The engine argument, stated properly
There are three significant browser engines. Chromium’s Blink, which Google controls. WebKit, which Apple controls. And Gecko, which Mozilla controls, and which ships in essentially one browser.
Every other name you can think of, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Arc, is Chromium with different paint. If Gecko stops being maintained, the practical situation is that Google decides what a web page is allowed to be, and the only check on that is Apple’s engine, which exists to serve Apple’s platforms.
That is a reason to use Firefox that has almost nothing to do with your own privacy. It is a reason about the web as a shared thing. We think it is a good reason, and it is why Firefox appears on our private browsers ranking despite scoring below Brave on the criteria that page actually measures.
Where the money comes from
Mozilla’s revenue comes overwhelmingly from search. Specifically, from making Google the default search engine in Firefox, an arrangement Mozilla renews periodically and publishes in its annual reporting.
So the independent alternative to Google’s browser is paid for, in the main, by Google.
Nobody has shown that this has bent a particular product decision, and we are not going to imply it. The problem is more ordinary than corruption. An organisation whose income arrives almost entirely from one counterparty makes decisions with that counterparty in the room, whether or not anyone from that counterparty says anything. It shapes what gets proposed, not just what gets approved.
The arrangement is also less secure than it once looked. The default search payments made by Google across the industry have been examined at length in American antitrust proceedings, and Mozilla’s own filings and public comments have acknowledged the risk that a remedy affecting those payments would affect Mozilla severely. A browser project whose funding depends on the outcome of a court case involving its main competitor is not in a comfortable position, and readers deserve to know that before treating Firefox as the safe, stable, principled choice.
How the browsers fund themselves
| Browser | Where the money comes from | Conflict it creates |
|---|---|---|
| Firefox | Search default payments, overwhelmingly from Google | Depends on its largest competitor for most of its income |
| Brave | Its own opt-in advertising network, paid in a token | Sells advertising while blocking advertising |
| Safari | Apple hardware, plus a very large search default payment from Google | Serves Apple’s platform strategy first |
| Tor Browser | Government grants and donations | Funding sources its critics reasonably question |
| Chrome | Google’s advertising business | The browser is a data collection surface for the advertiser |
This table is the honest way to compare browsers, and it is more useful than any feature list, because a browser sees everything you do and someone is paying for it. There is no option in the column that has no conflict at all. The choice is which conflict you would rather live with.
What it does with no configuration
Enhanced Tracking Protection is on by default and blocks known cross-site trackers, social trackers, cryptominers and fingerprinting scripts from a maintained list. Total Cookie Protection puts each site’s cookies in their own jar, which is a real structural improvement over blocking lists alone. Sync is end-to-end encrypted.
It does not block advertisements. A fresh Firefox on a news site looks like a fresh Chrome on a news site, and you need an extension to change that. Telemetry is on. The stronger anti-fingerprinting is off.
That combination is why our category page places Firefox fourth rather than first. It is not a judgement about the engineering, which is good. It is a judgement about first launch, which is what nearly everyone experiences.
Container tabs, which nobody else has
The feature worth switching for is containers. Each container has its own cookie jar and its own logged-in identity, so a work account, a personal account and a shopping session can run in the same window without seeing each other, and a site cannot follow you from one to another.
No Chromium browser offers an equivalent that is as clean. Profiles are the nearest thing and they are heavier and less fluid. If you juggle multiple accounts on the same services, this alone is a better argument for Firefox than any of the privacy marketing, and it is the feature we would miss most.
The iPhone app
Our App Store analysis for Firefox this cycle uses a sample of 50 recent reviews from a single storefront, which is too small to treat the sample average as a verdict. Within it the mean is well below the listing’s own average, and the leading themes are iOS integration complaints at 30 per cent of reviews, misleading advertising complaints at 10 per cent, and crashes and slow performance at 4 per cent each. Around a fifth of the sample carries a critical theme. No billing complaints, as expected for a free product.
The public listing is at 4.65 stars from roughly 216,800 ratings, a large and broadly positive base.
Bear in mind what the app is. On iOS it is WebKit with Mozilla’s interface and blocking rules, so the engine independence you might be installing it for is not present. Sync, containers of a sort, and tracking protection are.
Where it lands
Firefox is the right browser for someone who will spend twenty minutes on it: install a content blocker, turn off telemetry, set up containers, decide about resistFingerprinting. Configured that way it is excellent, and it is the only excellent option that does not hand Google or Apple another user of their engine.
Untouched, it is a decent browser with good tracking protection and visible advertisements, which is not what most people think they are getting.
Ownership and funding records for every product on this site are on the ownership explorer, and the browser fingerprint test will tell you what your current Firefox is actually exposing.
What we have not tested
We have not run our own measurements on Firefox: not what Enhanced Tracking Protection blocks across a fixed set of pages, not how identifying its default fingerprint is compared with resistFingerprinting enabled, and not its performance next to the Chromium browsers on the same hardware. The above rests on Mozilla’s published documentation and reporting, ownership records, and our own App Store review analysis. Pending scores stay pending until we have done the work ourselves.