Firefox

★★★★☆

I still have a soft spot for Firefox.

There have been times when it’s been the best web browser on Windows or Linux, and it’s still good on both (and macOS). I’ve used it as my primary web browser off and on for years. It’s stable! It runs almost everywhere! It’s built into most Linux distributions! It’s got a great extension ecosystem, and unlike Chrome, Mozilla is continuing to support older extensions.

Plus you can do things like translate languages locally on your device instead of calling out to a service like Google Translate, and keep your login sessions separate to prevent (for example) Facebook from tracking your activity on other sites even if they use Facebook features.

Compatibility

Unfortunately we’re in another period of near-monopoly in web browser engines, and a lot of developers only test with Chromium browsers like they only tested with Internet Explorer way back when – so there are websites that don’t work right, or don’t work at all. This is not Firefox’s fault, but it is a problem.

Vivaldi handles most of them, so I don’t have to keep Chrome around
except on one device for one website that I have to visit on a monthly basis.

Recommended Extensions

Mobile

I used Firefox for Android as the main web browser on my phone for several years (up through 2024).

Pros:

  • Works just fine! (most of the time)
  • Can run Portable Web Apps (PWAs)
  • Can run extensions!
  • Share button targets include other Firefox devices you’re synced with
  • Doesn’t phone home to Google

Cons:

  • Noticeably slower than Chrome or Vivaldi
  • May phone home to Mozilla
  • PWAs are clunky, and don’t support as many features as they do when installed through a Chromium browser.

I used to run PWAs in Chrome or Vivaldi even when I was using Firefox as my primary browser, just for the speed boost.

Sync

Syncing bookmarks, settings and history across multiple Firefox browsers is easy to set up. I turned off the bookmarks part in favor of using Floccus to sync with Vivaldi and other browsers. But when I was using Firefox on my phone, it was super-easy to send the page I was looking at over to my desktop or tablet. Your other Firefox devices just show up when you hit the share button.

In theory you can run your own sync server, which I
might get around to trying out sometime? Maybe?

Related Products

  • Thunderbird is a great email client again, after a major slump during the 2010s.
  • Pocket has been useful for read-it-later and read-it-offline scenarios, and sometimes for discovering interesting articles. I’ve actually been using it since before Mozilla bought it, all the way back to when it was called Read It Later. I used to find articles while at work, save them to Pocket, then take my tablet with me to read them at lunch even if there was no wi-fi connection where I went.
  • Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is a fantastic reference for web development, and I highly recommend using it instead of, say, W3Schools.
  • Fakespot is an interesting idea (detect bogus reviews and misleading store listings), but didn’t impress me when I tried it out a while back.

I haven’t used Relay (disposable email addresses) or their VPN, or their data breach monitor service, so I can’t really speak to how well they work.

Web Advocacy

Mozilla has done great work over the years advocating for an open web that everyone can use freely. They’ve called out industry privacy practices, dug into misinformation, tech policy and ethics, social impacts of the internet, and more. The “IRL” podcast series that ran from 2017 through 2023 was fascinating.

And of course maintaining their own rendering engine (Gecko) is an important bulwark against one company having too much influence over web technology. Firefox’s success in the mid-2000s arguably helped convince Microsoft to start improving Internet Explorer again after years of stagnation. Since Opera and Microsoft switched to Chromium in the 2010s, Gecko is the only major engine that isn’t controlled by Google (Chromium/Blink) or Apple (WebKit), making that role even more important.

The Mozilla Question

Unfortunately, Mozilla has a sustainability problem.

Mozilla’s main source of income is a deal to use Google Search as the default in Firefox. This is precarious, to say the least. It’s also been cited as monopolist behavior on the part of Google, and the US Department of Justice recommended blocking it
which ironically would cement Google’s dominance in browsers.

So the company has been flailing around for years, chasing trends in search of new revenue streams. Last year they But they shuttered the advocacy department and jumped into advertising
not exactly a popular move with people who were choosing it for privacy reasons.

As with Chrome, trust is easy to lose and hard to rebuild. Up to this point Mozilla’s flailing hasn’t made Firefox appreciably worse yet, but it’s likely slowed down making it better. I’d rather have feed detection back than an AI chatbot built into my browser.

I want Mozilla to succeed again. I want Firefox to keep getting better. But I’m concerned about the direction it’s going.

More info at Firefox.