Why is it better to use Firefox?

Mozilla Firefox is one of the most famous browsers, this article will tell you why it is preferred to use it.

Privacy

Firefox is operated by the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization that is in no way interested in collecting your personal data. Mozilla doesn't care about your search queries, websites visited, or the amount of time you spend online. This is not Mozilla's business model, but other popular browsers.

Even if you don't mind having your browser track your activity for privacy reasons, you must have experienced the situation when you bought an unusual gift and had to see ads for it on all the sites you visited. The Internet is great, so "customizing" it to the interests of the user is sometimes very justified.

I admit that if I could add the phrase "open source" to all my search queries, I would get more appropriate results. But then again, I'd like to be able to enable this option myself, rather than having to put up with the default setting of this and many other unknown settings that someone else has chosen for me and that I have no control over.

Mozilla has the following policy: Take less. Keep better. No secrets. Firefox doesn't stop there and offers account monitoring, an optional service from Mozilla that will alert you if your account is compromised in a large-scale data breach. In addition, Mozilla offers a paid VPN using the open-source Wireguard software, so you can sit safely online anywhere.

Container Interaction

It's hard to believe, but there was a time when the most popular web browsers didn't have tabs. In the late 90's and early noughties, when you wanted to open 2 web pages at the same time, you had to do it in two different browser windows. Firefox (then Mozilla's browser) was practically the pioneer of the tabbed interface.

Nowadays, all browsers are supposed to have tabs. But there is a very interesting twist to the tabbed interface capabilities in Firefox extensions. The Firefox Multi-Account Containers plugin, developed by Mozilla itself, can turn each tab into an isolated "container" within the browser.

Let's say your employer uses Google Apps, but you personally don't trust Google with your personal information. In that case, you can use the Multi-Account Containers plugin and isolate your professional activities. That way, Google will only remember what you do at work and won't have access to other areas of your life.

You can even open the same site in two different accounts. There is another bonus - color-coded tabs. Very handy if you want to isolate sites or just add new visual cues to your browser.

UI design

As much as we humans love all things new, we need something familiar and reliable for comfort. Over the years, Firefox has repeatedly updated its interface; it has introduced many innovations that are now considered unofficial industry standards. But, by and large, the design itself has remained pretty much unchanged - it retains all the user interface concepts you're used to.

When you download a file, you are prompted to choose what Firefox will do with the file. You can open the file in a suitable application or save it to disk. Firefox can remember your choice, or ask you each time you download a file. You can open the application menu by clicking on the newfangled hamburger icon... or press Alt and a "traditional" menu will open on top of the Firefox window.

Everything in Firefox feels familiar to both long-time users and newcomers, as the application is based on years of experience in user interface design. Where something could be improved - it will improve, but where it would be intuitively wrong to change something, Firefox will leave everything as we know it.

Developer Tools

Once upon a time, when the World Wide Web first appeared, you could open any site and view its source code. Repeating this a few times was a good way to learn HTML. Everything was open, transparent, obvious, and relatively simple.

Over time, the Internet has become a powerful cloud-based supercomputer. Sometimes it takes more than a piece of markup text to get meaningful information about a site. And so that everyone can figure out how a particular site works, Firefox has added a set of powerful developer tools to the browser.

This feature was originally developed in Firefox (it was still called Firebug in 2006), but many browsers now have it. Not all developer tools are the same. But it's the developer panel that has made Firefox my favorite browser for web design and UX testing.

Open Source

Most importantly, Firefox is completely open source. It's a great browser that has nothing to hide. The developers have no ulterior motives, their goal is to keep the web open, educate people about the possibilities of the internet, and promote open-source to solve everyday problems

You can make Firefox better. For example, by submitting a report on what you don't like. You can also review the code that's running while you're surfing the web. Firefox has been an advocate for the open web for decades. It has stayed true to its principles and even recruited a few competitors into its camp, who would hardly dare to voluntarily switch to open-source if Firefox didn't live up to public expectations.

Firefox is a powerful tool of the modern Internet and a great browser. Firefox works on PC and mobile. So do yourself a favor and download Firefox.