Not like Mozilla (Firefox)'s image isn’t tainted at all. Personally, I’ve found no difference between Firefox, Chrome and Edge’s Yomichan; as well as Tampermonkey for UserScripts.
Chrome or its variants might be a nice choice, as Chrome’s web engine is taking over the world, so unexpected things are less likely to occur. (There are Firefox’s variants too, but I don’t know much about them.)
For Edge and practically everything Microsoft’s, I dislike them; but they are playing with limitatations of our choices, and I have to continue using theirs, despite some of the things unsatisfactory (and the suggestions and advertisements).
Yeah, I mean, they’re all still companies, and they’ve done their share of scummy stuff. I just personally would like to not increase Google’s monopoly over the internet. Firefox is a little bit in jeopardy right now, but that’s a reason to support them, not abandon them, in my opinion.
As far as Yomichan and Tampermonkey and all of that goes, yeah, you shouldn’t experience much of a difference in performance between the different browsers. I’m not sure about Chrome’s offerings as far as other extensions go, but I have some adblockers and tracker blockers and other stuff installed on Firefox, plus XKit for tumblr. I think both browsers give more options for customization than Safari.
Modern versions of Edge are Chromium based. Microsoft took the open-source chromium code and remade Edge using that, stripping out Google’s “phoning home” elements (and likely adding in some of their own), but the result is that Edge has compatibility with Chrome based plugins and parses a little better on performance and resources.
What limitations or ads are you experiencing? I have ad blocking plugins and I disabled Bing and the Bing Bar as the search provider. I typically have a modest number of tabs open, and I don’t experience much unwanted behavior (in this window):
About Edge, that would be start page and suggestion to change back to Bing. There might be extensions to help with this, but I find some get blocked or disabled by default by Edge itself.
I don’t open so many tabs, so I generally don’t find performance an issue; and I care most about UX of the interface; and I feel that Edge does better than Chrome or Brave. Firefox isn’t so bad, although looking a little old-fashioned.
To use Chrome directly, it would also sign in to Google across all services.
Firefox also has one another pro – containers; but extensions can be lacking, or just I can’t use what I really want. At least Language Reactor isn’t on Firefox. (Although I probably now can do fine without it, only that finding subtitle files is harder.)
You can add a word in seconds using Yomichan and you can simply disable words you don’t want to study for whatever reason.
That being said, it’s never made sense to me to base what words you learn and when entirely around where you are with your kanji. Learning a language would never happen like that in the real world, which is why furigana exists in the first place. I just make up a silly mnemonic for it based on how it sounds and learn it that way via anki. My vocab cards all have furigana for that reason.
And yes there’s so many decks out there already but as mentioned above, making a deck can be part of the process (and it doesn’t have to be time consuming). When I started studying I made an anki deck based on the Genki I vocab. Then I did the same with Genki II, and eventually AIAIJ, then Tango N5 and N4 to fill in the gaps. Since I was learning vocab faster than I was learning anything else I kinda went ahead and learned all those vocab through anki before actually getting that far in the books. It was fun, and a great vocab foundation. Lots of words overlapped with wanikani but many were new.
In my case I’m so fixated on kanji because I’m learning Japanese for the sake of reading, not speaking or listening (at least as of right now.) So being able to recognize a word in writing is important to me. And if a word is commonly written using kanji, I need to be able to recognize it written in kanji.
My personal experience has just taught me that I struggle to remember a written word when it has kanji that I don’t know. That’s why I’ve gravitated so much to WK and its bottom-up approach to teaching words by helping you give meaning to the visual form of each kanji, so that you can recognize it and recall its general meaning, which in turn helps you remember the meaning of words the kanji is a part of.
tl;dr: I’m only learning Japanese for reading and my brain locks up when it sees unfamiliar kanji.
Perhaps I should have made it clear from the get-go that I’m mainly interested in reading
I would definitely echo what was said above about making decks using yomichan, disabling cards as necessarily, and also (not sure if anyone mentioned it above and I just missed it but in case not) install @kumirei 's awesome wanikani yomichan script which adds wanikani levels to the pop-ups so you can easily see if it’s a wanikani word and if so, at what level you’ll encounter it. I’m not sure if there’s a way to import that field into the anki card or if you’d have to go back and enter it manually. but in either case you could definitely add a wk# field to your cards and sort them by that.
