My Favorite Web Browser

This may be a hot take, but in 2025 my favorite web browser is still (and has been for decades) Mozilla Firefox and I'll tell you why.

1. Mozilla is the least abusive of the browser vendors we have today. They don't work in the ad business and so don't have the incentive to harvest all your private data in the way that Google (especially) and Microsoft do.
2. As evidence to that, when you use Firefox Sync to share your bookmarks/settings across devices, your data is encrypted by your password and stored in a way that Mozilla can't go snooping through it if they wanted to. In contrast to Google Sync where your data simply lives on Google servers and is free for them to harvest and target ads to you by.
3. Firefox is one of the last bastions of hope against the Chromium monopoly. Nearly every single web browser is based on Chromium (including Google Chrome, MS Edge, Brave, and dozens more), with only Firefox and Safari providing any diversity left over web browser engine. I will get more into that below.
4. With just a few add-ons (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger and Firefox Multi-Account Containers) you can very easily get massive privacy wins where all ads and trackers are blocked and Facebook/Google sites can be jailed away and unable to share data with other sites you visit.
5. Firefox for Android has support for add-ons, so you can install uBlock Origin and block ads on mobile websites without needing to root your phone. On some Androids, you can make Firefox the default webview for your other apps and have ads blocked even when viewing pages linked from your favorite social media apps, too!

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Mozilla in any way, I have never worked for them or taken any money from them. I just like their web browser and have a lot of thoughts about the Web in general, as the below post will make abundantly clear. I only started thinking about writing this post after a friend asked me what my preferred browser is recently and why I said "Firefox."

The Chromium Monopoly

In 2025, there are only about three different types of web browsers:

• Chromium based browsers, with the Blink engine.
• Firefox based browsers, with the Gecko engine.
• Safari based browsers, with the Webkit engine.

In terms of market share, Google Chrome currently corners 66% of the entire market and when you add the other Chromium-based browsers, such as Microsoft Edge at 5.18%, and smaller derivatives such as Brave, the Chromium Blink engine has 79% of the global browser engine market share.

Safari has a decent slice of their own, at 17.59%, thanks in large part to the way that iPhones and iPads mandate the use of the Safari engine to power all web browsers and their not insignificant market of Macbooks which have Safari as the default browser. Safari, however, does not run on Windows or Linux so while Safari is a nice browser with a good chunk of the market, it is isolated only to Apple devices whereas Firefox can run everywhere.

But Firefox only has 2.51% of the market and its engine, Gecko, could be at risk of going extinct one day.

Why is the Chromium monopoly worrisome? Because it is largely governed by Google, who is an ad company and has somewhat of a conflict of interest when designing web standards and Google's decisions in Chromium will have a ripple effect across all downstream derivatives.

I also lived through the "browser wars" era when Internet Explorer 6.0 clung to life for way too long, and had way too large of a market share, and it wasn't keeping up with the times and making life difficult for web developers who couldn't use the shiny new features that Firefox and Chrome were bringing to the Web because we had to maintain compatibility with Internet Explorer 6. A Chromium monopoly would again lead to web developers getting complacent, and designing their websites only for Chromium and not caring to test them in Firefox because they don't see the point.

I continue to use and support Firefox so that when my entry appears on a website's analytics, I want web developers to know that Firefox users still exist and they should continue to support it on their websites, lest we all just give up and let Chromium dominate the Web.

But Chromium is open source and not controlled by Google?

Ha.

The vast majority of Chromium developers are full-time Google employees. The Chromium project sees hundreds of commits daily with mainly Google engineers working on the codebase.

Yes, Chromium is open source and theoretically if Google makes an unpopular decision that benefits only their own interest, other downstream derivatives of Chromium could patch those changes out and undo them. For example, when Manifest v3 came out and crippled the ability of ad-block extensions which strongly benefitted only Google's interests, the other downstream Chromium browsers could simply revert those changes and maintain support for the old, working, ad block extensions.

For a time.

I'll tell you how it goes when you fork a popular project such as Chromium. If you're, say, Microsoft Edge, you take a snapshot of the Chromium codebase and then you modify it to add or remove features and you release your derivative. But then, as time goes on, you would need to rebase your code on the upstream Chromium so you can take advantage of all the security fixes, features and bugs that Google has fixed on the upstream codebase.

Web browsers are massively complicated programs and the Web is a fast moving target. Every day there are new vulnerabilities discovered that companies like Google and Mozilla need to fix in their browsers to keep them safe and secure. Google is constantly working on Chromium, and if you have a browser fork based on Chromium, you need to keep track of the upstream project and rebase your code on their latest changes to keep up.

