google Chrome today and the version that first launched in 2008, you’d struggle to tell them apart. The address bar runs along the top, there’s a row of bookmarks underneath, a few basic buttons to the left, tabs at the top, and that’s yer lot. Has the way we use the web really not changed in 15 years? There are alternative browser makers out there who would strongly disagree.
Google pioneered the fuss-free, feature-stripped browser in 2008 and the rest of its mainstream rivals followed. But there’s a new undercurrent of “power browsers” designed to satisfy users who want more from their web browser. Browsers with built-in email clients and feed readers, browsers that separate home and work life, browsers that don’t endlessly distract you from the task at hand with notifications and alerts.
The web browser is the most used piece of software on most computers. Shouldn’t it be better?
The mood for change
Jon von Tetzchner has form when it comes to creating alternative browsers. In the early 1990s, he co-founded Opera, a browser that regularly won fulsome reviews in PC Pro for the breadth and originality of its feature set. In 2015, von Tetzchner did it again, founding the Vivaldi browser (see p32) and continuing the same ethos of delivering a feature-rich, privacy-friendly browser.
Von Tetzchner thinks that companies such as Google and Microsoft don’t have to work too hard to make their browsers stand out because they have the inherent advantage of being able to bundle browsers with their operating systems. “For browser makers, the larger ones in particular, the point has always been ‘we don’t need to differentiate, we just need to make it easy to switch. We have a distribution advantage... We want to make it as simple to change as possible.’”
There are other reasons why the big players don’t pack lots of extras into their browsers. “If you don’t have a lot of features, there’s less that can go wrong,” he said. “You can just focus on simplification and then you can say, okay, if you want something more advanced than this, you have to go and get extensions.”
But in recent years, we’ve seen Microsoft begin to add features into Edge, and von Tetzchner believes that’s a consequence of consumers growing frustrated with the limitations of the browsers. “Microsoft has been trying to find a reason for people to use their browser, so they’ve been adding a little bit. Even Google has been adding features.
