Firefox: My On-Again Off-Again Favourite
I keep changing browsers. It is a problem.
Over the past three years I have used Firefox, Brave, Chrome, Safari, the DuckDuckGo browser, Vivaldi, and briefly Tor as a daily driver (that lasted four days). I settled on Firefox for a while, but then I switched to Brave because a work tool was acting up. Three weeks later I was back on Firefox. Then I tried the DuckDuckGo browser on my phone, but then I switched to Safari because the battery drain was too much. I have installed and uninstalled more browsers than most people have bookmarks. My partner finds this amusing. My phone's app drawer finds it exhausting. But through all of the switching, all of the testing, all of the "okay, this time I am committing to one browser for good," I always end up back at Firefox. Always. It takes a few weeks or a few months, but the return is inevitable.
The thing with Firefox is that it occupies a unique position. It is the only major browser that does not run on Google's Chromium engine. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, the new Arc browser — all of them are built on Chromium, which is Google's open-source browser framework. Firefox uses its own engine, called Gecko, maintained by Mozilla. Why does that matter? Because when 85 or 90 percent of all browsers share the same underlying code controlled by one company, that company has enormous influence over how the web itself works. Google can make changes to Chromium that affect every browser built on it. The Manifest V3 situation is a perfect example.
Manifest V3 is Google's update to how browser extensions work in Chromium. The old system, Manifest V2, allowed extensions like ad blockers to intercept and modify web requests in real time. Manifest V3 restricts that capability. Google says it is for security and performance. The practical effect is that ad blockers become less effective on Chrome and every other Chromium-based browser. uBlock Origin, the single best ad-blocking and tracker-blocking extension available, cannot run at full power under Manifest V3. On Firefox? No such restriction. Mozilla has said they will continue supporting both Manifest V2 and V3, which means uBlock Origin works exactly as it should. If you care about blocking ads and trackers at the extension level, Firefox is the only major browser that does not undercut you.
Out of the box, Firefox already does a reasonable job. Enhanced Tracking Protection is enabled by default and blocks known third-party tracking cookies, social media trackers from Facebook and others, fingerprinting scripts, and cryptominers. But the default setting is "Standard." If you go into Settings, then Privacy and Security, and switch to "Strict" mode, you get significantly stronger protection. Strict mode blocks cross-site cookies in all windows (not just private browsing), adds extra fingerprinting resistance, and blocks tracking content in all windows. I have been running Strict mode for over a year. In that time, maybe two or three Indian websites had minor layout issues because of it. I loaded those in a different browser and moved on. The compatibility impact is negligible.
Browser fingerprinting deserves a brief explanation because it is one of those things most people have not heard of but are definitely affected by. When you visit a website, your browser shares information about itself: your screen resolution, your operating system, your installed fonts, your language settings, your timezone, the specific version of your browser, the hardware capabilities of your device, and dozens of other data points. Individually, none of these identify you. Combined, they create a profile that is often unique to your specific device. Websites and ad networks use this fingerprint to track you across the web without needing cookies at all. You can delete cookies. You cannot easily change your browser fingerprint. Firefox's Strict mode includes fingerprinting protection that randomises some of these data points, making your browser look less unique.
The extensions situation on Firefox goes beyond just uBlock Origin. Privacy Badger, built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, learns which domains are tracking you and blocks them automatically. ClearURLs strips tracking parameters from URLs. And Multi-Account Containers is a Firefox-exclusive feature that I genuinely miss every time I switch to another browser. Containers let you create isolated environments within Firefox. You put Facebook in one container, your banking in another, your shopping in a third. Cookies from one container cannot see or interact with cookies from another. Facebook's tracking scripts, which are embedded on millions of websites, cannot link your browsing activity back to your Facebook session if they are in different containers. It is one of the most effective anti-tracking tools available and no other browser has anything quite like it.
On Android, Firefox is one of the only mobile browsers that supports full extensions. You can install uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android. Chrome on Android does not support extensions at all. Samsung Internet supports a small number of content-blocking extensions but nothing close to what Firefox offers. For someone who does most of their browsing on their phone, and in India that describes the majority of internet users, this is a significant difference. According to StatCounter data, Chrome holds about 85 percent of the browser market in India, with Samsung Internet at around 4 percent and Firefox at roughly 2 to 3 percent. The dominance of Chrome on Android devices, where it comes pre-installed, explains most of that gap. But a pre-installed default is not the same as the best choice.
