Yes alternatives are there but we should consider the possibility of earning enough with our browser. I mean I can't believe that why browser mining has got so much popular suddenly since last week.
The most hype got from the freebitco.in recently popping up the news on screen. You just have to push that start button after making the settings for core selection and there you can start minding right away.
I even tried doing that from the smartphone browser which gave me 5 H/s of hash rate. That's just crazy. But devices are heating up very fast so I don't think that it is worth doing it as we may crash the systems in first place. You can try freebitco anyway.
According to their
whitepaper, the browser will serve as a node rather than a machine for mining. In their testnet, SHA-256 would be utilized to create test tokens, which means ASICs would be the king here. After the network is deployed and the mainnet is fully functional, they would switch to either Argos2 or ETHash to mine the actual coins, so GPU would be the most viable hardware to acquire.
It would still be a hefty investment if you want to mine it though, but utilizing your browser to be a node is a cool implementation nonetheless.