That’s useful for the likes of Google Docs or Twitter. You can also download web pages as apps which then run as stand-alone applications without having to launch the whole browser. The new Chromium-powered version is considerably faster than its predecessor and includes some useful features including Read Aloud, the ability to cast media such as inline videos to Chromecast devices, an Opera-style start page and a good selection of add-ons such as password managers, ad-blockers and so on. It’s Windows’ default browser and there are also versions for iOS, Android and Mac. But Microsoft is on the side of the angels now and its Edge browser has been rebuilt with Chromium at its heart. Older readers will remember Microsoft as the villains of the Browser Wars that ultimately led to the rise of Firefox and Chrome.

Windows really wants it to be the default Mozilla’s struggling for income, so if you value Firefox you might want to visit to help secure its future. The lack of in-house quality assurance teams was also highlighted – much of Mozilla’s QA is outsourced – and in early 2020 the QA leads were reportedly let go in a round of layoffs. 2019 wasn’t a great year for Mozilla, with a major add-on crisis in May that Peter Saint-Andre and Matthew Miller claimed “was the result of having an interlocking set of complex systems that were not well understood across the relevant teams”.

Last year’s overhaul dramatically improved its performance, which was starting to lag behind the likes of Chrome, and it’s smooth and solid even on fairly modest hardware.Īs much as we love Firefox – right now it’s still our favourite browser – we’re worried about its future. As before it’s endlessly customisable both in terms of its appearance and in the range of extensions and plugins you can use. Version 90 is particularly good: it can alert you if your email address is included in a known data breach, it blocks those annoying allow-notifications popups, it blocks “fingerprinting” browser tracking and it brings its picture in picture video mode to the Mac version. Firefox has long been the Swiss Army Knife of the internet and our favourite browser.

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