Speed complaints about Firefox are outdated. The Quantum engine overhaul happened years ago, and in everyday use — loading pages, scrolling, running web apps — I cannot perceive any difference between Firefox and Chrome. Synthetic benchmarks might show small variations, but those do not translate to anything you would notice while actually using the browser. Memory usage is comparable. Start-up time is comparable. The "Firefox is slow" reputation comes from a version of Firefox that no longer exists.
What annoys me about Firefox? Some web developers still test only in Chrome, so you occasionally hit a website that renders slightly differently. It happens perhaps once every couple of months. Government portals are the worst offenders. And Mozilla's decision-making sometimes baffles me. They added a "Pocket" recommendation feature to the new tab page that nobody asked for. They accepted money from advertising partnerships that felt at odds with their privacy mission. They laid off a significant portion of their workforce in 2020 and again in 2024, which raises questions about the long-term sustainability of the organisation. Firefox's market share has been declining for years, and every percentage point it loses makes the Chromium monopoly stronger. I use Firefox partly because I think it is the best option and partly because I think it needs to exist for the health of the open web, and every user it keeps matters.
On the other hand, every time I leave Firefox, I end up remembering why I was there in the first place. No other browser gives me containers, full uBlock Origin support, independent rendering engine, and a non-profit behind it. Not one.
Brave: Great Features, Weird Crypto Stuff
I have gone back and forth on Brave more times than I can count, and my feelings about it remain genuinely split. The browser is excellent. The company makes me uneasy. These two things exist at the same time and I have not figured out how to reconcile them.
Brave is built on Chromium, which means every website that works in Chrome works in Brave. Every Chrome extension installs in Brave. Government portals that were built by developers who only tested in Chrome? They work. Banking apps, enterprise web tools, internal company dashboards? All fine. You get Chrome's compatibility with none of Chrome's surveillance, because Brave strips out Google's tracking code and telemetry before shipping the browser. When you install Brave, it does not talk to Google's servers the way Chrome does. That alone is a meaningful change.
The built-in privacy features, collectively called Shields, are on by default from the moment you install the browser. No configuration needed, no extensions to add. Shields blocks ads, third-party tracking cookies, fingerprinting scripts, bounce-tracking redirects, and a few other things. The effect on Indian websites is dramatic. Open the Times of India, NDTV, or any major Indian news site in Chrome and then open the same page in Brave. In Chrome, the page loads with dozens of ads, video overlays, tracking scripts, and consent popups. In Brave, the content loads fast and clean. The difference in page load speed is noticeable not just on benchmarks but with your eyes. Indian news websites are among the most heavily ad-loaded pages on the internet, and Brave handles them better than any other browser I have tested.
Brave shows you a running count on the new tab page of how many ads and trackers it has blocked since you installed it. After a month, the numbers are startling. Tens of thousands of trackers blocked, hundreds of HTTPS upgrades, hours of estimated loading time saved. The numbers are a bit performative (they are designed to make you feel good about using Brave), but the underlying blocking is real.
The thing with Brave, though, is the crypto stuff. Brave has its own cryptocurrency token called BAT (Basic Attention Token). The idea, originally, was to create an alternative revenue model for the web. Instead of invasive advertising, Brave would show you privacy-respecting ads (optional, off by default), and you would earn BAT tokens for viewing them. You could then tip content creators with your BAT. In theory, it is an interesting experiment. In practice, the crypto association puts a lot of people off, and the whole BAT economy never reached the scale needed to become a real alternative to traditional web advertising.
You can ignore the crypto features entirely. Brave Rewards is off by default. The BAT wallet does not appear unless you activate it. If you never touch those settings, Brave behaves like a very good privacy browser with no crypto anything. But the association lingers. When you recommend Brave to someone and they Google it, one of the first things they learn about is the cryptocurrency angle, and that raises suspicions. People think: is my browsing data being used for some crypto scheme? The answer is no, but the perception is hard to shake.
