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 favorite browser – we’re worried about its future. 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.Īs before it’s endlessly customizable both in terms of its appearance and in the range of extensions and plugins you can use.

However, it’s noticeably less demanding on RAM, allowing for faster performance - plus it now comes with an in-built password manager (opens in new tab).įirefox has long been the Swiss Army Knife of the internet and our favorite browser. It supports all the same browser extensions as Google Chrome, due to it being based on the same Chromium engine. It's not without its flaws, but developer Mozilla previously committed to supporting its users' privacy and developing tools to stop third parties from tracking you around the web. It's a very close-run competition, but we believe that Firefox is the best browser you can download today. Some anonymous browsers (opens in new tab) offer full suites of security tools to protect your online identity and shield against malware (opens in new tab), while others allow cookies and ads to run unhindered. As a final line of defence fir your family, why not take a look at the best parental control software (opens in new tab) to protect your kids online. We've also listed the best firewalls (opens in new tab) right now and Identity Theft Protection Software (opens in new tab). Once you've chosen the right browser, you might be interested in safeguarding against dangerous domains with the best URL filtering software (opens in new tab).

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