This morning, after I silenced my phone alarm and began immediately scrolling (as one does), one of the first things I came across was a Wired article by Matt Burgess: Is Firefox OK?
Seeing this title Did Me A Worry. I was an early Google Chrome adopter all the way back in 2008, but before that - in the days when I advertised my nerd cred by running Linux on every computer I owned, woof - I was all-Firefox all-the-time. Thirteen years later, in 2021, tech journalism’s increasingly dire warnings about Google’s eroding privacy protections finally got to me, and I switched back to my old friend. Having just gotten back on the wagon, I was gonna be real irritated to find out that the wheels were falling off.
Well, as such things often go, the title was a little more alarmist than the actual content… but not much. Firefox’s market share is down to less than four percent, and Burgess’ sources make it sound like Mozilla is feeling a financial pinch. Both Mozilla and outside commentators see a way forward for the browser and the company, but it’s going to require Firefox to hone in on what it does well, while Mozilla raises the profile of its other offerings. So, why is this important? Why do I care enough that I emailed this article to myself in the wee hours of the morning and then came here to talk about it?
In brief: a) Chrome sucks, b) Firefox makes the Internet better, and c) you should maybe think about using it.
I’ll note here that this is in no way a paid sponsorship or anything, I’m just a happy Firefox user who’s concerned enough about internet privacy to do the absolute, basement-level minimum to protect myself a little. (I can hear you all rolling your eyes at me and my Android phone, but even if the horse is long out of the barn, you gotta draw a line somewhere.)
Chrome has been getting boatloads of bad press lately for how much data they collect about you, their security vulnerabilities, their shady tracking activities, their permissive default privacy settings, and more. In response, privacy-forward browsers like DuckDuckGo and Brave have been gaining in number and prominence, but credit goes to Mozilla for holding down their end of the Overton window these last couple decades. Firefox has long been the credible third (now fourth) option keeping the internet privacy question relevant and holding Google and Apple to account.
Chrome is also the biggest kid in the browser playground with 65% market share, meaning they can influence web browsing standards for their own benefit. As Burgess points out, many of even the most privacy-obsessed browsers are built on Chromium, Google’s open-source browser project that makes up a large chunk of Chrome’s code. Firefox, by contrast, uses its own Gecko rendering engine. I’m not qualified to hash out what each of them does better, but I do know that I’m suspicious of monocultures: “Uniform software systems lead to uniform vulnerabilities,” writes Anna Purna Kambhampaty in Time, detailing the exact parallel between software and bananas that I was trying to get around to just now. Nobody wants the internet to die of Panama disease.
Addressing the question of online privacy feels overwhelming. While most of us weren’t looking, data collection became so ubiquitous that resistance seems futile, to say nothing of the fact that we still have to, like, live our lives and function as adults online. For my part, I eventually decided that something was better than nothing, even if I wasn’t going to pitch my Googlephone down a well and wrap my house in tinfoil. And can I tell you my latest most-favorite thing about Firefox? They’ve made it possible to fence in Facebook, so it can’t follow you all over the web. Baby steps, my friends.
So yeah, tl;dr: think about switching to Firefox. It’s nice here.