10 Best Browsers for Linux – Lightweight, Fast, and Secure!

We all are required to have a good browser that uses fewer system resources. You might have a powerful PC but what if you want to have a good web browsing experience on a virtual machine? In all scenarios, having a resource-friendly web browser on a Linux system can help you a lot.

Many times, we face a system lag due to resource-hungry software and when you consider resource-hungry browsers, Chrome is what comes to our mind. People are ditching Chrome just because it consumes almost half of the resources in many systems.

That said, we are going to show you what are the best browsers for Linux available but before that let’s discuss what are the crucial things to consider before picking up the best Linux web browser!

3 Things to Consider While Choosing a Linux Web Browser

Stability

A browser should be good enough to get you a stable experience and should not crash randomly.

Performance

We all know some browsers such as Internet Explorer which take Ages to respond to your single query. A browser should be good enough to get your desired results in some seconds.

Security

Your browser should be reliable enough for you to carry out your highly confidential tasks such as Online Banking.

Best Browser for Linux

Let’s have a look at some of the best browsers for Linux that are lightweight, secure, and blazing fast as most of them are open-source. The given web browsers work with most of the Linux distros available.

1. Pale Moon Browser

Pale Moon is an open-source, goanna-based web browser that is primarily focused on efficiency and customization. It is forked from Mozilla code and provides regular security patches so there are no security issues.

It is low on resources and provides extensive theme support by which you can customize it in your way.

2. Midori

Midori is a lightweight yet powerful web browser. It is often recommended for low resources computers such as Raspberry Pi. Due to this reason, it comes pre-installed on many Linux distributions such as Manjaro, Bodhi, and Elementary OS.

You get DuckDuckGo Search Engine as default because privacy is a major concern for them.

3. Falkon

Falkon is an open-source web browser that is based on QtWebEngine. It is cross-platform and available on Linux and Windows. Falkon is Lightweight yet bundled with several features such as Speed dials, bookmarks, and many others.

You also get a built-in ad blocker and options to change the default look via themes.

4. Otter Browser

Otter is an open-source web browser with the motive of “To create the best of Opera 12”. It is designed with a Qt framework and released under GNU general public license v3.

You get some great features out of the box that includes password manager, URL completion, spell checking, speed dial, and many others.

They have also promised mind-blowing features in upcoming releases such as the Bit Torrent client.

5. Netsurf

Netsurf is a cross-platform and Lightweight web browser written in the C language. It has its layout engine and is licensed under GPL v2. It comes with great features out of the box such as Search-as-you-type text search highlighting, a fast and lightweight engine, Incremental finding, and much more.

You also get mouse gesturing, access keys, ad filtering, and high portability.

6. Vivaldi

You might be thinking why is Vivaldi in the 6th place despite being a good browser overall? Because it’s a closed source. You might not be satisfied with our answer but we at GeniusGeeks prefer more open source tools than anything else. That’s the reason why we’ve listed the same browser in 6th position in our Windows 11 browser article as well. 

You get everything that you would expect from a modern web browser and as Vivaldi is chromium based, you will get all plug-ins that are available on Chrome Store.

If having an open-source browser is not your priority, Vivaldi can be the best browser for any Linux distribution including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux, Manjaro, Debian, and many others.

7. GNOME web

GNOME web is an open-source and secure web browser developed by GNOME Team for their GNOME Desktop environment. It is lightweight but still avails you of great features which you can find in popular web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox. 

You get features such as Incognito mode for private browsing, extension support, pop-up blocker, and Spell-checker.

8. Viper

Viper is an open-source Qt-5-based web browser. It borrows chromium base but does not add repositories that connect to the Google platform. As it uses a Qt-web engine, you will get lightweight but power-packed performance.

You get the ability to manage Cookies, simplicity at its core, the ability to prevent images from loading up, the ability to add user-defined scripts, and many useful features.

9. Waterfox

Waterfox is yet another open-source browser and gives you a super-fast experience from its competitors. It follows the minimalism out of the box with gives you a full-fledged experience by allowing you to have access to chrome and firefox extensions.

If you are really into performance, Waterfox won’t disappoint you.

10. Qutebrowser

Qutebrowser is an open-source web browser primarily focused on low resource consumption and simple to use interface. It is based on python and PyQt5.

The major advantage of using Qutobrowser is you can have great keyboard navigation which is similar to vim key biding.

 

Frequently asked questions related to Browsers

Is Firefox best for Linux?

If you are concerned about your privacy, firefox can be tweaked to get you the best browsing experience with maximum privacy achieved. So yes, firefox is the best browser for Linux if you are ready to apply some tweaks here and there.

Is Firefox built on Chromium?

No, it is one of the very few browsers which are not chromium-based. Firefox runs on a Quantum browser engine built specifically for Firefox to ensure your privacy and keep your data safe.

Which Web Browser Do You Use the Most?

All web browsers have their pros and cons. Some are only focused on privacy such as Tor and have to sacrifice the user experience whereas some provide the best experience but are resource hungry and some to get you fast performance, sacrifice on user experience.

So it depends on you what you prefer the most, resources or security and after choosing your preference you can have your best browser for Linux. Also, if you’re using Ubuntu, we would recommend you to try the Brave browser as it’s blazing fast.