Chrome controls about 65% of the browser market right now. Safari has second place locked up because, well, if you own an iPhone you’re probably using Safari. Firefox? Somewhere around 2 to 3%, which sounds pathetic until you realize that still works out to roughly 305 million people.
That’s a lot of users for a browser most tech journalists love writing obituaries for.
Extensions Without Google’s Permission Slip
Here’s where Firefox earns its keep. People who manage dozens of accounts, scrape pricing data, or run automated testing across regions need a browser that stays out of their way. Firefox does that better than anything on Chromium right now.
The big reason is Manifest V3. Google rolled out this update to Chrome’s extension platform and it kneecapped a bunch of privacy and ad-blocking tools by limiting background scripts. Firefox picked up parts of MV3, sure, but it kept the blocking WebRequest APIs intact. uBlock Origin still runs properly. If you’re using a proxy server for Firefox at MarsProxies to manage connections across locations, the extension can do its job without Chrome’s restrictions getting in the way.
And then there’s about:config, basically a control panel for people who know what they’re doing. Disable WebRTC leaks with one flag toggle. Force DNS over HTTPS through Cloudflare or NextDNS in two lines. Chrome has nothing like it, and probably never will.
The Privacy Angle Is Real, Not Marketing
Look, every browser markets itself as “private” now. But Chrome is made by a company that pulled in $307 billion in ad revenue last year. Firefox is made by the Mozilla Foundation, a nonprofit. Those two organizations have very different ideas about what your browsing data should be used for.
Firefox ships with Enhanced Tracking Protection already switched on. Third-party cookies, social trackers, cryptominers, fingerprinting scripts: all blocked from the start. Mozilla’s privacy documentation states the browser is built so that Mozilla itself doesn’t know which sites you visit. Whether you fully trust that or not, it’s a wildly different stance from Chrome.
Remember when Google said they’d kill third-party cookies? That got delayed, reworked, and essentially shelved. Users who cared about tracking had to dig through settings menus to get protections that Firefox just turns on by default.
Open Source Isn’t a Buzzword Here
Firefox runs on the Gecko engine and the whole thing is open source under the Mozilla Public License. Anyone with the skills can read the code, fork it, rebuild it. Tor Browser runs on Firefox’s codebase. So does LibreWolf, a privacy-hardened variant that strips out telemetry.
This matters for accountability too. In 2017, Mozilla quietly pushed a Mr. Robot promotional extension to users without asking. The backlash was fast and loud, precisely because people could see what happened in the code. Good luck pulling off that kind of community audit with Safari or Edge.
Dev Tools That Deserve More Credit
Chrome DevTools gets all the attention, and it’s good. But Firefox’s developer toolkit has a few things Chrome still doesn’t match. The CSS Grid inspector is genuinely excellent, and the Flexbox overlay tool makes debugging layout issues way faster than toggling classes.
Firefox’s responsive design mode is another winner. QA testers can simulate viewports for different devices without extensions, which saves real time when you’re checking if a client’s page breaks on tablet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points to Firefox-compatible tools like Privacy Badger and NoScript as strong options for tracker testing, and that endorsement from a respected digital rights organization says something about the browser’s ecosystem.
Performance Caught Up Years Ago
Firefox used to be slow. That was true, and people who switched to Chrome in 2012 had good reasons. But Firefox Quantum landed in late 2017 and rebuilt the rendering engine from scratch. The Gecko engine handles multi-process work well now, and RAM usage with 40 or 50 tabs open tends to come in lower than Chrome.
It won’t top Chrome on every benchmark. In practice though, with a stack of extensions running, Firefox holds its own.
Who Firefox Is Actually For Now
Mozilla pulls in about $500 million a year, mostly from its search partnership with Google (yes, the irony is noted). The browser keeps getting updated and it’s clearly not disappearing.
Firefox stopped chasing mainstream market share a while ago. What it offers instead is a browser for people who think about how their tools work: real privacy defaults, an extension system that doesn’t answer to an ad company, and open source code you can verify yourself. No other mainstream browser gives you all three.
Chrome is the path of least resistance. Firefox is a choice. That distinction keeps 305 million people coming back.
