Uninstall Firefox. It is finally dead. The only reason anyone is still using it is that it was the only viable (not really) alterative to Chromium browsers. That is no longer true.

Firefox now requires that all its users grant Mozilla “a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license” to their data. You cannot opt out of this and continue to use the browser.

Other Reasons to Stop Using Firefox

In addition to Firefox no longer being a good choice for privacy, Firefox is just objectively a bad browser.

Rendering Issues

Firefox has countless rendering issues that simply do not exist in other browsers.

I was going to post some example images of the Claude web interface to display the egregious failure of Firefox to properly render the gradient, but Medium’s compression made the comparison impossible. I encourage you to look at the difference yourself; it’s stark.

Bad Developer Experience

Firefox’s dev tools are simply not on the same level as Chromium’s. This has been discussed so frequently and is so widely known that I do not feel the need to repeat that discussion again here.

Terrible Power Consumption

Firefox now consumes an enormous amount of power when compared with other browsers. For a long while now many people have shared their personal anecdotes of their laptop’s charge lasting roughly around a third of what it lasts on Chromium or Safari when using Firefox.

Alternatives

Unfortunately there is no viable infallible alternative.

Brave has had its share of controversy.

Vivadi is not open source and in my experience, seems have broken or inconvenient features.

Opera is basically less ambitious Vivaldi.

Safari is Safari.

Librewolf is a great option for privacy as it is a privacy focused fork of Firefox, but it unfortunately still suffers from all of the other shortcomings of Firefox.

What I am Using

I’m returning to Brave. Despite their controversies, I like that they are not Firefox based, that they are trying to innovate new ways for website owners to make money besides embedded ads — though parts of this are related to the controversies — and that they ship with an ad blocker — something that should be the standard by now, and would be if a company that did not its revenue from advertising owned the most popular browser.

More Information

Embedded below are two videos on these topics. The first is a video by Mental Outlaw that covers information related to my privacy concerns with Firefox. The second is a video by Theo, and inspired me to talk about many of the ways Firefox is just an objectively bad browser in this article.

Final Sentiments

Thank you for reading my article. With all my experience on these matters I have to close with the notion that we desperately need to reimagine the internet as a whole.

The barrier of entry for creating and maintaining a browser engine is too high. HTML and potentially markup as a whole cannot be the best way to create user interfaces. HTTPS is more inconvenient to set up than it could be and does not hide where your traffic is going. JavaScript sucks. Fingerprinting is way too easy and should not be possible at all. A better web needs a scripting language that makes it impossible to fingerprint. More ways for sites to make revenue without embedded ads that create interests adversarial to the user would be nice.

Perhaps AI becoming the meta interface will solve most of these issues. Making API calls directly through an AI interface would eliminate virtually all fingerprinting. HTML holding back UI will no longer be an issue. Traffic destinations not being private will still be an issue. Advertising will no longer be a viable income strategy for websites anymore.

We cannot allow AI to inherit these issues. We cannot allow AI to collect your data for its parent corporation if this future is to be realized.

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