boojum
Ignoble Miscreant
I have been using Brave for years. It's a good browser. And DuckDuckGo for a search engine. YMMV
Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
This is a surprisingly complex question.
First thing you have to understand is that most browsers are really just shells overlaid on rendering engines, meaning a lot of them are fairly interchangeable. There are, for all intents and purposes, only three still in use today - Gecko (Firefox and its clones, i.e. Waterfox), Webkit (Safari, any iOS versions of other browsers), and Chromium (everything else).
Which you prefer depends a lot on who you trust most (or, alternatively, who you trust the least). Safari obviously has a lot of benefits if you're purely using iOS and OSX devices, and Apple generally have a good track record on privacy, data security, etc.
Firefox has long been the most widely-used cross-platform browser by folks in the know. Mozilla have historically been "the good guys" compared to Google, but in recent years there's been some very dodgy decisions coming out of Mozilla. Still, I personally use Firefox as my secondary browser for any time I have to use a Google platform (i.e. Google Docs, Youtube, etc) as they're now the only browser with fully-functional ad blocking on Google's platforms.
Chromium is a bit of an odd one. It has the widest install base across all the different things built on it (Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Edge, etc.), and so most websites should work with any Chromium-based browser (but as we see here, that isn't exactly the case). It's also theoretically open-source (which is one of the reasons so many people bought into it), but it's also owned and controlled by Google. What that means is that if Google decides something has to go into Chromium's code base, those changes are pushed to all the other things built on it - for instance, Google changed Chromium to make sure that third-party ad blockers couldn't interfere with their ad revenue, and all other browsers just had to follow along. I used to use both Opera and Vivaldi, but I've now dropped both of them because of this. It made a lot of the internet a lot worse almost overnight.
As I mentioned elsewhere, my main browser is now Min, a weird open source work-in-progress built on Electron (which, in turn, uses Chromium as its rendering engine), but takes up less screen space than any other Chromium browser, is incredibly stripped-back, and does a much better job of blocking ads and trackers than Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and so on. I wouldn't recommend it as anyone's "daily driver" unless they're willing to tolerate a bit of jank while things are worked on. Firefox (or one of the non-Mozilla-run forks) is a much better alternative for most people. I've tried basically every browser I can get my hands on (I usually have at least five installed on my computer at any given time, including some really obscure stuff), and Firefox is still the most user-friendly and safe bet.
Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
Oh, on a related note, for anyone who wonders why I'm so concerned about Google having access to your data and being able to push ads to you:
A friend of mine spent a lot of time during the Covid lockdowns playing with Raspberry Pis, Linux, Android, and so on. Lots of digging and tinkering. At one point he changed his daily phone from regular Android to a "degoogled" Android distro that specifically kills every single connection between your device and Google. His monthly data use halved with no change in usage. That's how much data Google is constantly sucking up.
Also, if you leave a Google Doc open in Firefox with a good ad blocker that shows a count of blocked elements/trackers, you can sit and watch the count go up in real time. It's horrendous. I've left a spreadsheet open until that count reached the thousands before. Even if you don't care about data privacy, that is a lot of energy and bandwidth that doesn't need to be wasted like this.
A friend of mine spent a lot of time during the Covid lockdowns playing with Raspberry Pis, Linux, Android, and so on. Lots of digging and tinkering. At one point he changed his daily phone from regular Android to a "degoogled" Android distro that specifically kills every single connection between your device and Google. His monthly data use halved with no change in usage. That's how much data Google is constantly sucking up.
Also, if you leave a Google Doc open in Firefox with a good ad blocker that shows a count of blocked elements/trackers, you can sit and watch the count go up in real time. It's horrendous. I've left a spreadsheet open until that count reached the thousands before. Even if you don't care about data privacy, that is a lot of energy and bandwidth that doesn't need to be wasted like this.
Rob-F
Likes Leicas
Somehow it seems to me that if I join a new web browser via, say, Google or Safari, I am still connected through Google or Safari. Is that not the case? I mean, I would find the new one by searching via Google--out of habit.