if you really want to stick it to Google you have to go for Firefox or something derived from it. Chromium gives Google a ton of leverage to push features to all of their downstreams. not sure what engine these are using, but i also prefer to use Firefox because it’s open source. if these were open source you could easily see which engine they’re using.

I use LibreWolf and SearXNG as a metasearch engine. I like both. They get the job done. I wouldn't use Vivaldi, since it's not Free Software. But that's personal preference.

When I have a reason to use a Chromium-based browser, it's usually Ungoogled Chromium. Otherwise, I use Firefox, and I've been playing with Waterfox in case Firefox ever asks me to agree to the terms of service that were discussed a little while back.

I actually switched from Vivaldi to Zen (now on Librewolf due to inconsistent updates on Void) after UB0 was nerfed on Chrome.

Highly recommend either of these as an alternative, but having CSS/JSON knowledge is necessary if you want the exact experience you can get on Vivaldi.

Brave is a crypto scam, skip it

I've been using Vivaldi as my primary browser for years. My favorite feature of Vivaldi is its powerful sidebar. It's a great browser, but because it's based on chrome, ublock origin will eventually stop working on it. When that time comes, I'll be switching to a Firefox based browser. I've been keeping my eye on floorp, but it's not quite where I would like it to be yet.

It's not, but it does have a cryptocurrency you can opt-in to if you want. I don't recommend that, but I think Brave is fine as Chromium browsers go.

Isn't brave's whole thing just replacing ads with their own ads? I've never understood why people bought into it so hard.

I've used Vivaldi for a long time before switching to Floorp (based on Firefox) and recently back to Vivaldi.

Pros:
Vivaldi is fast with lots of features.
I like how it works much more than other browsers (e. g. Sidebar tabs, pinned tabs can't be closed)

Cons:
Still built on chromium.
They have ways to customize the address bar autocomplete, but screwed up the implementation so every option doesn't work the way I want it to.

I've been using Vivaldi as my logged in browser for years. I like the double tab bar groups, session management, email client, sidebar and tab bar on mobile. It is strange to me that tab bar isn't a thing on mobile on other browsers despite phones having way more vertical space than computers. Although for internet searches I use a seperate lighter weight browser that clears its data on close.

Ecosia also been using for years. For a while it was geniunely better than the other search engines I had tried but nowadays it's worse since it started to return google translate webpage translation links based on search region instead of the webpages themselves. Also not sure what to think about the counter they readded after removing it to reduce the emphasis on quantity over quality like a year ago.

I don't use duckduckgo as its name and the way privacy communities used to obsess about it made me distrust it for some reason