Windows alternatives...

Alternative browsers

Sometimes it feels like there’s only room for four choices when it comes to web browsers on Windows: Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Internet Explorer. You’ll find some people running Opera, too, but for the most part it’s all about the big four.

Despite the seemingly small world of web browsers, there’s an entire alternative universe out there. All of them are fighting for your attention with unique features and specializations around new interface concepts, privacy, music, social media, and more.

If you’re looking to shake up your web-surfing experience, consider these 10 great browsers not named Firefox, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Opera Neon

Underpinnings: Blink rendering engine

Focus: Re-imagining the browser

Opera Neon debuted in early 2017 as an experiment in interface design and new browser features. Opera describes it as a proving ground “similar to the way concept cars predict the future of automobiles.” In fact, Opera released a new version of its mainstream browser in May that included some inspiration from Neon.

When you first open up Neon it’s clear this browser is not your typical tabs-at-the-top affair. In fact, you don’t even open new tabs in Neon the way you do in other browsers. To open a website you just start typing the URL or click on one of the “link bubbles.”

Opera Neon, just like the official Opera, uses Chrome’s Blink rendering engine.

Vivaldi

Underpinnings: Chromium

Focus: Power users

Vivaldi is a Chromium-based browser that targets hardcore power users. From the moment you install it, the browser helps you customize its look to suit your needs including color choices, tab position, and start page image. It’s a very simple browser at the moment that takes cues from current and former Opera features (Opera’s former CEO is leading the Vivaldi effort).

Vivaldi has a speed-dial feature for quick access to favorite sites, a built-in note-taking app, and a side panel for viewing a secondary webpage. Vivaldi also has some features that any power user will appreciate, such as mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts, saved tab sessions, tab stacks, user interface scaling, and adaptive interface colors.

There were early dreams of a built-in mail client for Vivaldi, like several browsers of old, including Opera. So far, however, Vivaldi has only managed to provide its own brand of webmail.

As Vivaldi is built on Chromium, it is compatible with extensions from the Chrome Web Store.

Maxthon

Underpinnings: Trident and WebKit

Focus: Multi-device browsing and social

The biggest feature for Maxthon is its cloud-based account, called Passport, which syncs browsing data across your devices. That’s a common feature among the major players, but not as common in the world of alternative browsers. Passport also has a feature called Cloud Push that lets you share content with your friends via email or text message.

Maxthon comes with a built-in RSS reader, notepad, password manager, a virtual email mailbox service called UUMail, and AdBlock Plus. There’s also a “reader mode” to read articles more easily without all the distractions of a typical website.

Maxthon isn’t a single-engine browser, instead relying on both Trident (Internet Explorer) and WebKit (Safari). Maxthon uses WebKit by default, but will switch to Trident on the fly for older webpages that are friendlier towards Internet Explorer.

Torch

Underpinnings: Chromium

Focus: Media

Torch is a browser for media junkies with features for music and games. There’s a built-in YouTube-based streaming service called Torch Music. Torch Games gives you one-click access to a selection of web-based games. Torch also has some handy drag-and-drop sharing features: Drag web content to the left and you get a sidebar for sharing content on social networks, or drag content to the right to search for it.

Torch is also a media-pirate’s dream, with a built-in tool for downloading audio and video from sites like YouTube and Vimeo, as well as a built-in torrent client for...well, you know.

Epic Privacy Browser

Underpinnings: Chromium

Focus: Privacy

If you like Chrome but don’t like forking over all your info to Google and other advertisers, then Epic Privacy Browser may be for you.

The browser doesn’t deviate far from its Chrome-based roots, but it comes with a bunch of privacy-enhancing features like a built-in proxy, always-on private browsing, and built-in blockers for third-party cookies and trackers. It also has a built-in video downloading tool that shows up on video sites such as YouTube.

Epic ditches Google account integration, so don’t use this browser if you want to sync bookmarks and open browser tabs with Google’s servers.

Pale Moon

Underpinnings: Goanna (Gecko Fork)

Focus: Legacy Firefox

Do you miss the old Firefox? Not the old, old Firefox, but the interface before the current one, with the menu button in the upper-left corner? If so, Pale Moon is worth looking at.

Pale Moon was “forked” from the core Mozilla project with an initial release in 2009. Forked means they took the Firefox open source code and started iterating it separately from Mozilla.

The result is a browser that will be familiar to longtime Firefox users, though the two browsers are different now, especially under the hood. Pale Moon, for example, continues to support old-school add-ons as well as NPAPI plugins—that last bit is not necessarily a good thing.

Comodo Ice Dragon

Underpinnings: Gecko

Focus: Security

From security firm Comodo, IceDragon is another browser promising enhanced security. IceDragon’s security props include webpage scanning for malware, the use of Comodo’s Secure DNS service by default, and active blocking of known phishing and spyware sites.

As this is based on Firefox, IceDragon also comes with the Pocket add-on pre-installed. IceDragon lets you drag content from a webpage to the right to share it on social networks, and to the left to use that content as the basis of a web search.

