To the Web: Mozilla Firefox (Premium)

Written off for its shrinking usage share and its recent deprecation of PWA functionality, Mozilla Firefox may nonetheless be the ultimate browser for Windows 11 users.

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Note: Recently, I’ve been thinking about a way to present a series of web-focused articles over a long period of time. And while this will likely evolve as we go, I wanted this to be less structured and finite than my “Living with…” series of articles. Something that touches on a lot of topics, some big, some small, some specific, and some high-minded. And this was very much not the way I wanted to start this series. But what the heck. This topic presented itself to me organically, and that is, perhaps, the best excuse of all to just kick it off. So here we go.

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It’s an exciting year for Windows fans. Microsoft is finally giving the 1.3 billion users of Windows 10 a major visual and user experience update, called Windows 11, that adds consistency and calmness while preserving familiarity. That’s a tough mandate to follow, and it remains to be seen whether Microsoft can withstand what is already a bewildering backlash against some of its refinements, which at a high level involve removing some superfluous capabilities that mainstream users ignore but its most sophisticated users rely on.

But there is one key component of Windows 11 that is escaping the UX chopping block, and, no, I’m not referring to Control Panel or whatever Windows 95-era fonts that some are still so upset about for some reason. I’m referring, instead, to Microsoft Edge. Which, when you think about it, is another semi-recent example of Microsoft giving a complete makeover to a legacy product in a bid to make it more likable and thus successful.

Today, Windows 11 and Microsoft Edge don’t align at all, not from a user experience standpoint. Where Microsoft is aggressively trimming away excess UI in Windows 11, it is just as aggressively adding excessive UI, every month, to Microsoft Edge. This excess arrives in the form of new features, many of which are unnecessary for most users and should perhaps be made available in the form of extensions. And while some of the new UI can be toggled off for a more minimalist look, those changes don’t sync to future installs of Edge on other PCs. So it is once again up to the user to not just configure the product the way they prefer but to do so over and over again.

On the Mac, users who care about both aesthetics and functionality can, of course, turn to Safari. And in the upcoming macOS Monterrey, Apple is further streamlining Safari to, using long-dead Microsoft language, “get out of the way and let the content you’re viewing take center stage.” The new Safari features a “streamlined” tab bar that “takes up less space … and takes on the color of the site you’re on, extending the web page to the edge of the window.” It has “redesigned, floating tabs” and more customization functionality. And, of course, deep integration with a new generation of Apple technologies like Share with You, Quick Notes, Hide My Email, and more.

As Windows users, we don’t have access to Safari anymore, so we need to turn to other browsers. And, since its announcement in late 2018, the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge has delivered on its promise to essentially bring customers “a version of Chrome with the Google removed.” Critics quickly pointed out that Microsoft would simply replace Google functionality—including not just search but tracking—with Microsoft functionality, and that has certainly happened. But I think most would agree that Microsoft is more trustworthy than Google, and, for Microsoft users, the ability to sync valuable personal data, like passwords and credit card information, across multiple devices through their 2FA-protected Microsoft accounts (MSAs) is highly desirable.

I’ve been using the new Microsoft Edge as my primary—no, no, my only­—web browser since the earliest previews, so for about two years now, I guess. And the experience, overall, has been positive, though there have been signs along the way that those critics may have been on to something. The first major issue I had with Edge occurred last year, when the browser did nothing to block Google from tracking a product I searched for (and ultimately did buy) and then producing advertisements for that product on many of the websites I subsequently visited. This, despite Edge’s vaunted tracking prevention functionality, with its super-obvious UI.

What I learned from that sobering episode was that Edge’s tracking prevention feature isn’t enough, and that anyone who a) wishes to use Microsoft Edge and b) really wants to prevent tracking will need a third-party extension. I chose Privacy Badger, but there are some other high-quality choices available.

Since then, however, I’ve been troubled by the sheer number of new features that Microsoft keeps adding to Edge. These new features are delivered in major version upgrades, which to date have arrived every six weeks, but will soon shift to a four-week release cadence, along with Chromium and Google Chrome. Though some people will love some of these features, many of them are, by and large, feature bloat. And they make the browser bigger and heavier while making the UI more obtuse and complex. Only Microsoft Teams is updated with more functionality on a regular basis than is Edge. And no one would hold up Teams as an example of an app with a good UI, a minimalist design, and a small resources footprint. Teams is a pig.

Fortunately, we do have options. There are other terrific Chromium-based browsers, like Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi, and each has its own strengths. But in recent weeks, I’ve been experimenting with, and then switched to, what will be, to many, a surprising alternate web browser. I am referring, of course, to Mozilla Firefox.

Firefox has its own problems, for sure.

On the desktop, Firefox usage share was just 7.17 percent in June, according to StatCounter, well below that of Chrome (68.7 percent), and behind Safari (9.7 percent) and Microsoft Edge (8.1 percent). And it’s been on a downward path for years. Firefox had an 8.5 percent usage share in June 2020 and 9.76 percent in June 2019. Fewer users mean lower revenues, and Mozilla’s financial fortunes have certainly fallen hard in recent years too. Aside from an ironic Google search advertising deal that probably keeps the company afloat, Mozilla has been forced to undergo multiple layoffs in recent years and has scaled back the development of non-essential products.

