Why I’m sticking with Firefox instead of Chrome

sticking with – After years of cycling through Chrome, Edge, and Safari, Jack Wallen says he’s returning to Firefox—citing privacy controls, open-source transparency, limited integrations, and an opt-in AI approach. He also points to Mozilla’s claims under Europe’s DMA showin

For years, Jack Wallen’s browser life moved in familiar loops: Chrome, Edge, Safari… and then back again, sometimes for no reason other than habit. But he’s making a different kind of decision now—sticking with Firefox.

He doesn’t pretend this change is effortless. He even says that in July, 2025, he announced he was deleting Firefox for good, driven by his “distaste for some of Mozilla’s actions over the years.” Time, he writes, eventually helped—and he found himself heading back to the open-source browser.

His pitch for Firefox isn’t built on novelty. It’s built on frustration with how the mainstream defaults work when privacy, choice, and control matter more than ever. He argues that switching browsers can feel like changing religions. largely because Chrome on Android. Edge on Windows. and Safari on iOS/MacOS come preinstalled. But he also says “good enough” has stopped feeling like a serious standard.

Wallen’s case comes down to a handful of concrete differences, starting with who builds the browser.

Firefox. he says. isn’t developed by a major company with a direct business incentive to keep you inside its own services. Mozilla is behind Firefox, and while the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit, Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit business. Still. Wallen contrasts that with Google’s incentive structure: Google wants users to stay in its ecosystem—google.com. Google Workspaces. Android—so it will “do whatever it can” to keep that loop intact.

Mozilla, he argues, doesn’t have the same kind of search-driven lock-in. Firefox. in his telling. doesn’t care which search engine you use. which operating system you run it on. or which productivity suite you prefer. He also frames this as a practical difference: Firefox won’t do “anything nefarious” to keep him from doing what he needs to do.

Transparency is the next part of his argument. Firefox is open source. meaning its source code can be viewed and—at least in principle—built into a custom browser. Wallen points out that this lets people see what’s happening under the hood. He contrasts that with other browsers where the proprietary layers sit behind obfuscation. and says he wouldn’t want to trust something he can’t verify.

He doesn’t claim Firefox is the single most privacy-focused browser—Brave and Tor Browser. in his view. hold that title. But he does say Firefox is more private than Chrome, Edge, or Safari. Firefox’s built-in tracker blocking. he writes. prevents a lot of data collection. though he’s clear that Firefox still collects limited technical and interaction data such as performance metrics. feature usage. and IP-derived location.

That data, he says, is used only to improve the browser and personalize sponsored content. He adds the important qualifier from his read of how Firefox handles this: the data is anonymized and not sold to advertisers.

He draws a sharp comparison with the ad economy behind Google. In his telling, Google doesn’t need to sell your personal data to third parties because it owns the world’s largest advertising network.

Then comes a theme that hits the everyday reality of how browsers tend to behave when they’re deeply stitched into a single company’s products.

With Chrome. Edge. and Safari. Wallen says you’re getting “deep integrations” with proprietary tools designed to work together—creating one cohesive whole. He points to Chrome’s integration with Gemini. Docs. and Meet. its syncing of accounts. bookmarks. and passwords. and its role as a centralized hub for data used for targeted advertising. Targeted ads, he says, are a major driver of Google revenue.

Firefox, he says, takes a minimalist approach. Yes, you can sync your Firefox account across devices, but he says Firefox is not deeply integrated with any particular ecosystem: not Google Drive, not iCloud, and not OneDrive.

And for readers who don’t want AI built into their browser experience by default, he sees another opening.

Wallen argues that AI is increasingly everywhere. He writes that if you open Chrome, you’ll find Gemini. If you open Edge, you’ll find Copilot. If you open Safari, you’ll find Apple Intelligence—and he expects those browsers to lean even harder into AI over time.

But his focus is on how it’s turned on. He says AI is an opt-out feature in Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Firefox. by contrast. takes an opt-in approach: by default. Firefox does not have AI turned on. meaning you have to manually enable it. He says Firefox does include AI features, but they won’t work until you enable them. For anyone “averse to AI,” that opt-in default is the point.

Finally, he brings in a regulatory reality that matters to the question of choice.

Under Europe’s Digital Markets Act, Mozilla says it tested how browser choice screens affect outcomes for users. Wallen quotes Mozilla’s statement that “Every 10 seconds. someone picks Firefox through a DMA choice screen.” He also notes Mozilla’s claim that users choose Firefox with “over 6 million instances” (as Mozilla puts it). The company. he writes. points to another study concluding that Firefox daily active users were 113% higher in the EU than they would have been without the DMA.

He links that outcome to how users behave, especially outside Europe. In the US. he says users don’t have the same type of protection. so monopolies are free to monopolize at will. Choice, he adds, is important—but many US users may not realize they have it. He says it’s “pretty easy to read between the lines” of a Yougov.com piece. where he writes that most users stick with whatever browser their operating system presents them. Some users may know alternatives exist. but he suggests they assume the companies behind those alternatives have their best interests in mind.

For Wallen, the DMA story becomes the cleanest version of what his whole browser argument is really about: when people are actually offered a real choice, the default pattern breaks.

He ends with that idea—grounded in his own misgivings about Mozilla’s decisions over the years. and his return to Firefox after deciding to “delete Firefox for good” in July. 2025. He doesn’t frame it as a perfect love story. It’s closer to a practical one: Firefox gives him what he wants more consistently—control. transparency. and the ability to decide what happens next—without pulling him into someone else’s ecosystem at every turn.

Firefox Mozilla Chrome Edge Safari privacy open source AI opt-in DMA Digital Markets Act browser choice cybersecurity