The Dissenter Browser, Mac Edition

So Gab was generous enough to release a beta version of Dissenter for Mac. I was actually out shopping when I saw the link, and had to wait a couple of hours to download and install it.

Anyway, I am very pleased with the Mac version.

Look and Feel

Right away I saw that it supported macOS Mojave’s dark mode quite well. I already had Dark Mode activated, so I went into System Preferences to change it from dark to light. It transitioned well, as I expected.

I noticed that the new tab screen was the same as the Windows version, with the lovely gradient that changes each time you open a new tab. Silly me hadn’t thought to click on the Menu option on the new tab screen when I looked at the Windows version…I clicked on it here and discovered a lot of different configuration options, including the option to set a background image for the new tab screen.

I also just noticed the Notifications feature on the new tab screen. I clicked on it and you can see the replies, upvotes and downvotes people give your comments on Dissenter (excuse the super-foul language).

There are still some orange elements left over from Brave, but it isn’t too distracting. Also, the yellow favicon issue isn’t present in this version of Dissenter, which is good. The app icon also looks very nice – no jagged edges.

Since this is a fork of Brave, it’s already going to look fairly good, with minimal issues.

Performance

The browser installed without any problems, and it’s really snappy and fast. I was able to import my cookies, bookmarks and history from Firefox with no problems. I wanted to import everything from Brave, and I think it might have shown up as Chromium but I wasn’t sure, since at one point I actually had a version of Chromium installed on my Mac, but, as it turns out, I had removed it. No matter – it imported all my info from Firefox fairly quickly and it looked good.

As I did with the Windows installation, I went ahead and installed some of my favorite extensions from the Chrome Web Store, and I did get a confirmation prompt for one of them, but was able to install them without any issues.

As with anything that has DRM, when I went to the Spotify web player I had to install Widevine. I also had to lower the shields in order to play anything through Spotify, but once I did that, it was smooth sailing from there. So, as with the Windows version, if you want to watch anything on a streaming service like Netflix or listen to music from Spotify or something else, you’ll probably need to install Widevine.

Features

The promised features of Bitcoin are not present, which is fine, since Gab has already informed us to not expect it for this particular version. The Dissenter feature works well and just like the Windows version. As I said yesterday, I hope they include some sort of pane for Dissenter at the bottom or on the side of the screen, so that the Dissenter comments for every given page are present on the screen.

Oh, and I also love how the default search engine is DuckDuckGo. Whatever you feel about DuckDuckGo, at least it isn’t Google. Google is an option, however, if you want to set that as your default search engine. StartPage, Bing and Qwant are the other choices.

Conclusion

So I am very happy to have this on my Mac, and I’ll probably install it on my other devices and mess with them all to see how things go. Forking it from Brave was a good idea, as that browser already had a lot of good features and stuff to build upon. The creators of Brave might not like it, but that’s too bad. This is the nature of open source, and why it’s so good.