Best web browser for Windows 11?

Personally, I love the Firefox web browser. I also have Firefox on my iPhone, and use that in place of Apple's handoff between Safari on iOS and Safari on macOS. However, you could do the same with Microsoft Edge. There are 2 pros and 1 con to consider if you decide to go with Edge.
Pros:
1. Edge uses Microsoft neural voices to read webpages, which sound absolutely amazing. Even more so if you use them to read a PDF file. Like a book PDF for example.
2. There is a YouTube app you can install, based off of the edge browser, that I use all the time on my PC laptop, and it seems to make YouTube ad free.

Cons:
1. The AppleVis site will not properly refresh after you have posted, or visited a post, or reply to a post, and are trying to return to the main page. You have to manually refresh the page in order for it to refresh properly.

HTH.

Hi Brian,

When you have a moment, please could you send us a note with details of the issues you experience with the AppleVis site on Edge?

Thanks,

Michael

Hi Lee,
I often use Brave on Windows 11 because it blocks adverts. I especially like the fact it blocks YouTube ads. I use Chrome too because if there are unlabelled images, sometimes Chrome labels them. And I use Firefox for reading PDF documents. I've never really liked Edge personally.

Why do you prefer Firefox while reading PDF documents on Windows 11?

I use chrome with nvda and the rare moments I use jaws.

Sure thing.

Hi,
I've found when using NVDA, if you try to read a PDF document longer than a page or two, Google Chrome and Brave will continually jump to the area where you have to choose what page you want, and you can't actually read the document because NVDA keeps jumping around. whereas when you open a document in Firefox, you can just navigate through it no problems. I've never tried reading PDFs with Edge.

I use Brave Browser on both my Mac and my Windows laptop.

I actually like Edge a lot. It does everything I need it to do. I haven't used Chrome for quite some time. Edge for pdf files works pretty well. I have a study guide for a Bible study I'm doing with my church, and so when I need to select certain parts of it to then put that in a text document, to answer the questions, I find it easier to open up my VM and do it in Edge rather than in Preview on the mac, due to how hard it is to select text in a pdf on the mac.

I sometimes wish I could find a more simplistic, yet secure web browser, but since one probably doesn't exist, I am content using Edge. I don't know anything about the brave browser mentioned here. Is there somewhere on Applevis to read up on it and what makes it different from Edge, Chrome or Safari?

Brave is an open source, Chromium-based browser that places particular emphasis on user privacy, in contrast to other leading browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, which include many features that enable robust data collection and ad targeting. As Brave is based on the same foundation as Chrome and Edge, it behaves similarly to those browsers, however, as it includes a number of features besides simple web browsing, some users may find it more cumbersome than the competition. You can learn more and download the browser if you wish on Brave's website.

I mainly use Firefox, with some add-ons to block ads and so on, and I find it very accessible. I also use Brave as a fallback if a site works better in a Chromium-based browser (which happens now and then but really not that often).

I like Edge a lot. It's one of the faster options in my experience and has useful features like the sleeping tabs and workspaces. I'd like to be able to use and recommend Firefox but it's slow in my experience once I open more than a couple tabs or try to play a game.

Thanks for the explanation...
So I recently installed Opera out of curiosity and found it fairly convenient. It's also good that it has its own built-in VPN in addition to ad-blocking. As far as I know, it also compresses data beside ad-blocking to further speed up data transfer. What I'm looking for though, is a browser that has its own integrated download manager that lets you pause and resume downloads even after a shutdown or power outage, or losing connection. This download manager should also support acceleration by splitting downloads into multiple parts and reusing existing connections, or letting you adjust how much bandwidth you wish to allocate to the device. I know these sound so complicated to be found in a web browser and most likely requires you to install separate software. By the way, have anyone used Tor? Does it require any cyber expertise? How accessible is it? Can you just use it as your standard browser and take advantage of the security benefits even if you're not into that kind of stuff like the dark web? Does the DuckDuckGo browser also let you surf the dark web?

