You know, there used to be good things about Firefox *other* than them not being run by Google or based on Chrome. That's been a while though.
On the developer side of things, Firefox also outperforms Chrome in its CSS developer tools; I use Chrome for debugging Javascript, I usually prefer to debug CSS and prototype layout in Firefox. There are other advantages, Firefox and Chrome kind of go in different directions in what they prioritize for developers.
But the extension support is the big one. Properly configured, Firefox will be more private than any other browser, including stuff like DeGoogled Chromium, because DeGoogled Chromium is still based on Chrome and is still missing the extension APIs that Ublock Origin uses in Firefox, it's still missing the anti-fingerprinting features from Tor.
People can debate a lot of stuff (I like Firefox's resource usage but performance is subjective and user-dependent), and people get mad about Firefox defaults and decisions the company makes (sometimes legitimately, Firefox often makes bad decisions), but just as a private browser, Firefox is objectively more capable today than any other full-featured browser I've ever seen. I don't think that's just my opinion, Firefox objectively has more privacy features and better privacy APIs for extensions.
IP address alone is already a very good identifier unless you share it with other people. If you do share it, then user-agent and browser fingerprint becomes the next thing. If other users on the same IP use Safari and you're the only one using Firefox then you are trivial to identify.
I don't have hard data to prove that, so I won't make a bold claim about it. But it seems illogical to me to say that you're using Chrome to blend in if you're also customizing Chrome (or using DeGoogled Chromium, Chromium itself, or a ton of extensions) in a way that makes it obvious you're a power user that cares about privacy.
In contrast, in Firefox having Ublock Origin installed is probably a bit more common than in Chrome, and turning on the anti-fingerprinting features standardizes a large percentage of your setup with anyone else who flips that bit in their Firefox settings. You can worry somewhat less that you're doing something that is completely unique with your anti-fingerprinting setup. But again, I would hesitate to make strong claims about that without more data.
We're (collectively within privacy spaces) working on this. It's one of the reasons why I think the "VPNs are useless" debates are so disingenuous. Tor also has this problem (if you're the only person on your network connecting to Tor, that's a decent signal about things), and nobody argues that Tor is useless.
But I'll refer back to a point I've made a couple of times in the past: if you are in a boat with 5 holes on the bottom, and you want to patch those holes before the boat sinks, there is going to be a point in time where you have 2-3 holes patched and some holes are still leaking.
Figuring out a mass-market way to deal with IP addresses (hopefully using a better method than VPNs) is a real challenge. I'm encouraged by what Apple is doing with its private relay, I'm encouraged by some (not all, but some) of the work going on with P2P connections. But it's a tough problem. We don't want these systems to be opt-in or expensive, and we want to protect people from shady actors that can abuse them (see again, VPNs).
That being said, if the response is that we shouldn't care about fingerprinting because IP addresses are an unsolved problem (even though with significant work, they're not an unsolved problem, VPNs/Wireguard/etc do legitimately help here), it just seems really fatalistic and worthless to me as a perspective. Sites do fingerprinting today, they see value in it. If fingerprinting was worthless and all you needed was an agent and an IP address, sites wouldn't fingerprint; and yet they do. To me that's evidence enough that anti-fingerprinting matters, sites don't just look at the Firefox header and then call it a day and I don't think they would waste their time if the header alone gave them all the information they wanted.
More to the point, I regularly see people argue that we shouldn't be doing anything about IP addresses because fingerprinting exists, it's an extremely common argument about why relays/VPNs/Tor/DoH/ESNI don't matter. So there's a little bit of circular reasoning here; Firefox is pretty much doing the best job at anti-fingerprinting right now, but people don't care because of IP addresses. And then when you talk about IP addresses, people don't care because of fingerprinting. The reality is that you are currently on a boat with multiple holes, it is filling with water, and you need to start patching some of them.
But at the moment which browser you use is nowhere near as powerful in identifying you as the rest of the huge fingerprinting surface available.
Fingerprinting currently gives pretty much everyone a unique fingerprint in almost every browser, so even if only 100 people managed to share a fingerprint, that would already be a big success. Firefoxes relatively low usage share doesn't currently add up to any real significance in the fingerprinting calculus.
And for me, that's a key difference. Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, all garbage --- staying logged into several AWS SSM sessions in different accounts at the same time w/ full features, logged into several paypal accounts at once etc etc etc. The containers fix so much of web dumbness that they've become indespensable in my workflow, both at work and at home. Unless the other browsers have feature parity regarding MAC, they are not even among the competition.
Firefox has much more efficient browsing keyboard shortcuts (although old Opera was comparably good), / allows you to jump to text where you're typing and you can use ' to search only texts of links, then you can just press return/enter to click links.
Tab management is better. Custom CSS allows multiple rows of tabs at the top and allows you to hide the close tab X's entirely, so you can close tabs only with middle click or double click without having to target (or avoid) a tiny close button. Also keyboard shortcuts CTRL Shift PgUp/PgDn to rearrange tabs which doesn't seem to be present in Chrome. CTRL+Tab as an option to browse tabs in recently used order (leaving CTRL pgup/pgdn for left/right order). Also for whatever reason Chrome doesn't let you mute individual tabs, only muting entire sites, while Firefox lets you mute individual tabs.
Extensions in general on Firefox are a bit more powerful, uBlock Origin on Firefox is a bit more effective at blocking ads than it is on Chrome. On Android Firefox supports uBlock Origin while Chrome has no extensions, but honestly I think every mobile browser is pretty shit (just Firefox slightly less so).
- Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/profile-switc...
- Connector (required for add-on): https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher-connect...
- Source: https://github.com/null-dev/firefox-profile-switcher