Practical Privacy — Firefox Browser
Here’s an interesting thought exercise to kick off 2018: Ask yourself what application you use more than any other on your desktop. If you said anything other than “my web browser”, you’re probably lying (or possibly doing some very specific type of work). Over the course of the last decade, there has been a dramatic shift away from standalone software, and towards software that runs in your browser (also known as Software as a Service, or SaaS). At the time of this writing, the most popular desktop browser is Google’s Chrome browser…but that wasn’t always the case, and if you’re looking for an a browser that gives a better mind to privacy, there’s another option: Mozilla’s Firefox.
The History of Firefox
The story of how Firefox came to exist is pretty interesting. The origins of the browser trace all the way back to Netscape Navigator, the first web browser used by the masses. The Mozilla Foundation used Netscape as the basis for their first browser. After Internet Explorer emerged triumphant after the first browser wars, Mozilla used this as an opportunity to reboot their focus, and out of the ashes emerged the “Phoenix” browser. The browser was renamed to “Firebird” after naming and trademark issues, and then again for the same reasons to its current name, Firefox. The first version of the Phoenix browser was made available in 2002, and by 2009 it was already competing with Internet Explorer, taking upwards of 35% of the browser market. However, Google Chrome was released in 2008, and due to a number of factors including speed, adherence to web standards, features, and the weight of Google, it was able to displace both Internet Explorer and Firefox to become the dominant web browser.
How This Helps with Privacy
So if Google’s Chrome is the most popular browser, why should you use Firefox? From a privacy standpoint, it’s harder to provide a definitive answer to this, as opposed to when the debate was Firefox vs. Internet Explorer. Firefox is an open-source application, which means you get the benefit of a massive community poring over the source code of Firefox, ensuring there is no funny-business happening from a privacy perspective. That said, Google released the core part of Chrome as an open-source project as well, under the name “Chromium”. That means that like Firefox, users of Chromium benefit from a community that ensures the source code of Chromium doesn’t contain anything that would violate privacy.
In the end, Firefox gets the nod for two reasons:
1. Auto-updates. With the mainstream version of Firefox, the application auto-updates itself, ensuring you always have the latest version installed. This also happens on Google’s Chrome, but not on the open-source Chromium.
2. Firefox Quantum. If this article was written a year ago, I’d might lean more toward using Chromium, even despite the lack of auto-updates. However, Mozilla released a massive update in version 57 (August 2017) of Firefox, named “Quantum” that really modernizes both the look and feel of the browser. After a number of years, it definitely feels like Firefox is back to competing with Chrome from a user experience perspective.
Compared to where we were 15 years ago, with a locked-down, buggy, standards-ignoring, single proprietary option, the state of browser options are incomparably better. Whether you go with Firefox or Chromium, you’ll have a very modern browsing experience.
How To Get It
Installing Firefox is about as easy as it gets. For Windows and Mac, simply visit the Firefox download page, grab the installer, and install it just like any other program. If you’re using Linux (and you should seriously consider it, which I’ve covered in this post), simply launch your distribution’s package manager, search for Firefox, and let the manager do the rest.
Parting Thoughts
The web browser has grown from a fun app to “surf the web” to an absolutely integral tool that is often the only application that you’ll interact with on your computer. Because of this prominence, the browser holds and passes through a lot of our sensitive information, and thus it’s become a very attractive method for various entities to harvest that information for their own purposes. If you’d like to keep a tighter handle on how much access those entities have, consider an open-source option like Firefox.
Hopefully you enjoyed this article! To get some more great Practical Privacy tips, check out my other articles! If you’d like to learn even more, check out this video history of Mozilla Firefox on tilvids.com.
