 For those of you have been following me for any amount of time You know that I've been on a browser journey of sorts over the last couple years. I've pretty much tried all the browsers out there I've switched back and forth between Firefox and Chrome and un-Google Chromium and Brave and Vivaldi And I mean I've tried them all and I almost always come back to Firefox for many good reasons and to me While Firefox has its problems, that's for sure, and I'm not entirely sure that Mozilla is my favorite company. I Do think that Firefox is overall the absolute best browser on the market now Obviously the market share numbers do not back this up. So this is a personal opinion, but I Really do think that everyone should at least try to use Firefox So what I thought I'd do today is talk about five reasons why everyone should use Firefox Let's go ahead and jump in. So the first reason is Probably the least important reason and that is that it's open source now I know what you're thinking Matt You're an open source advocate and you think that Firefox being open source is the least important reason to use it Yeah, because most people don't care that it's gonna be open source when they use a browser All they care about is does it browse the web and does it do it? Well, that's all they care about if both of those things were false then they would use something different So they honestly aren't going to care that this thing happens to have code that you can fork and make your own or a Code base that you can contribute to whatever that is. They don't most people don't care However, just because that's true doesn't mean that it's not important so when it comes to your ability to trust that your browser is safe secure and Well developed the open nature of Firefox means that you can trust that a little bit more than you can if you use something That is based on proprietary software something like Google Chrome now Google Chrome is technically based on open-source software But Chromium for all intents and purposes must might as well be ran by Google So if you absolutely trust Google then you're not going to have any problems with this But because Firefox is open source there are at least developers out there who can Search through the code base and make sure nothing the farious is going on Whereas that opportunity doesn't even exist when it comes to things like the proprietary parts of Google Chrome being open source also enables Developers to take Firefox and fork it and make other browsers like LibreWolf that offer extra privacy features So that is also a good thing and is only possible because Firefox is open source So moving on to the second one the second one is Customizability so I've talked about this many times on my channel before but Firefox allows you to customize basically everything not only in settings But also the Chrome or the parts of the browser that go around it So you can do something like I've done here where I have the URL bar in the tabs all in one line And I have the my bookmarks here along the side now. This is done through something called user Chrome CSS I've made a couple of videos about that I'll link those in either in the cards or in the video description It's fairly easy, but it's the only browser that lets you do this This customizability is one of the main reasons why I keep coming back to Firefox Despite everything else because I like customizing my browser And this is the only one that allows me to do it to this extent So the customizability of Firefox is actually really good and it's one of the things that makes me most happy to use Firefox The third reason why everyone should try Firefox is the privacy and security now I will not claim that Firefox is the most secure privacy respecting browser out there on the market That is absolutely not true because by default Mozilla actually does collect telemetry So that is something that you need to keep in mind if you're going to use this It can be disabled and because it's open source people can actually look at the cone and make sure it's actually being disabled But it's still something that you need to keep in mind when you use Firefox Outside of that however Firefox does offer a lot more in terms of customizability when it comes to protecting your privacy So it offers different modes that you can use to tweak your performance and privacy settings all the way across the browser or you can go through and Customize each and every little setting so that you can have full control over what is done in Firefox So it also helps to prevent things like trackers things like fishing and stuff like that And while I won't say that Chrome is horrible at this because they do actually have Some privacy features inside Chrome I will say that I trust Mozilla and Firefox to actually turn this stuff off if I turn it off Whereas I'm not sure I actually trust Google to do that because they obviously want my data as much as possible Whereas Mozilla has no interest in collecting your data What's the way we're outside of that telemetry they know they're not gonna sell it to anybody So that is the third reason now number four on the list is going to be something that is very niche and It's only going to apply to a small portion of people But really I've found the extension support in Firefox to be fantastic and there are some things here that are exclusives that you're not going to find on Chrome or chromium-based websites things like Vim Vixen is here I think Vim Vixen is probably the best Vim-based browser plugin that you can find There's another one that I use every day called simple tab groups It's this thing right here and while chromium does have tab groups built in it's not as good as this I don't think so so basically what simple tab groups does is allows you to group your tabs into categories and Then only display certain categories So right now I could be displaying the main group or whatever and that just has those four tabs in it And if I want to switch to a different category, I just click on one of these so like this here I can do that. It's as easy as just changing categories So I love tab groups and I like the way Firefox does them at least through an extension Then the way Chrome does theirs built in The fifth reason is one that is kind of iffy But it's some definitely something that I've noticed and the reason why I say it's iffy is because it's really going to depend on How you use your browser so for me personally Firefox uses less memory than Chrome. It just always has and it still remains true to this day I don't know that that's going to be the same for everyone but I've seen other accounts online where people also say that Firefox uses less RAM and this is important because browsers are notorious for taking up a lot of resources and Usually the resource that is going to be the most precious when it comes to browsing It's going to be the amount of RAM that you have So the fact that Firefox uses less is a good thing Now, like I said, it's going to depend on how you use your browser If you have like a hundred YouTube tabs open Your browser is going to take up a lot of memory no matter what browser you're using So if that's how you use your browser, don't expect to use a very small amount of RAM The one place that Firefox kind of falls down and I'm not sure how this compares to Firefox Or how it compares to Chrome rather Is that it spawns a ton of processes So at one point I think mine was wearing like 200 processes and that which is just nuts It's not even like a process per tab or whatever because I had I did not have that many tabs open But it does seem to spawn a lot of processes and that is a little weird But like I said, I don't know how that compares to Chrome Just to add a couple bonuses on here Firefox is not slow So anybody who tells you well, you should just use Chrome because it's the fastest browser I don't think it's actually true I've never had any problems with Firefox being slow So that is definitely not something that should bother you too much Unless your internet is like super slow or some reason Or perhaps all you use is Google Sites Where they perhaps slow their websites down in other browsers that aren't their own If that's the case, then you should just not use Google services unless you absolutely have to I think that's probably a good rule But you use what you have to to do the job, I suppose So those are the five reasons why I think everyone should try Firefox There are probably other reasons out there that I just didn't think of or didn't fit in the video If you have other reasons why people should use Firefox Or reasons why they shouldn't use Firefox Leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you You can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast You can follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey Those links will be in the video description You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com Slash the Linuxcast just like all these fine people Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon YouTube You guys are all absolutely amazing people Without you the channel just would not be anywhere close to where it is right now So I thank you so very much for your support Thanks everybody for watching I'll see you next time