Everybody needs a web browser. The web browser is probably one of mostly widely used tools in this day of cloud computing and internet. Google even made an operating system out of a browser. What browser you use depends much on its feature set and your own preferences. Almost all of the popular web browser today, have a very similar set of features.

Having said that there are still some major differences between them. Some are light-weight, fast and resource friendly while some are much more extensible and configurable. Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses. It is up to you to try out different browsers and select the one that best suits your needs.

If you are on a Linux distro, you have several web browsers available to you outside of what is usually shipped with the particular distro. Some of them should already be familiar to you. All of them are easy to download and install for free.

Google Chrome

Probably the most popular browser of the day, this is one of the new(-ish) browsers in the market. It is a Google product that has quickly taken over the market. It is extremely fast and has a very well performing JavaScript engine.

It also boasts of a marketplace with a wide variety of extensions that can be used to extend the functionality of the browser.

Chromium

Chromium is the open source browser that the Google Chrome is based on. It has all the features of the Chrome browser, and is also a little more cutting edge than the Google Chrome. However it also misses a couple of features that Google adds on such as the support for H.264 codecs and the Flash plugin.

Mozilla Firefox

The Mozilla Firefox has existed in some name or fashion since the advent of browsing. It has taken on several names and forms, starting with Netscape Navigator through Phoenix all the way to Firefox. It is a really good browser with good JavaScript performance and memory efficiency out of the box. It is also one of most extensible and configurable browsers that is available.

There are tons of add-ons that you can install. Unfortunately, the  speed and efficiency of the browser suffers drastically with the type and number of add-ons you install.

Opera

Opera has undergone on some fundamental changes recently. They have changed the underlying rendering engine from the home-brewed Presto to the Blink that is the rendering engine for some of the other browsers such as Chrome, Chromium, Vivaldi etc.

The team that develops Opera has the reputation for many innovative features: Multi Document Interface, Torrent Support etc. They have also made features such as Speed Dial, Native mail support, Browser Sync much more popular.

Vivaldi

This is yet another Chromium based browsers, built by a team that have some Opera background. That means you will see a lot of similarities between the two browsers. Vivaldi supports some of the less popular tab features such Tab Stacking and Tab Tiling. It is extremely fast, but support for some the extensions are still lacking.

This a browser that is built with modern day web technologies. The calling card for the browser is that it is a browser built with the web for the web.

Konqueror

Konqueror is the browser that has been around for a long time, and has been the default on KDE. It is based on the KHTML rendering and layout engines, which was later forked to created other popular engines such as WebKit and Blink. It supports many unique features out of the box such as Ad Blocking and Tab Splitting.

It also interfaces nicely with many other KDE libraries to provide many functionalities such as file browsing and display of various document types (text, PDF, images etc). It versatile, fast and reliable…known as the swiss army knife of browsers.

Web or Epiphany

This is the default browser for the Gnome desktop environment. It is just called Web but was originally known as Epiphany which was forked from Galeon. It provides the best integration with the Gnome desktop.

Initially based on the Gecko platform of Mozilla, the latest versions are now based on the WebKit engine.

 

There are several other browsers that are available in Linux. Most of these are not very popular and have a much more limited feature set. The purpose and goals of these browsers are usually a little different than the main stream browsers. Notable among them are Dillo, Midori, Pale Moon and Qupzilla.