Firefox Is Back. It’s Time to Give It a Try.

Have you ever felt that the web is breaking?

When you are shopping for toaster oven, you can expect an ad that oven to stalk you from site to another site. If you have a few web browser tabs open, your laptop battery will drain very fast. And don’t get me to start on those videos which automatically play whenever you are scrolling through that webpage.

The web has become now annoying, often toxic and of course an unsafe place to hang out. More Important, you give up your all secret privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads.

That is why it is now the time to try a different browser. Remember Firefox? The web browser, which is developed by the nonprofit Mozilla, which was emerged in the early 2000s as the most faster, better designed vessel to surf the web. But that became irrelevant after the Google in 2008 released Chrome, a faster, more secure and versatile browser.

“If they don’t trust the web, they won’t use the web,” Mark Mayo, Mozilla’s chief product officer, said in an interview. “That just felt us like that might be actually the direction we are going on. And so we started to think about the tools and the architectures on the different approaches.”

Now the Firefox is back. Mozilla release the very new version last year, code-named Quantum. It is designed very fast; Mozilla said the revamped Firefox consumes less memory than the competition, meaning you can open up too many tabs and browsing that will still feel buttery smooth.

Most Amazing Feature, Now the Firefox offers the privacy tools, like a built-in feature which allows you to block the ad trackers and a “container” that can be easily installed to prevent the Facebook from monitoring your activities across the web. Most other web browsers don’t include those features yet.

After testing the Firefox for about three months, I found it to be the best then Chrome in most categories. In the end, Firefox’s thoughtful privacy features convinced me to switch and make it my primary browser.

Here why you should consider it too…

Privacy Features

Both the Google Chrome and the Mozilla Firefox support thousands of extensions, which are add-ons that allow you to modify your browser experience. Well, Chrome do wins in terms of number from Firefox around with hundreds of thousands of extensions roughly 11,000.

Using Firefox for over 3 months, there was not anything that I wanted to do in Chrome I could not do on Firefox. Both the browsers do support the 1Password, The most popular password management program. Both browsers do support the extensions that blocks the automatic auto playing videos when you visit any website. And both of the web browsers do support uBlock Origin, the ad blocker recommended by many security experts.

Mozilla Firefox also offers the extension called Facebook Container. Normally, the Facebook can track your browsing activities even outside its social media site by using the trackers planted on other websites like web cookies. With the Mozilla Firefox extension, when you open the Facebook in a browser tab, it isolates your facebook identity into its own container, making it difficult for the social network to follow you outside its site.

Firefox is now on the top for the privacy features that are baked into the browser. Inside the privacy settings, You can easily turn on the tracking protecting, which basically blocks the online trackers from collecting your browser data across the multiple websites. With Chrome, you can install a third-party extension to block trackers—but the very few add-ons that you have to tack onto your browser for the better.

The Security experts appreciate the Mozilla Firefox for stepping up its efforts on privacy.

“Firefox does seem to have positioned itself as the privacy-friendly browser, and they have been doing a fantastic job improving security as well,” said Cooper Quintin, a security researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights nonprofit. “On the other hand, Google is fundamentally an advertising company, so it’s unlikely that they will ever have a business interest in making Chrome more privacy friendly.”

“You can’t have privacy without security on the web,” said Parisa Tabriz, a director of engineering for Google who specializes in security.

In fact, the both web browsers Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have tough security. Both include sandboxing, which isolates processes of the browser so a harmful website does not infect other parts of your machine. If you loaded a website which contains the malicious code, it could not infect your files, webcam and microphone.

Google do said that there is one thing that we could do better on: The inclusion of privacy settings to block the tracking of technology, similar to the tools that Firefox includes.

“I think that’s something that we can improve on,” Ms. Tabriz said. “Firefox has some settings that we’re also exploring.”

Speed and Battery Tests

Which browser is faster?

Some of the benchmark websites, which determines the speed of a web browser by measuring the responsiveness of a different web elements, say Chrome is faster. But some other benchmark sites say Firefox is faster.

Well Mozilla Firefox promise that Firefox do consumes less computer memory and raises hopes that it must use less battery life. Firefox lasted only a few minutes longer than the Google Chrome before the battery was depleted. On the other hand the test, which involved streaming a Netflix video on a loop on each browser, the battery lasted about 20 minutes longer when the chrome browser was used.

“The advantage of when you get beaten down is you kind of drop some of your own ego around your decisions,” Mr. Mayo said. “We had a lot less to lose.”