Were any new browsers created in 2017/2018? Any recommendations?

Just use Firefox.

There is, in fact, the Tor browser. This Gizmodo article describes it, apparently it does a good job of protecting your privacy.

There are hardly any truly new browsers – most these days are based on existing ones.

Some recent ones are:

- Waterfox (based on Firefox, focuses on preserving old extensions, therefore doesn’t benefit from Firefox’s recent speed improvements)
– Vivaldi (based on Chrome, by the original creator of Opera, focuses on being feature-rich by default)
– Brave browser (based on chrome, by a co-founder of Mozilla, focuses on block ads and replacing them with their own ads, that supposedly respect your privacy and can pay content creators through a cryptocurrency)
– Beaker browser (I think based on Firefox, somewhat non-standard in that it does not focus on traditional websites, but on those served over a special peer-to-peer protocol called Dat)
– ServoShell (not really usable at the moment, but this is the only completely new browser. It’s by Mozilla, and is where they experiment with potential new approaches to browser development. A lot of effort has been invested in it already, yet there’s still a long, long way to go to be usable as an actual browser – which shows you why truly new browsers are hardly ever created.)

That said, if speed and extensions are your thing, I would really recommend you to check out Firefox if you haven’t recently. It’s made some enormous strides in terms of performance recently, and got a few more great improvements lined up, so it should get even faster the coming year.