You Should Seriously Consider Switching To Firefox

It’s 2024, and every time I see someone sharing their screen during a call at work, they’re using Chrome as their web browser. Whether it’s someone in marketing, sales, engineering, development, or anything else in between, pretty much everyone is using Chrome. It’s actually a noteworthy event for me when I see someone using another browser… and generally then it’s Safari. When an engineer shared her screen on a call just a few days ago and opted to use Firefox when doing a demo, it gave me a (tiny) glimmer of hope.

Why Not Chrome?

The world largely runs on Chrome (outside of mobile). According to Statcounter at the time of this writing, Chrome has a commanding lead. I imagine those numbers would look even worse if mobile was taken out of the picture, since that’s where a lot of Safari’s numbers come into play:

• Chrome: 64.73%
• Safari: 18.56%
• Edge: 4.97%
• Firefox: 3.36%
• Opera: 2.86%
• Samsung Internet: 2.59%

The picture is actually even worse than this, though, because other than Safari and Firefox, every other browser listed is just Chrome masquerading as something else. Edge, Opera, and Samsung Internet are all based on Chromium, all having given up on building their own browser engine.

This in itself has some problems since it makes for a very homogeneous browser ecosystem. When that happens, suddenly one player can start implementing non-standard features and people will start to use them since it covers a majority of users, e.g. Internet Explorer 6… and we all know how that turned out.

However, the bigger problem is that Chrome itself holds the majority, and frankly… it’s just not a good browser in 2024. I used Chrome back when it came out because it was sleek, it was fast, and it was efficient. It set a new gold standard for what other browsers should be, and ones that had lagged behind on performance and features like Firefox fell out of favor. Years and literally hundreds of versions later, though, and Chrome has turned into a hulking, bloated monstrosity. It’ll lap up every kilobyte of memory it can get its hands on all while doing a sluggish job of loading pages. Even worse, it’s owned by a company that has a heavily vested interest in also lapping up every scrap of personal information about users that it can. Handing that information over to Google for a sub-par browsing experience doesn’t seem like a very good deal to me.

To that end, nothing hurts an advertising business more than technology that blocks advertising. Along with their recent crackdown of ad-blockers on YouTube, Google is now set to move forward with Manifest V3 for Chrome browser extensions. While things like the official company blog will sell it as a win for users, the reality is that it cripples the functionality of things like ad-blockers.

Why Firefox?

I became frustrated with the performance of Chrome and the fact that Google’s prying eyes were behind it several years ago. At the time I moved to Safari for my browsing on macOS and Firefox for my browsing on Linux. Since I spend most of my time on macOS for work, that subsequently meant I spent most of my time in Safari.

Safari is a decent browser, but it has a limited extension ecosystem. It often isn’t an early target for extensions. Proton Pass, for example, has yet to become available for it; an extension is in the works, but it’s not a priority. Likewise, uBlock Origin, the absolute best extension for blocking web content, isn’t available for it, either. AdGuard is available for Safari, meaning you don’t have to go completely without an ad-blocker, but it’s a far cry from uBlock Origin.

As a developer, I also found Safari’s web development tools to be clunky. I don’t do enough frontend development to know if they’re actually just not as good as the competition or if I just didn’t really know what I was doing, but either way I didn’t find myself liking them nearly as much as the same tooling from other browsers.

After getting frustrated with some of these limitations, I started just using Firefox on both Linux and macOS. Spending more time in it has really highlighted how far it’s come as a browser. Performance is great across the board, and even with dozens of tabs open, which is frequently the case when I’m working on a project at work (though unlike a scary amount of people, I actually close tabs when I’m doing using them) performance is quite good regardless of the platform. If I need to save information for later, I have a large array of bookmarks saved and organized into folders, and those bookmarks sync across my devices. In fact, most of my settings and extensions sync as well for whenever I happen to use a new device.

I’ve been using Firefox for years, and I basically never run into issues with sites working with it… something that is cause for concern moving forward as its market share dwindles and every other browser on the planet decides to just be a fork of Chrome. This is something we the users can prevent, though, by showing Firefox more love.

Perhaps most importantly, however, Firefox is developed and backed by the Mozilla Foundation, and it’s more or less the only entity creating a web browser that has no real benefit from creeping on your personal information. If I can use a browser that isn’t intrusively harvesting data about what I’m doing on the web, I call that a massive win.

I’ve seen a decent number of people upset with Mozilla within the open source community after a report late last year about the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation receiving a massive salary bump despite dwindling profits and dwindling Firefox market share. What some other, more level-headed posters pointed out, though, is that the Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation is responsible for the development of Firefox, so the idea that paying the CEO more (right, wrong, or indifferent) is taking money away from Firefox development is inaccurate.

It’s a new year, so start things off with a new browser and maybe we can collectively start to chip away at Google’s hegemony in controlling access to the web.