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

[dukla2000]

...

• Firefox: As the default browser FF works really well except for some UI glitchesa 
  

...

Yeah - I have tried some others and keep reverting to Firefox. Dog slow to load as well but at least it mostly works.

[lordnahte2]

Two other browsers I can confirm work that aren't listed yet:

Konqueror works quite well already. Very useful for if you want to mirror a website for offline viewing.

You can get Tor Browser to work by using the unofficial Tor Browser Ports packages available on SourceForge. Keep in mind this isn't an official release by the Tor team, so treat it with caution. It is working very well for me though outside of the same slight UI scaling issues left in FireFox.

[NormandC]

• 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
  

Why did you add so much white space in your post?

Which Firefox did you use? On Mobian, Firefox ESR (78) is installed by default. Have you tried to enable hardware acceleration? I wonder if it makes a difference in performance.

I agree that GNOME Web (Epiphany) is quite pathetic, which is a pity because it allows to create web apps very quickly.

[pothos]

There is also the WebKit WPE port for embedded devices. It's quite optimized and much snappier than WebKitGtk. You can try the cog browser but it has no UI elements, therefore, I suggest you to use it through my control app: https://gitlab.gnome.org/kailueke/cogwebrun#cogwebrun


Of course it would be nicer to have the control elements in the same window but I didn't investigate how to patch cog.

[rorus]

I can confirm that Epiphany is crash-prone. Works well (and faster than Firefox)... until it encounters badly-coded advertising javascript and OOMs itself.

I have used w3m successfully. Plain text only, but touchscreen works for selecting images. w3m-img SHOULD display images, but I can't get it to do so in KingsCross terminal.

Installing Qutebrowser and Konqueror after reading this thread, thanks everyone!

[Gamey]

Two other browsers I can confirm work that aren't listed yet:

Konqueror works quite well already. Very useful for if you want to mirror a website for offline viewing.

You can get Tor Browser to work by using the unofficial Tor Browser Ports packages available on SourceForge. Keep in mind this isn't an official release by the Tor team, so treat it with caution. It is working very well for me though outside of the same slight UI scaling issues left in FireFox.

Sorry that it took so long and thanks for the contribution! I will check them out and add them to the list when I find time

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• 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
  

Why did you add so much white space in your post?

Which Firefox did you use? On Mobian, Firefox ESR (78) is installed by default. Have you tried to enable hardware acceleration? I wonder if it makes a difference in performance.

I agree that GNOME Web (Epiphany) is quite pathetic, which is a pity because it allows to create web apps very quickly.

The white space seems to be a bug when using the not at all mobile optimized forum on a Pinephone. I used the normal Firefox on a Arch SD card whichg is where I do most of my testing and used it on PostmarketOS which till yesaterday was my daily driver but I haven't tried manually enabling any hw acceleration yet. About the Webapps I recently started testing cog for them which is some kind of frame for Webkit with no UI. It sadly doesn't support any kind of ritght click many and copy paste via keybindings seems broken to but I will have to play around with that a bit more.

---

There is also the WebKit WPE port for embedded devices. It's quite optimized and much snappier than WebKitGtk. You can try the cog browser but it has no UI elements, therefore, I suggest you to use it through my control app: https://gitlab.gnome.org/kailueke/cogwebrun#cogwebrun


Of course it would be nicer to have the control elements in the same window but I didn't investigate how to patch cog.

I discovered cog myself a while ago but the missing right click menu and as far as I can tell broken copy paste annoyed me. That app sounds awesome I will have to try it out soon thanks!

---

I can confirm that Epiphany is crash-prone. Works well (and faster than Firefox)... until it encounters badly-coded advertising javascript and OOMs itself.

I have used w3m successfully. Plain text only, but touchscreen works for selecting images. w3m-img SHOULD display images, but I can't get it to do so in KingsCross terminal.

Installing Qutebrowser and Konqueror after reading this thread, thanks everyone!

In my experience Epiphany works without JS but any kind of JS slows it down to a almost unusable state and even without JS none ESR Firefox seems faster to me personally. I wasn't aware of w3m at all yet but i will check it out for sure and probably add it to the list thanks! Also since you use KingsCeoss I assume you are on Mobian and probably use Firefox ESR so maybe try the normal one it's worth it

[MirceaKitsune]

As long as Firefox and Chromium (not Chrome) are there, I am a happy user.

[ypd]

Seeing this thread some weeks ago spurred me to spruce up my own Dillo that I’d been playing around with a bit.

It’s old-school, yes, doesn’t do javascript, etc., but it suits me because I’m read-mostly when it comes to the internet.

[ryo]

I'm still waiting for Brave to be ported to ARM though.
Probably still a pipe dream for now.