Google's Chrome web browser has held a dominating market share (over 50 percent) for years. But is it time to switch to Firefox Quantum? We compare the two.

Ever since it was first released almost a decade ago, Google’s Chrome browser has been the most consistent piece of technology in my life. Docker for mac how it works. I’ve gone through a legion of phones, laptops, and headphones, I’ve jumped around between Android, iOS, Windows Phone, macOS, and Windows, but I’ve rarely had reason to doubt my browser choice. Things have changed in recent times, however, and those changes have been sufficient to make me reconsider. After so many years away, I’m returning to Firefox, in equal measure pushed by Chrome’s downsides as I am pulled by Firefox’s latest upgrades. If a friend were to ask me what the best web browser is, I’d answer “Chrome” in a heartbeat, so don’t mistake this as a screed against Google’s browser.

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I still see it as the most fully-featured and trouble-free option for exploring the web. It’s just that sometimes there are reasons to not use the absolute best option available. Here are mine. Chrome has outgrown its competition in a way that’s unhealthy The thing that woke me up to my over-reliance on Chrome was when Google. I’d usually be delighted to have ad blocking automated away, but the surrounding conversation about Google — an ad company — having sway over which ads are and are not acceptable to present to users convinced me there was a problem., Chrome is now used by 60 percent of web users, both on mobile and desktop devices, and Firefox looks respectable with 12 percent of desktops, but is almost a rounding error with only 0.6 percent of mobile devices. Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge don’t look much better, even though they’re the default option on their respective OS platforms.

Chrome has outgrown its competition in a way that’s unhealthy. My colleague Tom Warren already, with web developers optimizing and coding specifically for Chrome (and Google encouraging the practice), with unhappy connotations of the crummy old days when Internet Explorer was the dominant browser for the web. Chrome came to liberate us from the shackles of IE, but like many revolutionary leaders, too many years in power have corrupted Chrome’s original mission. Before I settled on Firefox as my Escape from Chrometown alternative, I gave Safari a solid couple of months as my primary browser. If I were committed to using only iPhones, iPads, and Macs for the rest of my tech life, I might still be on Safari. Its performance is great on both iOS and macOS — though I’d be lying to you if I were to say I could tell a difference in speed between any of the modern browsers — and it offers a choice of ad blockers among a reasonable selection of browser extensions.

The options are nowhere near as varied as Chrome’s extension library, but that’s a non-issue for me since I’ve never been dependent on extensions in the first place. Today’s Firefox is a very different beast from the memory hog of a few years ago But I’m writing this in Firefox today for a very simple reason: cross-platform compatibility. I recently set up a new Windows laptop, and having to deal with a browser that doesn’t know me or my preferences was just an exercise in frustration. Safari’s nice, and I’m certain it’s good enough to supplant Chrome for Apple device users, but for me it’s a non-starter. I need a browser that knows me as well on a Huawei smartphone or Lenovo ThinkPad as it understands me an on iPhone X. Like Chrome and Safari, Firefox has a built-in password manager that saves my logins and passwords as I browse, which I can then protect with a master password.

One password, I can remember. Dozens of weird alphanumerical concoctions?

That’s where I need the browser to step in and help, and Firefox has been great in that respect. With Safari, I had a couple of occasions where the browser would either forget a password or get confused about where to save it when, for example, I’m logging into more than one Google account. Firefox keeps all this stuff straight and, so far as I can tell, secure. (Security pros will tell you that a dedicated password manager is best, of course.) In pondering my browser switch, I did the obvious thing and looked at benchmark comparisons among the most popular browsers, while also reading up on real-world experience with regard to battery life and other less obvious impacts.