It has also added a tablet mode that lets you switch to larger interface elements when surfing the web on a Windows touchscreen device.

Ghost Browser

Underpinnings: Chromium

Focus: Productivity

Ghost Browser is an interesting idea. It’s built with productivity in mind and let’s you create separate browser sessions inside the same window. That way you can have a set of tabs for your work accounts, and another for your personal ones. Each session has separate “cookie jars” so that you can remain logged in to multiple social media or email accounts at the same time in separate tabs. Each new session tab is automatically assigned a different color.

You can even go one level deeper and organize sites by “projects” that stash your tabs for you. That way you can do a social media project with all your various accounts open in different tabs, and then swap into your party-planning project with tabs open to email, list-making tools, calendars, and so on.

Ghost Browser is built on the freemium model. That is, it’s free to use, but features are limited. If you want a more robust browser you have to pay $10 to $15 a month.

The free version is still pretty good. You’re limited to three projects and three separate tab sessions per project. You can also only open one project at a time. Free users don’t get an incognito mode or separate user profiles either.

As Ghost Browser is built on Chromium it works with the Chrome Web Store.

Midori

Underpinnings: WebKit

Focus: Lightweight

Midori is a longstanding choice for underpowered Linux systems, but there’s also a Windows version for anyone who needs a lightweight browser.

Midori is pretty simple, lacking any major features and sporting an almost XP-like interface. On the upside, it’s responsive and very simple to use. There’s also a portable version if you want to run it from a USB stick.

Avant Browser

Underpinnings: Gecko, WebKit, Trident

Focus: Browser fanatics

Avant Browser features a “tri-core rendering engine.” Instead of choosing one popular browser engine it uses those of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Avant Browser has several interesting features including a “video sniffer” that helps you download videos from websites such as YouTube. An “always on top” feature makes sure that your tabs never get buried behind other desktop applications like Outlook, Microsoft Word, and Photoshop.

Avant’s interface is decidedly “Windows XP,” but if you can get past that, there all kinds of power-user features to satisfy most browser lovers.

That’s our look at the latest 10 alternative browsers that have caught our attention, but there are others just a quick Google search away.

Alternative browsers

Paint.NET - Free Software for Digital Photo Editing

For photo editing, free Windows tool Paint.net is an excellent alternative to Photoshop.

Paint.net is a Windows-based alternative to the Paint editor that Microsoft shipped with versions of Windows. Don't let that put you off, though, as it's a surprisingly capable and useful tool, available completely free of charge. The software started out life as a Microsoft-sponsored undergraduate project, and has become an open source project maintained by some of the alumni.

The focus is on ease of use, and there's a definite tendancy towards photo editing rather than artistic creation. That said, there are a range of special effects available, allowing you to easily create fake perspective, blend and push pixels around the canvas, tile and repeat selections, and so on.

A good range of selection tools, support for layers, and adjustments such as curves and brightness/contrast mean that Paint.net is a great alternative to Photoshop for photo editing, especially if you can do without some of the more recent additions to Photoshop's toolset.

Paint.NET - Free Software for Digital Photo Editing

GoPro Studio instead of Windows Movie Maker

Import and enjoy your GoPro footage and create beautiful videos with just a few clicks.

GoPro, the Q-Tips of action cameras, recognized a problem. People are shooting tons of footage with their cameras, but are then letting it languish away on a dusty old hard drive, unseen and unedited. The California company is hoping to help correct that with new mobile apps and desktop editing software.

We recently got a preview of the new software while at the GoPro Mountain Games in Vail, CO. Here's a rundown of the new goodinesses. UPDATE:Studio 2.0 is now available. We've updated this article (originally published June 12th), with a bit of new info about the final version.

GoPro Studio 2.0

GoPro's video editing suite for desktops has been around for a while, but we suspect it doesn't get a ton of use. It is, essentially, a pared-down editing program, designed to make putting together your personal highlight reel easier. It provides a simple way to import footage, speed it up or slow it down, crop, and make image adjustments (like removing the fisheye lens distortion, or adjusting color or contrast). It's also handy for making a timelapse out of a bunch of stills, and perhaps best of all, it's much easier to work with footage shot at different resolutions/frame rates compared to even pro-level editing suites (no conversions required). The new feature, which actually might tempt people to use Studio 2.0 for action cam videos, is templates.

So, you know how GoPro has these amazing commercials and videos they put out? Some things are slowed down, some are sped up, and all the cuts are timed perfectly to the music. Most of us could never dream of cutting together a video that looks that good, because A) most of us aren't professional video editors, and B) even if we had the skillz, most of us don't have the time. Templates in Studio 2.0 basically takes the framework from one of those pro edits—music and all—and allows us to just drop in our own footage. It's a really good idea.

The process of making a video with a template goes like this:

Go through your clips, one by one. When you see a highlight that you want to include, you set an in point and an out point around it, then hit Convert Clip, and it will be added to a queue. This will convert that highlight into CineForm 444, a proprietary format designed to make video editing smoother (it's similar to Apple's ProRes in FinalCut). You can pull multiple highlights from the same clip, one at a time. Once you've gone through all the footage and pulled out your best bits, you convert the whole queue at once. This process is the same as it's always been. It takes some time to go through your footage—there's still no getting around that.

