I used Firefox and forks for a long time, then I decided to try Ungoogled Chromium for at least a month, to have a better experience of what it is to use it daily.
There are some pros and cons when compared to Firefox and similar. One of this cons is a showstopper, and for that I found a workaround. I'll start with this:
In it's default form, UG crashes every time you try to save a file through the save dialog.
The workaround is to modify it's launcher to set the environment variable XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP to KDE before launching the browser. This will make it use the QT file dialog windows instead of the GTK ones, avoiding the crash.
#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Ungoogled Chromium
Comment=Google web browser based on WebKit sans integration with Google
Icon=ungoogled-chromium
TryExec=ungoogled-chromium
Exec=bash -c "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE ungoogled-chromium %U"
Categories=Application;Network;WebBrowser;
MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml;x-scheme-handler/http;x-scheme-handler/https;x-scheme-handler/ftp;
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
You can change it using the menu editor, or copying the default .desktop file from /usr/local/share/applicazions to ~/.local/share/applications and edit the Exec line.
The first common roadblock is that there is no default search engine defined and that catch many users by surprise when the first thing they do is to enter some keyword in the address field to start a search for the first time. You can fix this by opening the settings and choose your favourite engine.
Another common roadblock is the installation of add-on. To install and update them, you need to follow the instruction here: NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store
Speaking of addons, many good anti-ad and anti-tracking ones will soon stop to work due to Google Manifest V3. Today, they are still working, but I don't know for how long...
Some less powerful, but farly good alternatives are:
- ublock lite instead of ublock origin
- Cookie Auto Delete (the one with the grey cookie icon) instead of the more versatile Cookie AutoDelete (with the blue icon and trash bin icon)
You can still use LocalCDN or Decentraleyes, and Privacy Badger.
The pro that I found is basically its performances. Ungoogled Chromium on GhostBSD is much much faster and responsive than any other Firefox forks that I tried (Firefox, Librewolf, Waterfox). Not only when rendering pages and playing videos, but also when tying into the pages text fields. With Firefox forks on GhostBSD I always have lots of input lag that more that, very frustratingly often causes key misses. Instead with UG, I have no issue at all.
That's an issue I'm having only on GhostBSD. I never suffered this on any Linux distribution or on MacOS.
