== Firefox versus Chrome (my 2019 view) On Twitter, [[I said https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/1124735349345878018]]: > I continue to believe that Firefox is your best browser option, > despite the addons screwup. Mozilla at least tries to be good (and > usually is), while Chrome is straight up one tentacle of the giant, > privacy invading, advertising company giant vampire squid of Google. > > I'm sure there are plenty of good, passionate, well-intended people > who work on Chrome, and they care a lot about privacy, user choice, > and so on. But existing within the giant vampire squid of Google > drastically constrains and distorts what outcomes they can possibly > obtain. Mozilla is absolutely not perfect; they have committed [[technical screwups https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/05/technical-details-on-the-recent-firefox-add-on-outage/]], [[made decisions in the aftermath of that that I feel are wrong https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/1126694301352595458]], and especially they've made [[trust-betraying MozillaStillTrustProblems]] [[policy decisions FirefoxNoRecommendations]], which are the worst problem because they infect everything. But fundamentally, Mozilla is trying to be good and I do believe that it still has a general organizational culture that supports that. Chrome and the people behind it absolutely can do good, especially when they take advantage of their position as a very popular browser to drive beneficial changes. That Chrome is strongly committed to [[Certificate Transparency https://www.certificate-transparency.org/]] is one big reason that it's moving forward, for example, and I have hopes that [[their recently announced future cookie changes https://blog.chromium.org/2019/05/improving-privacy-and-security-on-web.html]] will be a net positive. But Chrome is a mask that Google wears, and regardless of what Google says, it's not interested in either privacy or user choice that threatens its business models. Every so often, [[this shows through Chrome development in an obvious way ChromeWalkingAway]], but I have to assume that for everything we see, there are hundreds of less visible decisions and influences that we don't. And then [[there's Google's corporate tactics https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871238922776576]] ([[alternate https://archive.fo/tgIH9]]). Much as in [[my choice of phones and tablets ../tech/SmartphoneWhyIPhone]], I know which side of this I come down on when the dust settles. And I'm sticking with that side, [[even if there are some drawbacks ChromeWalkingAwayII]] and some screwups every so often, and [[some things that make me unhappy FirefoxNoNightly]]. (At one point I thought that the potential for greater scrutiny of Google's activities with Chrome might restrain Google sufficiently in practice. I can no longer believe this, partly because of [[what got me to walk away from Chrome ChromeWalkingAway]]. Unless the PR and legal environment gets much harsher for Google, I don't think this is going to be any real restraint; Google will just assume that it can get away with whatever it wants to do, and mostly it will be right.)