Although recently Mozilla is trying to prevent its collapse, it is obvious that Firefox He didn’t have his best moment for a long time. The one that was a great bastion of web standards and that amassed a third of all Internet users on PCs is now struggling not to drown in its competition against the legion of Chromium derivatives led by Chrome.

Firefox’s current situation cannot be understood unless one takes a critical look at Mozilla, which has rested on its laurels for far too long while Chrome gained ground. Google’s browser has conquered the web not just because of the company’s powerful advertising machine, but also because of it Chromium and its main derivative were the first to really take advantage of multi-core processorswhich is a feature that Firefox didn’t fully solidify until Quantum (at least in terms of quality).

Another aspect to consider is support HTML5, especially when it comes to multimedia. Here, Chrome was clearly ahead both Firefox and Internet Explorer practically until the arrival of the original Microsoft Edge, which ended up being discontinued due to its failure to be resurrected (or rather continued) as a Chromium-based project.

Due to Mozilla’s slow update and its inability to penetrate the mobility market, there are not a few who think that Firefox currently lives on Linux, a system where it still has many loyal users, some users who, surprisingly, were not cared for until relatively recently Mozilla, plus most of the cool improvements incorporated into this system come not from the basics, but from Red Hat.

Given that Firefox’s situation is less than ideal, one might ask if there are compelling reasons to use it today, and that’s what we’ll answer in this post.

Avoid monopoly

This reason sounds quite obvious, but it makes sense. In case Firefox falls into the legion of Chromium derivatives flooding the market (although only Chrome and Edge stand out in terms of users), Google and its acolytes could end up replacing the W3C and dictate how the site should function.

It is true that the fact that Chromium is open source means that its domain is not as harmful as it was in its Internet Explorer days, as Microsoft has in the past tried to impose its criteria on how websites must work in web browsers, and Firefox was in these years the main resistance in this sense.

While some Chromium derivatives like Vivaldi and Brave try not to follow everything Google dictates, the reality is that they don’t have much room to maneuver if they want to maintain compatibility with extensions, among other things.

Other ways to respect users’ privacy

Mozilla has always marketed Firefox as a privacy-friendly browser, but it’s not exactly that. Despite this, it is true that the application, especially in recent years, contains mechanisms that minimize the radius of action of those actors who tend to skip over or disrespect users’ privacy, mainly the well-known Google and Facebook.

Mozilla was enabled last month Total Cookie Protection of Firefox, a feature that puts each website’s cookies in its own “jar” to prevent cross-site tracking. This way, each website can only access its own cookies and not the cookies of other sites, minimizing the possibilities of tracking and enforcing less invasive policies.

Another recently added privacy feature is trimming or cleaning URLs containing unique codes for tracking purposeswhereby Firefox also tries to minimize the possibility of tracking websites.

Multiple picture in picture

One of the standout features is picture-in-picture, which allows you to separate the video playback from the web page and fix it on the screen so you can watch it while visiting other web pages. But it is not only supported once, but can be used multiple times, allowing the user view multiple videos simultaneously from different platforms or websites.

Watching multiple videos at the same time sounds crazy, but the multiple picture-in-picture feature is useful for watching videos in the order the user chooses without losing sight of them.

Open multiple sessions of the same site

Those responsible for Firefox themselves are developing an extension that provides containers that allow you to run different sessions on the same site, a mechanism that can be used to re-enforce privacy. Yes, allows you to run multiple Gmail or Outlook sessions using the same browserif someone asked.

In addition, the container extension supports profiles, that is, it is possible to define a professional profile for work and another for home use and entertainment. This expands the possibilities, for example, to avoid using the wrong email account, to give a simple example.

Conclusion: Firefox is still alive

Firefox may not be at its best, but that doesn’t mean it’s a useless product, as it has some interesting features and Mozilla seems to be getting its act together on certain fronts, but the question remains whether they will. to come on time, because there are not a few who say that they reacted late and poorly.

We’ve left some advanced aspects like the debugger/inspector in inkwell, which for some is better than Chromium, but this is where we start to dive into the nitty-gritty.