8 Reasons why people use Firefox over Chrome
If Chrome is the most used web browser in the world, a lot of people still use Firefox. Here are 8 reasons why.
Google Chrome is one of the fastest web browser, but it has serious lack of privacy. The main reason why people use Firefox web browser is to have more control other their user data and more privacy, but it is not the only one. Open-source, development purpose among other things, there are plenty reasons to use Firefox.
1. Privacy
Google Chrome is not really the best browser when we talk about privacy, on the other hand Mozilla Firefox is one of the web browser available on computer that care the most about privacy and user data protection. Firefox has built-in features that help the user to protect their data :
- Blocking third-party tracking cookies - You are tracked everywhere on the web, many different websites add cookies to your browser to be able to track you and your action on other website, they are called third-party tracking cookies. Using these, you will see publicity specific to your profile, so you are more likely to click on them.
- Blocking social trackers - A different kind of third-party cookies are the social media trackers. Social media like Twitter or Facebook add trackers on other website, so they can follow what their users are doing and are looking at. By doing this, they will be able to provide targeted ads, not always relevant.
If you don’t want to be tracked on the web, better to use Firefox. Google Chrome can still use some of your data in incognito mode.
2. Autoplay blocking
It can be very annoying that every time you are visiting a new page, the video on the page, if there is one, is starting to play without any of your actions. It’s ok to have this kind of autoplay on YouTube for example as you do want to watch a video, but on a news website or a recipe website it’s quite annoying.
Firefox has an autoplay blocking built-in feature, the browser will stop the autoplay of the video automatically, you won’t have to add an extension for this.
3. Open-Source
An open-source project means that the code is available to the public, anyone can look at it. It also means that everyone can review it, to see what kind of information are used, for example.
While Google Chrome has been built from Chromium, an open-source project, it still has a lot of proprietary features from the Google corporation added, black boxes where only Google knows what’s inside.
On his side, Firefox is completely open-source, anyone can review the code to see what kind of information are used by Firefox, how secure it is and so on. They can’t hide anything from the users, that’s why it is way less difficult to trust Firefox over Chrome.
4. Resources usage
Firefox is a lightweight web browser, it won’t use a lot of hardware resources. A lot of people with low budget computer will like Firefox as it will work well on their computer compared to other web browsers. Linux users especially will like Firefox for this as wrote in this article.
Google Chrome is not as lightweight as Firefox and use a lot of RAM memory for example
5. Mobile extensions
While the official Google Chrome web browser on Android do not allow adding extensions yet, the Firefox mobile version allows the users to add extensions. You will be able to add any of your favorite extensions that you use on the desktop, like an ad blocker or your password manager.
6. Sync across all devices
Almost all the web browsers do have this feature today, but sync feature across all devices on Firefox works very well. It’s very easy to send a tab from your mobile to your computer, to continue to read on your computer, you can even just choose a tab opened on another device. All you need to have is to set up a Firefox account.
7. In browser screenshot tool
This is one of my favorite feature in Firefox, their built-in screenshot tool allows you to screenshot directly inside the browser. Nothing awesome for now but the magic of this feature comes with the options, you can for example screenshot the entire web page without scrolling.
8. Other small smooth features
There are a lot of other cool features that are better on Firefox than on Chrome, here are some of them :
- Browser history - Chrome will delete your history after 90 days, while Firefox has a longer history.
- Zoom back to 100% - With Firefox, you can reset the zoom to 100% by just clicking on the percentage in the URL bar.
- Customization - By going to the about:config page, you are able to do a lot more of customization on Firefox than on Chrome
- Remove the search bar - To win some space, you can remove the search bar on Firefox and just use the URL one.
- Disable automatic update - If you don’t want your browser to update automatically, you can disable it on Firefox, but not on Chrome.
Firefox is a very good web browser, but it does not mean that Google Chrome is not a good one, it’s not the most used browser for no reasons. Your choice will depend on your needs, just give it a try at least.
Author
Maxime Levesque is a technical engineer with more than 5 years of professional experience. He is an expert in computer and phones, mostly on Apple products. Maxime is also the founder of TechBrowser.
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