After ten years of using Google Chrome as my primary browser, I am switching back to Firefox. In this essay, I will outline my reasons.
TLDR; Firefox has achieved comparable or better performance as Chrome and treats user privacy as a feature.
Performance
I started my career as a full-stack web developer. Perl was still relevant, and Internet Explorer was the browser most people used.
As a developer, I remember that time as an era of non-standard browsers, with Firefox being the closest thing you could have to a “Web Standard” browser. Naturally, that’s what most of us used to develop the web applications and when we were done, add code to make it work on Internet Explorer. Which meant the web apps for our customers using IE were slower than for those using Firefox.
And then, Google released Chrome. I am not sure when I installed Chrome first, but I remember being on nightly builds and being blown away by the sheer speed. It was a standard browser with excellent developer tools. I was sold. Chrome replaced Firefox as my main browser ever since.
In ten years, a lot has changed. Chrome dominates the market, with Microsoft losing most of its market share. Most popular browsers - Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Opera are running Blink under the hood, which is a fork of WebKit browser engine that is powering Safari. Firefox is a rare exception with its in-house Gecko engine.
With the 2017 release of Firefox Quantum Mozilla engineers were able to incrementally achieve significant performance gains that now puts Firefox on par with Chrome. In addition to web rendering speed, the Firefox team optimized the browser’s memory footprint and made Firefox power efficient on OSX.
Privacy
Unlike it was in the past, nowadays, you have to make a conscious effort to maintain your online privacy. Privacy is important. It matters, and it is a fundamental right of a free society.
Customer data and its interpretation is what powers the advertising engines of companies like Google and Facebook. Their free user-facing products and services are built to collect as much data as possible, often without explicit user knowledge.
For example, Facebook can track you across the Internet on many websites that aren’t connected to the social network in any apparent way.
Or imagine what kind of data Google collects when you search on Google, using Chrome, signed into your Chrome profile associated with your Google service account like Gmail. And if you have multiple user profiles in Chrome, Google has de-anonymized you and mapped your behaviour across your Internet identities.
With Firefox - privacy is a feature. You still need to be mindful of how you browse, especially around products or services from companies like Google or Facebook, but Firefox offers tools to help with that. One of these tools that I want to highlight is Firefox Multi-Account Containers.
Firefox Multi-Account Containers lets you keep parts of your online life separated into color-coded tabs that preserve your privacy. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously.
This is neat because, with this add-on, you can isolate the websites into their own containers and limit their tracking capability significantly. Add-on also allows you to maintain the convenience of persisting the authentication within the container, i.e. you don’t have to login to Gmail within the container dedicated to Gmail.
To summarize, I switched from Chrome to Firefox mainly for privacy reasons given the Firefox performance being in the same ballpark as Chrome. I’ve been running Firefox with multi-account containers for the last four months, with first Bing and now DuckDuckGo as my search engine, and I think I am in for a long haul. I still have Chrome installed for few web apps I need for work. Which I find amusing given what I described as the “era of non-standard browsers”… :)