More problematic for Firefox fans, Mozilla has also scaled back the development of non-essential Firefox technologies, too. In early 2021, it halted work on the Site Specific Browser (SSB) functionality that allowed users to use Firefox to create apps on the local PC from Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and other web apps, similar to the functionality provided in Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and other Chromium-based web browsers. “There is currently no plan for PWA support in Firefox,” an aggrieved Mozillian blurted out to one complainer at the time. PWAs, obviously, are key to the web becoming a world-class cross-platform apps platform.

My knee-jerk reaction at that time was to declare Mozilla and Firefox dead and to pull any possible recommendation of this product to readers. Which is what makes my recent experimentation with Firefox all the more interesting.

Feature-creep in Microsoft Edge led me down this path. And, yes, I will continue evaluating Chromium-based browsers, including Edge, and will likely move back and forth between them as I wish. Please don’t take this to mean that “I have switched back to Firefox.” I mean, I have switched back to Firefox. For now. But I’m not going to declare victory here. This is an ongoing thing. What’s really changed is that I settled on Edge two years ago and never looked back. Now, I’m looking again.

But the real attraction of Firefox, despite its issues, is multifold. It offers deep privacy protections that can be as effective as anything as, say, Brave offers, though that requires you to configure one setting differently than the default. (Firefox settings > Privacy & Security > Enhanced Tracking Protection > “Strict.”) It offers excellent extensions coverage, allowing me (and probably you) to bring over the add-ons you rely on in your current browser. It offers desktop and mobile web browsers with simple, seamless data sync between them (unlike Brave, where this functionality is complex). It offers tremendous customization capabilities. Thanks to the semi-recent Quantum makeover, it offers better performance and lower resource usage than before. And, most importantly to this discussion, Firefox received a recent makeover that should thrill anyone who’s excited about Windows 11.

Let’s go back in time a bit. Earlier this year, before Windows 11 was even a rumor, Mozilla began touting an upcoming Firefox UI refresh in which it promised that its product design team “obsessed over every detail—spacing, words, colors, icons and more. They studied how people interact with the browser, observing their patterns and behaviors. They refined, revised, and refined some more. They sweated all the details. The resulting new look is a beautiful, fast experience that delivers on what people do most in Firefox.”

And check out this language.

“One of our design team’s pillars was to make Firefox feel calm,” Mozilla’s M.J. Kelly explained. “We worked to deliver a cohesive experience so that people felt the same calming comfort, no matter where they use Firefox — on a computer, phone, or tablet. That meant paring down and streamlining over adding and expanding. Our user research guided the choices and validated that we were solving the right problems for people.”

This is exactly the approach that Microsoft is taking with the Windows 11 streamlined user interface. And as I examined what Mozilla changed in Firefox, it occurred to me that it had created the ultimate web browser for Windows 11, a browser that fits into the Windows 11 design better than Microsoft’s own browser.

Consider. The new Firefox has a simplified toolbar in which Mozilla “removed visual clutter to focus on the most important navigation items.” It has streamlined menus that “puts priority actions quickly at your fingertips,” and features “reduced visual noise” by removing unnecessary iconography and adding clearer labels. It has floating tabs, and the “rounded design of the active tab signals the ability to easily grab and move tabs as needed.” There are fewer prompts and notifications. More cohesive and calmer visuals. “More consistent styling, lighter iconography, a refined color palette, and a more modern aesthetic for screens of all sizes—computers, phones, and tablets.”

This is exactly the way that Microsoft describes the visual and UX changes that it is making to Windows 11. And that it is not making to Microsoft Edge.

What’s interesting about all that is that I didn’t really go back and re-read Mozilla’s plans for the new Firefox UI until after I had installed and started using the browser again. And to be clear, I did install and use Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi as well. I routinely install new browser versions as a matter of course, but a few weeks ago, I started actively investigating what it would mean to replace Edge. And for whatever it’s worth, Firefox was last on the list, mostly for the issues I cited earlier.

But Firefox has been the most pleasantly surprising experience of the bunch. And just looking at it, with its floating tabs and their rounded corners perfectly in-tune with the floating Start menu and its rounded corners in Windows 11, I thought, … hm. There’s something right going on here. And I love the whole minimalist aesthetic. This really is a browser that gets out of the way. Unlike, increasingly, Microsoft Edge.

You can read more about the new Firefox UI in the blog post that Mozilla published the day that it went live, on June 1, 2021. (Again, before we knew anything about Windows 11.) Better still, just install it and give it a shot. Mozilla deserves our support for its long-time stances on openness and privacy, and unlike with Google and Microsoft, there’s no platform agenda getting in the way of its browser being truly great and user-centric. (There are other problems, yes, as noted above.)

Just a thought.