Google Chrome vs Firefox
One’s a behemoth, the other an old(er) pretender
WHEN IT COMES to browsing the web, more than six in ten of us use Google’s Chrome browser. Its dominance has slipped slightly in recent years, but that only tells part of the story. Beneath Chrome’s hood is Google’s open-source Chromium browser and Blink web engine, which renders web pages and performs other core tasks, including navigation, running scripts, and security. Virtually all other web browsers—including Microsoft Edge—now use Blink rather than develop their own proprietary engines.
While Apple continues to plow its own furrow with WebKit, the only other standout is Mozilla’s Gecko engine, used to power its Firefox browser. Unlike virtually any other browser comparison, then, we’re not simply splitting hairs between two browsers who share large portions of code from the open-source Chromium browser project; we’re genuinely comparing apples and pears.
Any comparison, then, must start with Blink and Gecko. For the most part they work in a practically identical manner, so when you open a website in either browser, you see no difference. Behind the scenes, however, there are many differences—in the past, websites often produced multiple versions of a web page, each one optimized for a different browser or web engine.
Those days are long gone, and one reason why so many browsers have switched to Blink is because most sites focus solely on producing pages that work with it. Gecko does its best to keep up, but there are some pages that won’t load properly (if at all)—however, Firefox users can simply try the pages in Edge without having to go near Chrome at all, although it’s obviously still a faff.
Chrome also wins hands down when it comes to raw performance, outpacing Firefox by an average of around 40 percent in our tests using the three benchmarks at Browserbench.org. This translates to faster loading times and a snappier experience overall, but in the real world this is small beer—Firefox is perfectly responsive and fast enough in everyday use.
It’s at this point that Chrome starts to lose its luster, thanks in no small part to Google’s own practises around security and privacy. For example, the behemoth has long threatened to remove the functionality that allows ad-blockers to fully block ads on web pages, and it looks like this may finally come to pass this year. Google has also been rolling out plans to kill off tracking cookies, but this isn’t an act of altruism; it plans to use its own tracking mechanisms instead. This should not be surprising for a company that dominates the web advertising and user profiling sphere.
In stark contrast, Mozilla stands firmly in the court of online privacy, as evidenced by its own Enhanced Tracking Protection tools, which have evolved over time to offer a wide range of options for blocking unwanted trackers. A recent addition is Total Cookie Protection, which prevents cookies from being able to follow you from site to site. Users can also experiment with even more restrictive settings at the risk of breaking some sites’ functionality (you can then whitelist those sites or take the hint to steer clear).
THE BROWSER EXPERIENCE Moving away from the underlying engine to the browsers themselves, both Chrome and Firefox offer a similar subset of core features. Both pioneered tabbed browsing
and allow you to sign into an account (your master Google account in Chrome, a dedicated Mozilla account in Firefox) to sync settings, passwords, add-ons, and tabs across all your devices—including mobile. Both feature well-stocked addon stores for increasing the browser’s functionality beyond the basics too.
Chrome scores additional points for natively supporting multiple profiles, which you could use on a solely personal level—for example, to separate work and home life—or to share the browser with multiple users on a single PC. There’s even a ‘Guest’ option for temporary access, ensuring your settings, tabs, and bookmarks remain private.
While not present in Firefox natively, you can gain this per-user sharing experience with the Profile Switcher for Firefox add-on. However, Mozilla also offers its own official Multi-Account Containers add-on, which allows you to separate various parts of your life into individually color-coded containers. Each container houses its own tabs and login details (so you can log into the same service with different accounts), plus each container is sandboxed from the others, allowing you to contain trackers within each silo. You can even integrate your containers into Mozilla’s paid-for VPN or your own proxy setup for both security and geographical reasons (you could, for example, have one container sited at home, and the other for abroad, giving you access to local sites and currencies).
It’s worth pointing out that neither Chrome’s native features nor Firefox’s add-ons can hold a torch to Vivaldi’s Workspaces/ Tab Stacks feature for bringing order to dozens of chaotic tabs.
As you’d expect from two venerable browsers that share a similar feature set, there’s also little to choose between them on the user interface front. Chrome feels sleeker and simpler—the side panel providing one-click access to history, bookmarks, synced tabs, and so on is a nice touch, while Firefox offers one-click access to your history (and tabs) only.
One honorable mention should go to Firefox’s integration with Pocket, which stems back to Mozilla’s partnership with (and then acquisition of) Pocket. The free account lets you save a simple list of content to return to later, while Premium adds a permanent library, full-text search and unlimited highlights, among other things. It’s a good feature that outclasses Chrome’s simple Reading List option, but given you can add Pocket to Chrome via an extension, it’s not the killer feature it might otherwise be.
Long story short, there’s very little to differentiate the two when it comes to features and user experience. This leaves you choosing between performance—
Chrome wins comfortably—or privacy and the open-source ethos, and here, of course, Firefox is the victor. You might be tempted to try a more privacy focused Chromium browser like Vivaldi or Brave to bypass Google, but striking a blow for open web standards in 2023 means rejecting Chromium altogether, and that means choosing Firefox.–