More damaging was the affiliate code scandal in 2020. Brave was caught automatically appending affiliate referral codes to URLs when users went to certain cryptocurrency exchange websites like Binance and Coinbase. If you typed "binance.com" in the address bar, Brave would redirect you through Brave's affiliate link, earning the company a referral fee. Users had not consented to this. Brave's CEO, Brendan Eich, apologised and the behaviour was removed immediately, but the damage to trust was done. A browser that markets itself on privacy was silently modifying user URLs for profit. That is a contradiction, and people noticed.
Brendan Eich himself is a complicated figure. He is the creator of JavaScript and a co-founder of Mozilla. His technical credentials are not in question. He resigned from Mozilla in 2014 after public backlash over a political donation, and went on to found Brave. Depending on who you talk to, that history either matters or it does not when evaluating the browser. I mention it because people bring it up constantly in discussions about Brave, and ignoring it would feel dishonest.
On the technical privacy side, Brave does things that other Chromium browsers do not. It randomises your browser fingerprint, making it harder for websites to track you using the fingerprinting technique I described earlier. It blocks third-party cookies by default. It upgrades connections to HTTPS when possible. It has a built-in Tor integration for private windows (not as secure as using the actual Tor Browser, but better than a normal private window). The "De-AMP" feature strips Google AMP pages and redirects you to the actual publisher's website. The "Debounce" feature skips tracking redirect pages that sit between you and your destination link.
I use Brave as my secondary browser. When a website does not work properly in Firefox, I open it in Brave instead of falling back to Chrome. For people who want a browser that works on every website, blocks tracking out of the box, and does not require any configuration, Brave is probably the easiest privacy upgrade available. Just download it, set it as your default, and browse. The fact that it is Chromium-based means the transition from Chrome is painless — you can import your bookmarks, passwords, and history directly.
On the other hand, I cannot bring myself to make it my primary browser because I keep thinking about the affiliate code thing. Trust is a strange currency. You can build it over years and lose it in a single news cycle. Brave's technical privacy features are genuinely strong. Their corporate track record gives me pause. Both of these statements are true at the same time.
The Others: Chrome, Safari, Tor, and Why I Always Come Back to Firefox
I should talk about Chrome, because pretending it does not exist would be absurd. Chrome is the most popular browser in India by an enormous margin. StatCounter puts its Indian market share at around 85 percent across desktop and mobile. It comes pre-installed on every Android phone, and since Android dominates the Indian smartphone market with roughly 95 percent share, most Indians have never actively chosen a browser. They use the one that was already there.
Chrome is a good browser. It is fast, it is stable, it works on every website, the developer tools are the industry standard. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But Chrome is built by Google, an advertising company, and the browser reflects that. Chrome tracks your browsing history and feeds it into Google's advertising profile for you. Incognito mode was sending data to Google's servers until they got sued for it and settled for $5 billion in 2024. The "help improve Chrome" features, which are on by default, send usage data back to Google. Chrome is the front door to Google's advertising business, and every feature in it is built with that context in mind.
If your employer requires Chrome or if specific web applications only work in Chrome, there are steps you can take. Block third-party cookies in the settings. Turn off every "help improve Chrome" and "make searches and browsing better" toggle you can find. Install uBlock Origin Lite (the full version is being degraded by Manifest V3, but the Lite version still blocks ads). Switch your default search engine to DuckDuckGo or Startpage. Disable "Preload pages" so Chrome does not make requests to websites you have not actually visited yet. Will this make Chrome as private as Firefox? No. Chrome still contacts Google servers in the background in ways you cannot fully disable without breaking functionality. But it is a large improvement over the factory defaults.
The Chromium monopoly is something I think about more than most people probably do. When one company's rendering engine powers 85 to 90 percent of all browsers, that company has outsized influence over web standards, extension capabilities, and the technical direction of the internet itself. Google's push for Manifest V3 affects not just Chrome but every browser built on Chromium. Their decisions about which web APIs to support or deprecate ripple across the entire browser market. Firefox, running its own Gecko engine, is the primary counterweight. Safari uses WebKit, which provides some diversity, but Apple only makes Safari for its own devices. Firefox is the only cross-platform, open-source, independently-engined browser available, and its shrinking market share weakens that independence year by year. Every person who switches from Chrome to Firefox, even for a month, contributes to keeping an alternative alive.
