List of Pinephone browsers

[Gamey]

I made a post about browsers on the Pinephone a while ago but it's a bit outdated by now and I obviously wasn't able to test everything by myself. I though maybe we can make a list of browsers and document how well they work together. I will make the start and hope some of you also have something to add later on :D



Browsers I was able to get working.

• Firefox: As the default browser FF works really well except for some UI glitches and the removal of PWAs which really fucked with me since Hydrogen depends on the feature. https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmXmq8...Lqd1qa1kJw
  
• Chromium: It works somewhat okay but only with x11 (via XWayland) because Ozone which should enable proper Wayland support is very buggy with the keyboard. Without Ozone you can't type a "@" which is annoying but not a deal breaker, with it I can't even type a "o". In short the Pinephone will render it at a lower resolution to decrease the performance impact caused by XWayland. In my experience it's the only browser that can reliably get out of fullscreen tho so while I dislike Chromium it's currently the best solution I have to watch video online. https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmST4v...e9R56VKwds
  
• Librewolf: Ik it's basically Firefox from a different source and with better defaults but since I got it to work I thought it still deserves at least a mention here. https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmbsBX...RqcrJ5WkJk
  
• Angelfish: The default plasma mobile browser and the only truly mobile optimized browser I know of. It's a really nice browser with a damn good UI but it still crashes a ton and sometimes has strange bugs. https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmQDBx...wC46yo49Nh
  
• Dillo: Not my kind of thing (a bit to retro) but still a working browser. It can't scale websites and doesn't load most of them but if you like it you can enjoy it on your Pinephone. https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmPqxo...zQpT4Aha6E
  
• Castor: It's probably debatable and I don't use Gemini but it's awesome that there already is a mobile compatible browser for it and after a lot of fucking around I got it to work once with one version but never again. Luckily it still runs on my Arch testing setup.
  
• Qutebrowser: It may seem strange to you that I include a keyboard driven browser in here but Qutebrowser works damn well. As long as you use the Terminal layout you can use it without any issues and a few little tweaks to the keybindings can improve it even father. https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmWicY...fmX4BeXT4F
  
• Liri Browser: I won't lie I am not a fan of material design and much less on Linux but the Liri apps work damn well beside of some scaling issue and the browser is fine and works well in my experience. https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmanBj...39kFupV51M
  
• Midori: Like all WebkitGTK apps this browser runs like shit on the Pinephone but it runs and if you disable JS you can even somewhat use it. It has UI glitches that prevent any searches tho so if then you can only use it as default for GTK apps.
  
• Epiphany: Just don't even try it! I heared some rumors about potential improvmentes in GTK4 but since I haven't seen any source for that I doubt it.
  
• Vivaldi: We have so many great open source browsers so I hate to even imagine someone uses a closed source option within the Linux community but I want to get this list somewhat complete. It works but the UI is absolutely awful for mobile devices and it also seems to use XWayland. I want to add that I only started the browser to take a  look at it and deleted it right after that so this is a bit one sided and I am aware of that but common a closed source browser I mean that gets a no thanks from me! https://gateway.pinata.cloud/ipfs/QmXfDA...vMkmYBDf8N
  
• Falkon: The KDE browser for desktop devices which doesn't work that well on mobile devices but it works so it's in this list.
  
• QtWebBrowser: Seems to be a simple browser directly from the Qt team and made for Touch devices but it seems to be more of a thing for tablets since the UI components are far to big and start to stack on top of each other instead of scaling down.
  
• Konqueror: Another KDE browser that seems to also be a swiss army knife for file managment. The main usecase I can see for it is to download websites and view them later which can be really useful at times. It doesn't intentionally scale but the UI is suprisingly mobile friendly by default and you can tweak it quite a bit to fit the screen even better.  I can confirm that it works on Mobian but seems broken on Arch (missing dependency) and it uses KDEWebKit and optionally the long dead KHTML webengine.
  
• Tor Browser: The current official Alpha seems to actually support ARM64 but that's not secure so to get a build rn you can go to the Sourceforge page of TorBrowser Ports. (I haven't done that since I absolutly hate Sourceforge so I can't confirm if the browser actually works but there are videos of it running)
  
• Cog: A Webkit WPE launcher without any GUI that seems to work quite well beside of some reaqlly annoying buggs. Those include absolutly no UI (not even a right click menu) and broken copy paste even with Strg+C/V. It's not technically a browser but I just had to include it since it makes creating Webapps so damn easy with a single command launched via a .desktop file. There also is a small external UI that adds some basic controls called Cogwebrun
  
• W3M: A minimal text based browser (Terminal) that works really well on the Pinephone. In theory w3m-img should also allow it to display images but I wasn't able to get that working nether on Arch nor Mobian.
  

Extra:




You can delete Cookies in Angelfish using those commands.



rm ~/.local/share/KDE/angelfish/QtWebEngine/DefaultProfile/Cookies


rm ~/.local/share/KDE/angelfish/QtWebEngine/DefaultProfile/Cookies-journal




To run Chromium with Ozone you have to add the following flags. (tested with the Flathub version of Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium)


--enable-features=UseOzoneProject --ozone-platform=wayland



Btw I made a blog post about the topic with info collected here and on Mastodon where I talk with a little more details about the best/most interesting browsers from this list to. I asked on Matrix and was tolled anything topic related is allowed but I admit this is a bit of shameless self promotion so please just tell me if any of you amazing mods wants me to remove it!

https://odysee.com/@gamey:c/pinephone-browsers:e