As described in my previous post, I am actively seeking to live a more open source lifestyle by using open source software whenever it is practical. I am proud to announce that I have finally switched to Firefox as my primary web browser.
A brief history
I have been using Chrome forever. While chrome’s core, Chromium is open source , Google Chrome does not make a user’s privacy a first-class citizen. There is tons of data being sent back to Google and I value my privacy.
Enter Firefox Quantum
In November of 2017, Mozilla announced the latest version of their browser, Firefox Quantum. This was a major release of their browser that made Firefox almost twice as fast as it was before. They also reduced the system footprint, taking down the CPU and RAM usage significantly.
Making the switch
The biggest gripe I had with Google chrome was the CPU usage, it would constantly cause the fan on my laptop to fire up when doing simple things like watching videos and put the CPU usage of “Google Chrome Helper” to 100%+. This is frustrating because it kills my battery for relatively mundane tasks.
Unfortunately, when Quantum was released, a lot of necessary functionality didn’t exist because they redid their Add On framework which made things like LastPass unusable. This meant that I switched to Safari for my main browser. Safari is fast, power efficient, and I trust Apple not to harvest my data. As a developer, however, I absolutely hate their developer tools. Safari is also not open source.
Now that all of my major tools support the new Firefox, I am happy to announce that it is my main browser!
What web browser do you prefer?