Choosing a Browser for Video Chat Applications

Nearly all of my time on the computer is conducting online tutoring sessions using Chrome. Whenever I ask the tech support at the company about alternative browsers, they say, “We use Chrome.” Conversation done.

Before I utterly kicked the Windows habit, I used Chrome (in W7), and certainly noticed memory leak issues. Switching back to Ubuntu, those seem gone. But I am quite aware of the suspicions around Chrome. How do I narrow down alternatives? It seems that there must be serious codec and rendering issues that would influence a choice.

I also have Firefox installed. While it is good, there are things I cannot do in FF that are painless in Chrome; special popup functions do not work, for example.

Is there a way I, or anyone else, can figure out which browser alternatives would work? In particular, I have read that Brave and Vivaldi use the same rendering engines.

The platform is proprietary (called Vimbox), and resembles Flash in the way it works. It is stand-alone, and does not need anything upgraded or installed. Camera and mic access need to be enabled (naturally), but I doubt I can describe anything more technically than that.

Is this something that a user (myself or anyone I grant password access to, :wink:) can figure out? At what point can I risk it and try a class with a different browser?

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Basically, the closest thing you will ever get is Chromium, which is the open source part of Google Chrome. Every other alternative is by definition farther away from the base. The only true alternative I see is that someone builds a new engine that is not based on Chromium but it is supposed to support/mimic Chromium behaviour exactly and I doubt anyone would do that unnecessary extra work.

If you ask me, the true problem is:

What does Vimbox have that any other video call service does not?

Maybe this question is out of the question anyway, since I doubt you would change your money giver just because of a slight software issue.

I guess the only option left is what I mentioned in the first place.

P.S.: By Chromium I am including every browser that is based on Chromium and that is a ton.

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Easy. The lessons, the homework, the student progress info, the attachments (videos, charts, grammar pages, etc) and the ease of entry for students and teachers.

Your link indicates that Yandex is a Chromium browser!! Cool! Yandex is the email service that we all use. Maybe THAT is the way to go. I have gossip galore on them, too.

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Vivaldi has a Chrome base, but isn’t Chrome. I know that some Chrome extensions work on it as I use Facebook Purity and that gets directed to install on Chrome. Also Opera has the same base and I have found that useful for running flash (when it is needed).

Both of these get recommended as Chrome Alternatives which is why I started to use them.

One final thought is there any way that you can just do an experiment lesson to see if another browser works before changing?

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You may use Brave. It’s based on Chromium so the Chrome-specific webapp should work on it.

Have you tried Opera ? It is Chromium based and has a lot of features. Google Chrome is available on Ubuntu as well.

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I like Opera and Vivialdi for the reasons you mention.

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