I will give Zen browser a try. As for Netflix, I only used it for a one month since it’s quite expensive in my country and it crawled like anything on Firefox for Linux. I was getting consistent 720p video but not sure about full HD. Eventually I canceled it.
Comment on I've tried nearly every browser out there and these are my top 6 (none are Chrome)
Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Zen browser is really nice imo. The developers update it very frequently.
One drawback is that it lacks widevine support, which means that things like netflix won’t work.
kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
klu9@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
IIRC major streaming services like Netflix and Prime do not offer 1080p or 4k streams to Linux browsers, mainly for technical reasons. You have to use some tricks (special extensions or add-ons?) to get anything above 720p.
kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I think 4K is only available on Edge on Windows for Netflix. I never bothered with 4K since that’s above and beyond my device’s native resolution but I didn’t have too positive a experience with Netflix, IMO.
I just want to watch something in full HD without intermittent streaming or buffering. Legal streaming services including Netflix treat one like a criminal by forcing them to watch in a Web browser with constant Internet connectivity forced upon them. I can use keyboard shortcuts to increase playback speed by 0.1x each time in mpv, does Netflix allow me to do the same? No, instead it gives me a dusty experience.
klu9@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Back when I used to watch Netflix in a web browser, I had a browser extension that gave me lots of different capabilities, including all kinds of playback speeds.
I can’t remember the name of the extension I used then, but I see there are still plenty of extensions available. addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/search/?q=netfli…
naeap@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
“technical reasons”
Wasn’t this just about DRM?
klu9@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
IIRC it was something to do with the difficulty of getting the browser to use hardware acceleration/GPU in the countless variations of Linux, to the point where they don’t even bother trying because of the infinitesimally small market share of each distro.
But I’m not 100% sure of that.
Propheticus@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Zen looks nice and some of the UX concepts (workspaces, glance, split sidebar from vertical tabs) work well. The ‘fit & finish’ and the way changes are pushed (unilaterally? Unvalidated with endusers?) feels very much like a 1 man hobby project though.