It's time for me to switch to Firefox

Published on 24 April 2025 by Andrew Owen (2 minutes)

I’m old enough to remember when web apps were written to work with Internet Explorer 6. Thankfully, the days of being dependent on specific browsers are mostly consigned to the past. But one reason for this is because most browsers use the Blink engine (derived from WebKit, which is in turn derived from KHTML). The alternative is Mozilla’s Gecko (used in Firefox). Chrome is faster than Firefox, but because of its architecture it’s a lot more resource hungry. And Mozilla recently added the one feature that was preventing me from switching: built in page translation (which enables me to interact with Spanish-language communities on Telegram).

Chrome has a reputation for using less RAM than Firefox, but in practice I’ve found the opposite to be true. This may be because I’m running them on an M1 Mac with only 8GB of RAM (which has an effect on how RAM is managed by the system). Chrome is faster. But Firefox doesn’t generate messages telling me my system has run out of RAM. My first approach to the problem was to get an external SSD and move all my data to it to leave more space for swapping RAM on the internal drive. I now know why Apple internal storage is so expensive: it’s an order of magnitude faster than the fastest external storage you can buy. But that didn’t completely eliminate the problem.

So I switched to Firefox. I was pleased to see that it offers to install the Privacy Badger, Facebook Container and ClearURLs privacy extensions on install. Although it still defaults to Google for search, it’s trivial to switch to DuckDuckGo. There’s a version of the Lighthouse plugin for auditing performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and so on. There’s the aforementioned Translation feature. And the developer console offers equivalent functionality to Chrome (there’s also a dedicated developer edition). Extensions are available for popular password managers, LanguageTool (my recommended grammar checker), reader view and RSS feeds.

Being in the Apple ecosystem, I haven’t entirely abandoned Safari. On mobile devices it generally gives the best browsing experience (and Apple forces other browsers to use Webkit). But I have installed the Firefox Focus private browser. It has a nice feature where you can enable it as a content blocker extension in Safari. I’ll update this article later this year and let you know how I get on.