Safari on Apple devices is quietly one of the better options for privacy. Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention was blocking third-party cookies and cross-site tracking years before Google claimed to care about it. Safari was the first major browser to introduce anti-fingerprinting measures. The Privacy Report, accessible by tapping the shield icon in the address bar, shows you how many trackers Safari has blocked on each website. Indian news sites and e-commerce platforms regularly trigger 20 to 40 blocked trackers per page — a number that tells you something uncomfortable about how those sites treat their visitors.
Safari has limitations. The extension library is small compared to Firefox and Chrome. Apple controls exactly which extensions are allowed, and the approval process is slow. But for most people, the built-in protection is strong enough that extensions are optional rather than required. If you pay for iCloud+ (which starts at 99 rupees per month in India), you also get Private Relay, which hides your IP address from websites by routing your traffic through two separate relay servers. It is not a full VPN, but it adds a meaningful layer of IP address privacy.
On iOS, every browser uses Safari's WebKit engine underneath, regardless of what the browser is called. Chrome on iPhone, Firefox on iPhone, Brave on iPhone — they are all WebKit under the hood, with different interfaces and some different privacy features layered on top. The rendering, the JavaScript execution, the page loading is all WebKit. So on iPhone, you might as well use Safari itself, because Apple optimises it for the hardware and the privacy features are built in. The battery life difference alone is noticeable. Third-party browsers on iOS drain the battery faster because they are fighting against the system's own optimisation for Safari.
Tor Browser sits at the extreme end of the privacy spectrum. Tor routes your internet traffic through three relay servers (called nodes) scattered around the world. Each node only knows the addresses of the node before it and the node after it. The entry node knows your IP address but not which website you are visiting. The exit node knows which website you are visiting but not your IP address. No single point in the chain has the full picture. The result is genuine anonymity, not just privacy, but actual anonymity where connecting your identity to your browsing activity becomes extremely difficult even for sophisticated adversaries.
The trade-off is speed. Because your traffic bounces through three relays in different countries, every website takes noticeably longer to load. Five to fifteen seconds per page is typical. Streaming video is impractical. Many websites throw up CAPTCHAs constantly because Tor exit nodes are flagged. Indian banking websites and government portals will not work properly. Some websites block Tor traffic entirely. I have Tor Browser installed, and I use it when I have a specific reason to need anonymity. I have never lasted more than a few days trying to use it as a daily browser. It is a specialised tool, not a daily driver, and treating it as one leads to frustration.
The DuckDuckGo browser deserves a mention for a specific audience: people who want privacy without configuration. Install it, open it, and it blocks trackers by default using DuckDuckGo's own tracker radar dataset. The "fire button" on the mobile app clears all tabs and data with one tap. My mother uses it on her phone. She has never adjusted a setting. She does not know what a tracker is. She does not need to. The browser handles everything silently. On desktop (available for Windows and Mac), it is still maturing but functional. For someone who will never install an extension, never change a setting, and just wants something that works, the DuckDuckGo browser is a reasonable choice.
The thing with all of these browsers is that none of them is perfect. Firefox has the best extension support and the most important engine independence, but its market share is shrinking and some websites occasionally render oddly. Brave has the best out-of-the-box blocking and full Chrome compatibility, but the company has had trust issues. Safari is excellent on Apple hardware but does not exist on Android or Windows. Tor provides real anonymity but is too slow for normal use. Chrome works everywhere but is a data collection pipeline. Every choice involves a trade-off.
For my Android phone, I use Firefox with uBlock Origin, Enhanced Tracking Protection on Strict, and DuckDuckGo as my search engine. For those random links people send on WhatsApp, I open them in Firefox Focus, which is permanent private browsing mode. No history, no cookies saved, trackers blocked. I read whatever was sent, close it, and nothing lingers. On my iPad, I use Safari, because Apple's privacy protections are built in and on iOS the rendering engine is WebKit regardless of which browser you pick.
If someone forced me to pick exactly one browser for everything, phone and laptop, it would be Firefox. Not because it is the best at any single thing, but because it does everything well enough and the independence of having a non-Chromium engine matters to me. On the other hand, I would understand anyone who picks Brave for convenience, or Safari on Apple devices for integration. There is no single correct answer. There is only the question of which trade-offs you find acceptable.
Anyway. I will probably switch browsers again next month. Currently eyeing Zen Browser, which is Firefox-based but with a completely different interface. Will report back if I actually stick with it. (I probably will not.)
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