I’m back on Firefox in 2023. Here’s why.
I’ve come crawling back to Firefox in 2023, and I couldn’t be happier. My quest for a browser that truly suits my needs has been arduous. I don’t have long and intricate workflows for my browser. I’ll open the same couple of social media sites, picture-in-picture whichever video podcast I’m watching at the moment (Linus Tech Tips’ The WAN Show is a personal favourite), and the rest of my tabs are typically associated with whatever hobby I’m into at the time, random tech project I’m working on, or anything else that allows me to kill time on the internet.
My device time is divided between an M1 Pro 14” MacBook, a custom-built Windows PC, and my iPad and iPhone. There is a multitude of browsers that would allow me to fit everything in, and any number of them would have sufficed. But last week, when I was sitting at home with three browsers across the four devices, I decided I’d had enough. It was time to sit on one side of the fence.
And naturally, I picked a side of the fence that I hadn’t considered for years. Mozilla Firefox.
It wasn’t as if I’d never used Mozilla’s offering before. In the dark ages of Internet Explorer’s dominance, before Chrome was even a twinkle in a Googler’s eye, Mozilla Firefox was the only thing standing between Microsoft and complete domination of the browser space. Even as a preteen tech nerd (betraying my age a bit there…), I knew that Firefox was a better offering, with its tabbed browsing, extension support, and customizability.
In the intervening years, I’d flipped between several other browsers, including Google Chrome (which started life as a zippy upstart, as described in this oddly prescient CNET article), Microsoft Edge (both EdgeHTML and Chromium versions), Opera, Brave and Vivaldi, all at various times. Working as a front-end dev and automation tester in my career meant I’d have to keep tabs on all of them, including how they’d function, their quirks, and how to fix them when things went awry. But I hadn’t quite found that browser that just clicked.
For a while, Vivaldi felt like the one. Jon Stephenson von Tetszchner, the founder of Vivaldi Software, had also co-founded Opera Software in 1995, so his pedigree in building a sustainable browser business was unparalleled. He’d also famously pledged to swim across the Atlantic Ocean from Norway to the US if the downloads of Opera 8 exceeded 1.05 million within the first 96 hours after release, a challenge that he’d enthusiastically and promptly failed.
Vivaldi had everything I was looking for out of the box. The customizability was immense, and it gave such fine-grained control over user preferences, even without delving into back-end flags and settings! It was built on Chromium and not only supported a large percentage of the same plugins as Chrome did but also meant that the rendering engine barely skipped a beat when trying to use more complex sites. It didn’t mean that I was tightly coupled to the Google way of life (as I would be in Chrome), nor at the mercy of increasingly aggressive product placement (as I had when trialling Chromium Edge). It ran on macOS and Windows, so I could synchronise browser preferences between them. It seemed a perfect fit!
Unfortunately, there was always a “but” coming. Vivaldi met my needs on my desktop and laptop, but I still had an iPad and an iPhone, hoping for admittance to the Vivaldi party. (As of the time of writing, it’s a work in progress.) And after a few weeks of use, the cracks started showing. After loading it up with my chosen suite of extensions, things started getting funky. Certain extensions (mainly for tab management) weren’t compatible with Vivaldi’s custom user interface. Other extensions worked but caused horrible lag on fundamental browser interactions (I distinctly remember waiting ~60 seconds on my brand-new MacBook for a right-click to register). And, perhaps most egregiously, I started getting bizarre out-of-memory errors that weren’t happening on Chrome (namely when trying to watch an F1 race on Kayo).
Things were getting weird. But hey, I figured, there’s no perfect piece of software. I could work around those use cases while still sticking with Vivaldi. I would use Chrome for streaming on my Windows PC since it handled high-definition video streams without crashing. I’d switch across to Safari on my MacBook, by far the most efficient browser on macOS. But I’d also use Chrome on my MacBook since my work uses G Suite very heavily. Meanwhile, I’d swapped back to Safari on my iPhone but was still daily driving Brave on my iPad. All while using Edge on my client’s hardware.
Five browsers. I was giving myself a migraine.
That was when I reopened Firefox.
It greeted me enthusiastically, like an old friend that I was seeing for the first time in years. How’s it going? Did you want any of your imports from your old browsers? How about I refresh your browser profile for you so you get a nice slick user experience when you’re ready to jump back in?
I cautiously proceeded.
Sites appeared to load more quickly. The UI felt refreshingly snappy after the minutes spent waiting for Vivaldi to stop beach-balling. Everything was placed in a spot where it just made sense.
I installed a few extensions. Bitwarden, Dark Reader, Grammarly, Wikiwand, Surfshark. All good so far.
I opened up my MacBook and booted up Firefox again. (Perks of being in automation testing are that you’ll almost always keep a good suite of browsers installed.)
I signed into my Firefox account. All of my plugins synced across as if I was still using the Windows machine. Seamlessly. Ditto with my iPhone and my iPad.
It doesn’t sound like much, but having a cohesive experience after everything was like a breath of fresh air. Even as I write this entire blog post from start to finish inside the Medium editor, I’ve not had a single pop-up from Microsoft asking me to try Bing for the 5000th time. Or one single lock-up from a misbehaving Chromium extension.
Naturally, software changes all of the time. It evolves, priorities change, and software companies get bought and sold and born and die every second. But jumping back into Firefox after the headaches of my little browser crisis has so far felt like returning home. (Though opening an InPrivate window with Cmd+Shift+P rather than Cmd+Shift+N to get a clean browser session without cache is still something I’m fighting!)
Of course, there’s no saying whether or not I’ll stay on this path. Even last night, I watched Austin Evans’ video on Bing’s new ChatGPT integration, which has been in the press for good and bad reasons over the last few days. There’s an excellent chance we’re headed for a future where the company with the best AI implementation is going to “win” the browser war as Microsoft did with their monopolistic strong-arming back in the 90s. But for the time being, I’m enjoying getting reacquainted with an old friend.
