I’m an old Internet person, relatively speaking, so I get teary-eyed thinking about the role Mozilla played in the web standards movement. They’ve revamped Firefox with a brand new rendering engine and some very clever developer tools (love the grid view). It’s worth taking a look, if you haven’t recently.

I think at this point, switching browsers to “keep browsers manufacturers competing,” is probably misguided. Leaving aside rendering engines and their slight differences, this becomes a debate about identity. Apple people use safari. Google/Android/Chrome people use, well, Chrome. Web people also use Chrome. Everyone else runs something probably powered by the Blink (née Webkit, née KHTML) rendering engine. Sure Microsoft has their own thing going on with Edge (which, from what I hear is pretty good), but the main point to underscore is that web standards was largely victorious and how the web works is roughly the same for everyone above a certain income level.^[1]

If you want deeper integration with your OS level features, more privacy, more extensibility and so on, then you are likely to make a choice for a niche browser. That however, comes with the realisation that you know what you want out of an internet browser. These days, that’s pretty esoteric. Most people see the world through tiny film-covered windows looking out of Facebook’s high tower.

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1. Why yes, it turns out that zippy internet speeds, large monitors, or capable hardware is a privilege for a few and not the reality for everyone. ↩︎