I remember when Netscape was abandoned and open-sourced as Mozilla, and it was huge and bloated as slow as hell. And out of that came a project to just pull out the browser part of Mozilla and make it super fast and as portable. I remember a series of early alphas, and even the name went through a few evolutions. First it was called Phoenix, then Firebird, briefly, until they realised Firebird was taken and changed it to Firefox. It had this shiny new Gecko rendering engine and its only rival was IE…5?

When I started my first dev job in 2006, Firefox was far and away the best browser to use because it had an extension that no other browser could match: Firebug. Firebug was the precursor to the standard F12 devtools that every browser now has and it was life-changing if you were a web developer. (Try imagine doing your job without it now.)

Then Chrome arrived and it was shiny and W3C compliant (yay!) and you could pull a tab off into a separate window (wow!) and every tab ran as a separate process (neat!) and Google wouldn’t be evil for at least another decade. Back then, FF had memory leak problems and that drove a lot of us away.

And then Chrome pulled this ad surveillance shit and I was fucking out. I’m so glad that FF is still here.

I let myself be fully engulfed by the Google/Chrome/Android continuum and it’s only recently that I realised just how much of myself I gave away and, while my personal data has long since been propagated to a million servers, I’d still like to try keep some of myself to myself.

My back hurts.

The lack of Google/Microsoft enshittification is a huge draw.

It’s the only truly free choice for a browser.

I’ve been using it for 20-ish years and there’s never been a major reason to switch, and all the alternatives seem worse.

Also, it’s all that stands between Google and the free web at this point.

Because its not chrome and has good extension support (I actually use librewolf)

Because the options are firefox, chrome, or chrome in a moustache and glasses

All of which I use because X thing doesn’t work on Y browser

1. Because of FoxyGestures, I can’t find a good replacement for this on Chromium based browsers.

2. Because of uBlock Origin, Firefox has the full version, on mobile too.

3. Because Google Chrome can scan my files system for “malware” and improving their ad data, in other words their spying goes too far.

4. Because of the customisability of the UI.

5. Because I can tweak every variable (visit about:config)

6. Because if you turn telemetry off, it’s actually off, Google lies about that.

7. Because Google’s market share is so big, that they have the guts to try and DRM the entire Internet for their browser, no company should have that much power.

Firefox had the best reader view of any browser and looks great in both mobile and desktop.

Also, uBlock

FOSS Not-Chromium based Ublock origin Sane Ctrl+tab

Not chromium based. I think it’s important to have alternatives to chromium-based browsers and Google’s monopoly.

If Firefox vanishes, I’ll use Epiphany instead.

Cause it’s the only non chromium browser left

Because it’s better.

Because it’s open source.

Because it’s not based on Chromium and competition is good.

And also because TabStash.

A lot of false equivocating has been made regarding Mozilla and actual surveillance capitalism firms like Google and Microsoft. Mozilla remains, in my mind, the least of all evils with an organization capable of supporting a modern web browser as well as other projects.

I use Firefox because I can use the full version of UBlock Origin, and UBlock Origin also works on the mobile browser.

I also make heavy use of the extension Multi-Account Containers for signing in with different accounts for the same service at once.

Lastly, I prefer the UI for Firefox over anything else.

Cause there is no alternative. Google can take my fiery fox from my cold dead hands.

Because it’s the successor to netscape, and I never felt the need to change browsers. Glad I didn’t.