This post is somewhat inspired by a similar write-up done by Luke Smith which I absolutely recommend reading. I do agree with his writing for the most part, but I believe that having my own spin at it would be better. Most of my write-up will cover the same points as his, but I do still recommend reading his take on it since it's much more nuanced and better worded.
I'll now list down all the features that a browser must have in order to be qualified as a good browser. Browsers that have most of the features is what I'd qualify as "passable" while if they have all of the listed features then they'd be qualified as a good browser to which spoiler: there is none.
And with that I've already killed off 95% of all browser that is in the market. While I'm not the biggest fan of Firefox, I do think that having the market be overly-saturated with Chromium monopoly isn't really a good thing, especially since Chromium isn't really that amazing nor good enough to warrant having such monopoly (more on that later). Worth noting that I'm not saying that a browser have to be based off Firefox, but moreso that it shouldn't be based off Chromium. I do think that for the most part, developers still need to use Chrome(ium) since unfortunately it's what the majority of users are using, but I'm not a developer, so aside from 1-2 sites being broken, it isn't really that much of a big deal to me.
Not much to be said about this, kinda crazy to use a proprietary software when the FOSS version of them tend to be on-par if not better in almost every single circumstances.
Qutebrowser is cool & I had been maining it for quite a while, but the lack of extension support is driving me crazy and was hugely one of my main gripe with it (other being the fact that it's written in Python). Having no Extension support is like being in a bedroom with no bed, still technically sleepable, but is less than ideal. I absolutely NEED my extensions and not having them is such a huge blow to an otherwise cool browser.
I hate telemetry, simple as that. I DO NOT want to make unsolicited connections to your servers, I DO NOT want analytics, and I DO NOT want to send you crash reports. If I frequently encounter issues, I'll compile a report myself.
Hello, Brave! I do not want your crypto garbage at all. Sure, I could make the interface looks normal & pretty by disabling it, but bloat is bloat. I don't need it, so I'm adamant about not wanting it. While this section is mostly about Brave and their KYC crypto, I also want to highlight browsers that include other useless features like AI. This mostly goes for features that are unnecessary for browsing by the way. Settings such as vertical or horizontal tabs can stay, even if I logically would only use one of them (horizontal), as I want my browser to act as a browser, not an OS.
I don't want cookies nor do I want history, so why isn't there an option to have my data cleared after closing the browser? Even better, why can't the browser automatically launch in incognito mode? Firefox has this feature, so why can't your run-of-the-mill Chromium browser also have it? All of this, and I still need to launch a non-incognito tab just to tinker with the settings and install extensions, great.
Now this is the fun part as I can finally take a jab at Firefox. While I do praise Firefox for the most part, the fact that it's consuming 2GB worth of memory at the same time is hard to overlook. Love you Firefox, but being slow and hogging system resources are still one of your flaws even after years being in the market (alongside ignoring years-old bug reports, lol).
Sorry GNU IceCat and most terminal browsers. You guys are cool and serve a purpose, just not for my day-to-day browsing.
With all of that, I can conclude that there is STILL no good browser in 2025. The browser that I can say is the closest to being "viable" is Librewolf, primarily due to its stripped bloat. However, it still falls a bit short since it’s essentially a hardened Firefox with a community that's a bit all over the place when trying to determine what is and isn't bloat.