Here's where the fun starts. Hit Templates, and up pops a list of 4 preloaded templates, or you can choose to download nine other options. They are templates for some of GoPro's more popular videos, like Alana Blanchard surfing, or the Baby cam Superbowl commercial. Each one tells you how long the finished video will be and how many separate cuts go into it (see image above). Choose the one that best matches the amount of footage you have and length you want to end up with. For example if you've just got a few highlights from a bike ride, you can probably just pop them into the 30-second 4-cut template. If it's a whole weekend's adventure, maybe you want to go for the a two-minute 40-cut template.

Once you've picked the template you want, it opens up a timeline that looks like any other video editor, except the timeline is pre-populated with GoPro's clips from the original video. Each of those clips has a bullseye on it, which means you can drag one of your highlights onto that clip, which replaces it. The timing of the cuts and the motion properties (such as slo-mo) from the original sequence are preserved, but now it's your footage instead of theirs. Once it's in there, you can drag the start point around within the clip, so you make sure the best part is included. It's all extremely intuitive.

Once all of GoPro's clips are replaced with yours, you click Export. There are a bunch of built-in templates for export, too, which are made easy for the lay-person to understand. “Best for YouTube,” “Best for Vimeo,” “1080p,” stuff like that. There's “Custom,” too, if you actually know what you're doing. Once it exports, you're ready to upload it to wherever you want.

UPDATE: We got an early hands-on with the final Studio 2.0 software (to be released tomorrow), so I used that as an opportunity to cut together some footage I had from my buddy John's bachelor weekend raft trip. It took about an hour to log the clips, and maybe another hour to cut it together, if that. Given the small amount of time it took, I'm pretty pleased with the results:

There are a few caveats with the templates. You're stuck with the music in the original commercial. It's not that the music is bad, it's just that with thirteen templates at launch, we're going to start seeing a lot of action cam videos set to the same music. You also have GoPro branding at the start and end of the video (not replaceable), which makes your masterpiece feel a bit like a GoPro commercial. Naturally, GoPro likes it like this. The more people they have making commercials for them (for free) the better. Sure, you could take the export, put it into some other editing software and cut that out, but most people probably won't bother. UPDATE: The GoPro branding can now be replaced.

Of course, if you have video editing skills and don't mind investing the time, keep doing it yourself. The templates are really aimed at beginners and people who might shoot some awesome stuff, but then don't know how to cut it into something compelling. The idea is to enable more people to upload and share polished-looking videos, and if it works, then that's a cool thing. Personally, I have a hard drive full of action camera footage, but I've never felt like devoting the time or energy to making something really good out of it. But hell, I'd take an hour or two to make something if it's that easy. It's certainly better than it just sitting there doing nothing.

It should be noted that it's definitely not a perfect solution. It's gotten a lot better since our original hands-on, but there's still some pretty unintuitive behavior. For example, you can't drag a clip from one place on the timeline to another. Or if your clip isn't long enough to fit in a section, rather than slow it down and thus stretching it to fit (which is perhaps what you intended) it will simply block you from dropping it. So you have to go back to step one, re-convert a longer version of the clip, drag it back in, and thenslow it down. The title editor isn't particularly user-friendly, either.

These are mostly small gripes, though, and all of them could be improved with quick updates in the future. In the meantime, make sure you check these tips from professions for getting the best action camera footage.

GoPro - Quik | Desktop

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And now we have G Suite

Dopamine for Windows expertly handles your local music library

It’s crazy to think that I’ve been using Winamp as my go-to desktop music player for nearly two decades now. The app has always been the best looking tool for the job, and made light work of managing my collection as it grew from a handful of MP3 snippets to a 350GB library of locally stored tunes.

I stuck with Winamp even after I upgraded to Windows 10, but it doesn’t play nice with my 4K display. That’s why I’ve been looking for a worthy replacement, and Dopamine seems to check all the boxes on my list.

The free music player has a beautiful interface that blends in nicely with Windows and lets you customize its accent color and overall theme with light and dark options. It also works great in a small window size that highlights only the cover art, and displays notifications with playback controls every time a new song starts up.

Dopamine for Windows expertly handles your local music library

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The 4 Best Alternatives to uTorrent on Windows

Remember when uTorrent was great? The upstart BitTorrent client was super-lightweight and trounced other popular BitTorrent clients. But that was long ago, before BitTorrent, Inc. bought uTorrent and crammed it full of junkware and scammy advertisements.

Screw that. Whether you need to download a Linux ISO or do whatever else you do with BitTorrent, you don’t have to put up with what uTorrent’s become. Use another BitTorrent client instead.

Note: this article was originally written a while ago, but due to uTorrent bundling some really shady stuff with their upgrades, we’ve republished this article.

The 4 Best Alternatives to uTorrent on Windows:

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