I Keep Giving Firefox Love: With Necessity, Not Loyalty
Not because I really want to. Because I'm being forced to.
Brave is the browser I keep pinning my hopes on. It promises privacy, it promises speed, it promises not to be Chrome wearing a mask. But every few months, something breaks in ways that trace right back to Chromium. Tabs hang. Extensions behave weirdly. Hardware acceleration fails on older GPUs. And I'm left blaming the engine—the very thing Brave promised to fix while still building on top of.
The Mozilla Turbulence
Let's talk about Mozilla. They've had multiple executive transitions tied to governance controversies over the years—from the 2017 CEO departure amid internal strife to subsequent board reshuffles, layoffs, and constant rebranding. None of it gives me confidence in their long-term vision.
And yet.
I must give Firefox credit where it's due. It might not be the most private or the prettiest, but it works everywhere.
Where Firefox Works—and Why It Matters
On a 2011 iMac running Ubuntu 26.04, Firefox still works—extensions and all. Passkeys work reliably now, after Firefox added support in late 2023. On a scrap-heap PC build with an Nvidia GTX 960 running open-source drivers on Pop!_OS—because the proprietary ones are no longer supported for this card—Firefox doesn't show a black screen where the video player should be.
On my daily driver Samsung Galaxy S23 FE, Firefox Mobile's UI doesn't disappear or fly away on me.
I've seen it firsthand. On many older machines, Chromium-based browsers render a completely black screen. Not gray. Not frozen. Just void. The GPU acceleration fails silently and leaves you with nothing but a blank window. That's precisely the kind of unreliability Firefox doesn't exhibit, and it's exactly why most Linux distributions ship it as the default. It just… works. When you're troubleshooting a system with limited RAM and ancient graphics hardware, working software is a feature, not an aspiration.
What I Wish Was Different About Brave
I've been using Brave since its early days, and I genuinely wish they'd chosen a different engine. When it works, the experience is undeniably better. The ad blocking is seamless. Privacy protections actually protect something. The web feels faster and cleaner.
But "when it works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Every couple months, there's a Chromium update that breaks something Brave-specific. Sometimes it's extension compatibility. Sometimes it's memory handling. Sometimes it's that black-screen-of-death issue that never seems to fully disappear from the ecosystem. The dependency is a one-way ticket to shared fate with Google.
The Browser Landscape Is Narrower Than It Seems
Here's the uncomfortable truth: we effectively have three major browser engines now. Safari (WebKit), Gecko (Firefox), and Blink (Chromium). Though WebKit and Blink share ancestry, they've diverged enough that each represents distinct development paths. Two of those are controlled by companies with massive incentives to push web standards toward their own ecosystems. Apple has control over the only engine allowed on iOS. Google controls Chromium. Mozilla is the last independent option, and they're not exactly firing on all cylinders.
For anyone who cares about having actual choices on the open web, that's a problem.
So What's the Play?
I keep using Firefox with Brave Search as my default search engine because it's a combination that works when I need it to. I keep hoping on Brave—the browser—because I want it to succeed. Neither position is ideal. Both are compromise positions in a landscape that's gotten worse for consumers even as it's gotten better on paper.
Maybe I'll find the road to the heavenly web experience one day. Maybe Mozilla will stabilize. Maybe someone like Ladybird (a brand-new engine, not Chromium-based) will challenge Chromium's dominance while showing Firefox what independence really is. Until then, I'll keep giving Firefox love—with necessity, not loyalty.