Google Chrome is the most popular web browser by a long shot—but should it be? Firefox provides many advantages over other web browsers, encourages an open internet, and focuses on you, the user. Here are the top reasons you should be using it.

Firefox Uses Less Battery Than Chrome

Using Firefox can increase the battery life on your laptop due to its superior resource efficiency compared to Chrome. This, along with other proven methods to improve your battery life, means you can go longer between charges and get more done while on the move.

Firefox Doesn’t Track Your Internet Activity to Make Money

Firefox is 100% free and doesn’t attempt to monetize your browsing habits by monitoring your internet activity. Some other web browsers track your internet history and behavior to build an advertising profile about you so that they can deliver personalized ads.

Google Chrome is arguably one of the worst offenders here(Google is an advertising company after all). They even had to admit that their supposedly private ‘Incognito Mode’ was still tracking users when they thought they were browsing in private.

Firefox Has Better Privacy Controls To Prevent Sites From Tracking You

Your web browser isn’t the only way you can be tracked around the internet. The websites you visit can also record your interactions: where you’ve been, what you’ve looked at, and what you’ve purchased with the goal of using that information to serve you ads or to sell to other businesses to analyze for their own purposes.

Firefox has robust privacy protections and also allows you to further enforce strict privacy rules to help you avoid this kind of tracking.

Firefox Facebook Containers and Multi-Account Containers Enhance Your Privacy

Keeping your work and private life separate can be difficult enough without websites trying to tie all of your data together. Firefox’s container functionality lets you isolate your internet activity and logins from each other, making sure that you don’t accidentally share your private thoughts on your work social media account, or let your employer see your web search history.

Multi-account containers can be set up to make sure that each website you use has its own separate logins, session, and cookies, while a Facebook container is available to specifically prevent Facebook (and its related products) from tracking you around the internet.

Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay Hide Your Personal Details

Mozilla VPN routes all of your internet traffic through a secure intermediate server, so your device doesn’t connect directly to the websites you visit. This both protects your data from being intercepted in transit, and hides your IP address so that it can’t be used to associate your online activities with you.

Firefox Relay is a service that provides single-use email addresses and phone numbers that forward on to your real email or phone, keeping your contact details private.

Firefox Is Open Source and Evolves With Time

A big part of why Firefox is able to focus on privacy over profit is because it is a community-developed open source project. It is backed by the not-for-profit Mozilla organization that oversees the project, working with paid developers and volunteer contributors.

The Mozilla organization is partially funded by some of the additional, user-friendly services offered (such as Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay) that are designed to enhance your internet experience and privacy.

By using Firefox, you are supporting an open internet that isn’t controlled by big companies, and is driven by user needs rather than profits.

Firefox Has a Huge Extension Ecosystem

Firefox has a huge array of extensions (or plugins), and going forward will grant plugin developers greater flexibility than Chrome’s more restrictive Manifest 3 plugin API.

This will give Firefox a leg-up, maintaining an ecosystem of innovative plugins that let you fully customize your internet experience with things like enhanced tab management. Plugins are also fully supported on Firefox for Android, bringing functionality previously only available to desktop users to mobile devices.

Firefox Is Highly Customizable

Firefox lets you make a lot of under the hood tweaks to its behavior using its hidden about: pages, including how the search and address bars behave and the appearance of new tabs.

Firefox also has a big library of themes to customize its appearance, and you can even make your own custom themes.

Firefox Sync and Pocket Keep Your Online Life Organized

Firefox sync keeps all of your bookmarks, internet history, passwords, preferences, and extensions securely in sync across your devices. It’s much more robust than Chrome’s sync tool and also serves as a great backup for all of your important credentials and bookmarks. Many apps are cloud based these days, so you can be back up and running where you left off by simply restoring your Firefox data on a new device if your old one is lost or broken.

Pocket is an app that helps you save, organize, and discover internet content. It’s perfect for saving something to read later, and finding content about topics that you are interested in.

Switching From Chrome to Firefox Is Easy

Moving from Chrome to Firefox is easy. All you need to do is install Firefox and follow the prompts to import your data from Chrome. If you already have Firefox installed, you can still move your data from Chrome without re-installing.