Yet in my tests on a laptop running a script that automatically reloaded the top 10 news sites, Firefox lasted only a few minutes longer than Chrome before the battery was depleted. Mozilla’s promise that Firefox consumes less computer memory raises hopes that it should also use less battery life. In my anecdotal testing as someone who juggles more than a dozen web tabs at a time, both were very speedy. But some other benchmark sites say Firefox is faster. Some benchmark websites, which determine the speed of a browser by measuring the responsiveness of different web elements, say Chrome is faster. “Firefox has some settings that we’re also exploring.” Speed and Battery Tests “I think that’s something that we can improve on,” Ms. Google said there was one thing it could do better on: the inclusion of privacy settings to block tracking technology, similar to the tools that Firefox includes. So if you loaded a website with malicious code, it would be contained within the webpage so it couldn’t infect your files, webcam and microphone. Both include sandboxing, which isolates processes of the browser so a harmful website doesn’t infect other parts of your machine. In fact, both Chrome and Firefox have tough security. Chrome wins in terms of numbers, with hundreds of thousands of extensions compared with Firefox’s roughly 11,000. Privacy Featuresīoth Chrome and Firefox support thousands of extensions, which are add-ons that modify your browsing experience. In the end, Firefox’s thoughtful privacy features persuaded me to make the switch and make it my primary browser. Most other browsers don’t include those features.Īfter testing Firefox for the last three months, I found it to be on a par with Chrome in most categories.
Most notably, Firefox now offers privacy tools, like a built-in feature for blocking ad trackers and a “container” that can be installed to prevent Facebook from monitoring your activities across the web. It is sleekly designed and fast Mozilla said the revamped Firefox consumes less memory than the competition, meaning you can fire up lots of tabs and browsing will still feel buttery smooth. Mozilla released a new version late last year, code-named Quantum. And so we started to think about tools and architectures and different approaches.” “That just felt to us like that actually might be the direction we’re going. “If they don’t trust the web, they won’t use the web,” Mark Mayo, Mozilla’s chief product officer, said in an interview. Eventually, they concluded there was a “crisis of confidence” in the web. About two years ago, six Mozilla employees were huddled around a bonfire one night in Santa Cruz, Calif., when they began discussing the state of web browsers. Mozilla recently hit the reset button on Firefox. But it became irrelevant after Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser. Remember Firefox? The browser, made by the nonprofit Mozilla, emerged in the early 2000s as a faster, better designed vessel to surf the web. That’s why it may be time to try a different browser. More important, it has become an unfair trade: You give up your privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads. It has become an annoying, often toxic and occasionally unsafe place to hang out. And don’t get me started on those videos that automatically play when you’re scrolling through a webpage.
If you have just a few web browser tabs open, your laptop battery drains rapidly. When shopping online for a toaster oven, you can expect an ad for that oven to stalk you from site to site. Do you ever feel that the web is breaking?