In my experience, you don't need any unique expertise to use Tor. However, as your traffic is routed through several nodes across the network before reaching its destination, you're likely to experience slower speeds when compared to conventional browsers. Also, as your IP address will be spoofed to the websites you visit, they may not always behave as expected.

Yeah, so I will probably have to use another browser as the default one anyway.

Answer: Try opening a PDF with tables. In all other browsers accept Firefox, tables in PDF files are inaccessible. And if not Firefox, tables work only in Adobe Acropad reader.
Probably there's some difference in how these browsers are passing PDF files. Given that recently Google announced some enhancements with reading PDF files with their Chromevox screenreader on ChromeOS, I was hoping that it would fix this issue as well. Sadly, doesn't seem like that.

I keep Google chrome as my primary, Firefox as secondary, and Edge when I want to read something in a really nice voice.
I keep Brave for those times when I am not sure about the website I am visiting is safe or not, or, don't want them to track me. Kind of incognito, but the entire browser. Don't need add blocking as I use U-Block origin on Chrome for that, and I have Youtube premium purchased.
Also, quick tip, I keep my browser as well as most frequently used applications pinned to my task-bar, so that windows+the corisponding number to that icon opens that application quickly. Desktop icons are a 2 step process, this is just 1-step.
I know we can creat alt+ctrl+some randum letter shortcuts, but I find those very sluggish and slow to operate. That affects NVDA's launch shortcut, ctrl+alt+n as well.

I agree with Tyler, you don't need any special expertise to use Tor. It is really only a slightly modified Firefox, with some extra things added and a lot of things removed, so the accessibility is generally on par with standard Firefox. It is also based on a older version of Firefox, this is because they must double- and triple-check all changes made to Firefox to find privacy loopholes before release, so, for privacy Tor is good, but not always for security. You can theoretically use that as your only browser but it will probably be more cumbersome than e.g. using Brave or Firefox with the right settings, if you are not interested in the .onion sites that are only available on the Tor network of course. As for the DuckDuckGo browser, I don't know much about it but I'm fairly certain that it won't be able to surf to .onion sites, if that is what you mean with "the dark web".

Hi,
I just did a complete reinstall of Windows 11 the other day and I’m now happily using Brave on all of my devices. I can’t recommend it enough. Just about every website I visit works well.

Call me a simpleton, but I like Firefox because it has a sensible menu and not one of these stupid things hidden behind a hamburger like many Windows apps. Maybe I'm just too used to the Mac. But it seems to do a good job anyway.

For YouTube, there's an app called, I think, Accessible YouTube Downloader Pro. It's free and open source and provides easy, ad-free access to YouTube. Seems a much better bet than trying to deal with the website.

I use Google Chrome with NVDA and find the experience the greatest compare to other web browsers. I personally don’t like edg especially after the stuff they tried to shove down my throat when I tried to install chrome.

Firefox with a few add-ons seems to be the most useful. I found chrome ate a lot of resources and Firefox is very customizable, and as far as I know, the only browser that lets you just have a blank page to start with so you don't have all these stupid news feeds and things. Also it has the best reader mode and the best sync especially if all your other devices are either Windows or Android.

cheat code for Firefox.
True story. 😇

I;'m not sure if download managers are even a thing any more, they were pretty common around 20 years ago when dial up made them a necessity for downloading anything more than a few dozen kilobytes.

I use chrome with firefox as backup, but foxIt for PDFs. I found acrobat reader incredibly slow and prone to hanging or outright freezing.

do not most web browsers have some semblance of a built-in download manager these days? I know you can pause downloads and resume them, I am not sure if that carries over once you reboot your machine though.

I see a lot of people recommending it and there's a lot I like. I've just had issues with slowness in the past. For those that use it, do you have any trouble when opening a lot of (more than 4 or 5) tabs or playing web games?

I didn't know firefox handeling of pdf, it's why I was favoring my mac for that, will give it another try on windows.
PS: I have some experience with chromeos flex and it basically has the same table problem with chromevox than chrome on windows or even the mac, last time I tried 3-4 months ago.