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AI-generated summary
I’ve never been a big fan of Mozilla Firefox, at least not since Google Chrome showed up. To be fair, a company with no real competition tends to stagnate — or even regress. That’s exactly what happened with Firefox: the browser got slower and slower and clearly lacked ambition.
In 2021, Firefox is the third most-used browser. The Chromium engine is dominant (Chrome, Brave, Edge).
Windows users are the best served — they get all the best Chrome extensions in a browser fully integrated with their system. Safari takes the wrong approach and ruins the user experience by locking you out of the vast extension catalogue, even if compiling third-party extensions is technically possible (you’ll still need to pay for a developer licence).
Brave
wants us to believe in a tracking-free world, but really just replaces other people’s ads with its own. Imagine doing that in the real world — taking down someone’s billboard and putting up yours instead, on the grounds that yours is better, and then paying people to look at it. Funny times, but people get what they want since everything is too expensive for the internet generation. People refuse to pay for anything 💰 so they have to be force-fed ads instead.
That said, I’d recommend Brave over Chrome if you can’t give up the latter.
So what about Firefox? Knocked off its pedestal, it still has some real strengths. First — and in my opinion the best feature — is container mode. You can separate your browsing sessions within the same window. I have one container per GAFA. So when I use Google services, I’m in an isolated container. To do the same in other browsers, you’d have to either create separate profiles and manage extension installs for each one, or open a private browsing window.
If you’ve never tried it, go do it now. You’ll be able to specify which link opens in which container — so if I click on a YouTube video it opens in the Google container.
The benefit I see is being able to search on Google without being logged in to my account, getting 🔬 non-personalised search results. The sites I visit don’t know exactly who I am. And of course I do the same in separate containers for Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, etc.
Go ahead, I encourage you to use Firefox — which in my opinion has the best icon of any browser on the market 🥰.
