Use Firefox

A quick shout out to the Firefox browser. If you are not using it because Chrome & its cousins are the new cool thing, do give it shot to see if it works for you.

Via this week’s Security Now podcast (show notes) I came across the stat that Firefox has lost nearly 56 millions users in the last two years. Nothing surprising about it as everyone’s on Chrome or Chromium based variants, and while I have no vested interest in Firefox I am saddened by the decline in its usage. This reminds me of my childhood when Internet Explorer was the default and all websites were written for it; now everything’s written for the Blink rendering engine (which is what Chrome and all Chromium based browsers such as the new Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi etc. use) and no one cares about the Gecko rendering engine (which is what Firefox uses). That’s not nice. You need competition, and having multiple rendering engines is important for that.

I too had switched from Firefox to Chrome many years ago when Chrome was new and Firefox was a memory hog; but Firefox has since caught up and is not as much of a memory hog as Chrome. It’s good looking too with the recent UI updates and I am more comfortable using a browser created Mozilla (who I feel is on the side of users and privacy etc.) rather than Google or Microsoft (whose Chrome and Edge are the two popular browsers nowadays). I still use Edge occassionally for work, but Firefox is my primary browser and I am glad it exists. It’s got a neat sync feature too that keeps all my extensions, bookmarks, and preferences in sync and I love its feature of being able to send tabs from one device to another (e.g. I am reading something on the phone, I can send it to my Mac so that when I go the Mac later this tab is open in Firefox already).

Anyways, if you haven’t tried Firefox yet give it a chance. Or you have tried in the past but moved on to Chrome etc. for whatever reason, try it out again. Maybe it will work out better (or as well as Chrome etc.) for you now. Or maybe you can use it along with your current browser as it fits some use case. Who knows!