Maintaining a web browser is a full-time job that requires hundreds or thousands of engineers. Even Microsoft could not keep up: they stopped trying to maintain Internet Explorer or their first version of Edge (which was based on IE), and threw in the towel and decided to make a Chromium based browser so that they could leverage the engineering talent of Google in providing a solid base for them to build on top of.

So, Google does something unpopular like Manifest V3 and early on, it's a simple issue to just revert those changes in Chromium when you rebase your browser. But over months or years, Chromium sees a lot more code changes, many of those changes touching the same parts of code that Manifest V3 touched. Suddenly, when you rebase your project on Chromium you get "merge conflicts" because parts of the code that you have customized (like, say, when you removed Manifest V3 before) can't be reconciled with the latest state of the Chromium code. So you need to figure out what the merge conflict is about and how to manually resolve it.

These little merge conflicts keep coming up, and the burden of keeping your fork of Chromium up to date while avoiding all the misfeatures you don't want only grows over time. Your browser team is miniscule compared to the headcount of the Google engineers who are churning out hundreds of commits per day to Chromium.

Eventually, all of the downstream Chromium browsers will feel the effects of whatever it is that Google wants to do with their browser engine. Web browsers are expensive to maintain and very few people other than Google have the budget or manpower to manage them. Again, even Microsoft could not keep up with their own browser engine.

What about Firefox derivatives?

There exist a few downstream Firefox derivatives too, such as LibreWolf or Zen.

Some of them customize Firefox to have better privacy features or add-ons by default, or they exist only because of some controversies of Mozilla that the developers decided were worth creating a Firefox fork over.

I don't use these derivatives for the following reasons:

1. It is not hard at all to harden Firefox to get more privacy out of it. Simple add-ons like uBlock Origin take you a long way with only one click to install, and the defaults in these add-ons are good so it's "set it and forget it" and with Firefox Sync, all your devices get your add-ons after just setting them up once.
2. But more importantly: these downstream browsers will not exist if Mozilla goes under.

See what I said above about Chromium: it is massively expensive to maintain a web browser, and if Mozilla is a small team compared to Google, these Firefox derivative maintainers are even smaller.

One of Mozilla's largest sources of income actually comes from Google: they pay Mozilla to keep Google as the default search engine. Google does this because it keeps the regulators at bay, so Google avoids getting an antitrust monopoly lawsuit by being able to say "but Firefox exists! And look, we support them financially, too!"

If, god forbid, Mozilla decides to give up on Firefox or is no longer able to maintain it, Firefox and all downstream derivatives will be dead, the Gecko engine would not keep up with security fixes for long and these tiny teams who maintain Firefox forks won't be able to keep going.

So, I stick with Firefox proper because that's where Mozilla is.

Firefox Controversies

Of course, Mozilla and Firefox are not without their own controversies. I said at the top of the post that Mozilla is the least abusive browser vendor, not that they have never done anything to stir up bad press among the community.

However, I do always find it ironic when I see comment threads on Reddit about people dunking on Mozilla about something that is relatively minor, and then they go running arms open back to Google Chrome who is abusing them 100X more severely, but I digress.

Some of the most common things I hear people rail on Mozilla about include:

• In 2025 when they revised their terms of service regarding user data. This story was blown a bit out of proportion: they were advised by their lawyers to revise their wording over something they were already doing, which was collecting telemetry data, which just about every app collects and shares with their company. They want to know what features users interact with, what buttons on the UI they click on, to make internal product decisions about how to improve their browser. Every place I've developed software had me add analytics and telemetry, too.
• In 2020 when they laid off a bunch of workers and gave their CEOs a salary raise. But find a competitor who hasn't done this, especially in 2020 during the pandemic where it seemed like every corporation was taking some advantage of the situation.
• In 2015 when they added Pocket integration to their browser, Pocket being a third-party company they had partnered with. I found this to be a non-issue as I had never used Pocket, and if you click the button by accident it just asks if you want to activate it and log in, and if you don't, no browsing data is going anywhere.

I did a bit of research just now to dig up what the Mozilla controversies were, and the above are just about it. Some people were unhappy about Mozilla commentating on politics before. Again though I find it funny when people will crucify Mozilla over something small and then run to Google Chrome with Google's whole dedicated wiki page of controversies or to browsers like Brave with their own shady dealings and "sorry we got caught" history of controversies.

The only way you get an ethically spotless web browser, I suppose, is to go with a purely volunteer-driven, open source, non-corporate one like those Firefox downstream browsers. But, again, those browsers will not exist if Mozilla ever stops developing Firefox so this is why I just stick to Firefox and have for decades, ever since they wrested some market share away from Internet Explorer 6.

Now, feel free to fight it out in the comments but this is my hot take and I'm sticking to it. 😎