2019: The Year in Web Browsers (Premium)

Web browsers are, by far, the most important applications we use on desktop and mobile. And this year, most of them even got serious about privacy.

And it’s about fricking time.

The problem, of course, is that the market leader, Google Chrome—which currently holds about 67 percent usage share on desktop and 64 percent on mobile—is the least protective of our privacy among all the major browser makers. Google talks a lot about protecting user privacy and it even pretends to build an ad-blocker into its browser. But make no mistake: Google will never cut off the lifeblood to its core advertising business, and most of the tracking that occurs online today starts with Google (or its chief competitor in this market, Facebook).

This is a bigger problem than you may realize, as Chrome has little in the way of real competition. The majority of web users out there—thus, the majority of users—are unwittingly coughing up their personal data so that Google and third-party ad companies can learn more about them, construct elaborate profiles, and then offer them relevant ads at every step of their online activities.

But back to Chrome’s competition, such as it is. Depending on how you measure things, Apple Safari, with its 27 percent share on mobile, is the only other web browser to truly rival Chrome at all. How’s that, you ask? It’s the only web browser with double-digit usage share. And that’s only on mobile: Safari’s share on the desktop is just 4 percent. Even Microsoft Edge outperforms Safari on desktop.

Safari’s popularity is mostly a byproduct of the loyalty of Apple’s fans, of course. But credit the consumer electronics giant with at least understanding its audience: Thanks to its integrated privacy and security protections, Safari is also one of the safest web browsers you can use. But since it is offered only on Apple’s platforms, it’s not an option for most.

That’s a shame. But there are, at least, several viable alternatives for the 87 percent of the world that uses Windows PCs instead of Mac, Linux, or Chrome OS.

The most popular, of course, is Mozilla Firefox, though this once-mighty web browser has fallen on hard times in recent years and has, more literally, fallen to sub-10 percent usage share on desktop. (Its usage share on mobile is an almost non-existent 1 percent, which perhaps explains this year’s strategy change on mobile; a new client is on the way.)

Firefox is an excellent choice. It offers top-rated tracking protection against the data-collecting trackers that Google blithely ignores and it provides many integrated safety and security features, from its secure Firefox Lockwise password manager to its Firefox Monitor data breach alert system. Firefox’s privacy policy is so good, so strong, that even Apple admitted that they would just copy it.

I have two problems with Firefox, but to be clear, neither may bother you. First, it doesn’t offer the ability to locally install Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and then host them in browser-less windows that act more like native apps than browser tabs; this is something that virtually all of the other browser contenders do on both Windows and Mac. (Safari, alas, doesn’t offer this feature either.) And second, Firefox is the only major browser maker to develop its own browser rendering engine, which is expensive, time-consuming, and causes performance and incompatibility issues. Firefox always seems a bit behind the other browsers, most of which are Chromium- or WebKit-based.

Most of the remaining contenders—(the new) Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Brave—are based on Chromium, the open-source foundation of Google Chrome. And all of them predictably offer the same basic advantage over Chrome: They provide the same performance and compatibility while stripping the browsers of Google tracking and other technologies. The issue? They do so to differing degrees. And in Microsoft’s case, much of the Google functionality that bogs down Chrome has simply been replaced by Microsoft functionality.

That said, any of these browsers are a good choice. And though Microsoft is simply swapping out much of the Google-specific stuff in Chromium with its own technologies, Microsoft is a much more trustworthy company and has a good privacy story.

But if you really care about privacy and performance, Opera and Brave are better choices. Opera is the more long-lived product, and it offers seamless syncing between desktop and mobile, something that is currently a bit dodgy with Brave. But Brave is by far the most aggressive with tracking protection and ad-blocking, both of which have big impacts on safety and performance. So if privacy and/or performance is job one for you, then Brave is the best choice.

Experienced browser users know that a rich ecosystem of ad- and tracker-blockers exist on virtually all of these platforms, of course, so even those who stick with Chrome can gain at least some of the advantages of the better browsers with a little bit of research and work. But don’t get complacent: Google is working to undermine its extension system to prevent this behavior and as the owner of its browser, it can adapt Chrome to work around these protections if it wants. Edge, Opera, Brave, Safari, and Firefox are all better bets.

Put simply, I feel very strongly that no one should use Chrome, and I’m hoping to see this year’s sudden awareness of the privacy ramifications of doing so translate into some major usage changes in 2020. But it is our job, as technology enthusiasts and influencers within our families and groups of friends, to make that happen. And the only way that can happen is to vote with our usage and to be vocal about why we are right.

You can do this. And you can do this because you have so many great options to choose from, all of which offer major advantages over Chrome, and with little or even no downsides. Let’s resolve to make 2020 Chrome-free.