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

In fact, both Chrome and Firefox have tough security. Both include sandboxing, which isolates processes of the browser so a harmful website doesn’t infect other parts of your machine. So if you loaded a website with malicious code, it would be contained within the webpage so it couldn’t infect your files, webcam and microphone.

Google said there was one thing it could do better on: the inclusion of privacy settings to block tracking 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.”

Which browser is faster?

Some benchmark websites, which determine the speed of a browser by measuring the responsiveness of different web elements, say Chrome is faster. But some other benchmark sites say Firefox is faster. In my anecdotal testing as someone who juggles more than a dozen web tabs at a time, both were very speedy. Let’s call it a draw.

Mozilla’s promise that Firefox consumes less computer memory raises hopes that it should also use less battery life. Yet in my tests on a laptop running a script that automatically reloaded the top 10 news sites, Firefox lasted only a few minutes longer than Chrome before the battery was depleted. On another 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.

Firefox is the No. 2 computer browser, with about 12 percent of the desktop browser market, lagging far behind Chrome, which has about 67 percent, according to StatCounter. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari browsers are even farther behind in the desktop market, with Explorer’s share about 7 percent and Safari’s about 5.5 percent. On Android phones, the Chrome browser is still far more popular than Firefox’s mobile browser. And only lightweight versions of Firefox are available for Apple’s iOS devices.

Yet the path forward for Mozilla looks increasingly promising for consumers.

In addition to the normal Firefox browser, Mozilla offers Firefox Focus, a privacy-centric mobile browser that blocks trackers by default and purges your web browsing history as soon as you close out of a page.

(Original source)