Who makes your browser, and what do they sell?

Most browsers on the market are produced by companies that earn from advertising or from services bundled around the browser. That does not make them bad software, but it does determine which questions get asked during development. A browser whose revenue depends on what happens after a search will not, on its own initiative, make it hard to see what happens after a search.

Firefox is run by a non-profit foundation. It does not sell data, it does not push the operator's own services through the interface, and it does not need a browsing history in order to earn. That origin shapes the design: privacy is where the work starts rather than a switch added at the end. The code is open under the second version of the Mozilla Public Licence, and the engine underneath – Gecko – is not built on the mainstream commercial engine. It is one of the very few independent rendering engines still in serious use, which matters for the web as a whole: a single engine is a single point of failure for how pages are allowed to be written.

Full support exists on Windows, macOS and Linux, with companion builds for phones.

Privacy as the starting point, not a feature label

Third-party trackers and social network trackers are blocked by default: cross-site cookies, fingerprinting scripts and mining scripts are all covered. Protection has three levels – standard, strict, custom – and the privacy panel reports how many tracking attempts were stopped on each page, which turns an abstract benefit into a number you can watch.

Container tabs go further than blocking. Work, shopping and social identities can be kept in separate containers, and trackers cannot join activity across them, so the profile that would otherwise be assembled from a single browsing session simply cannot be built.

Around that sit the smaller defences that matter in daily use. Pop-up advertising and autoplaying video are blocked without configuration. An HTTPS-Only mode forces encrypted connections everywhere it can. The password manager can be locked behind a master password, and sync is end-to-end encrypted, which means the organisation operating the service cannot read the tabs, bookmarks or passwords that pass through it. That last point is not a marketing claim but an architectural one: the key is not held on the server.

What the newest release added

The current release introduced split view: right-click a link, choose to open it in a split, and two pages sit side by side. For anyone who has spent years switching between two tabs to compare two documents, this is the sort of feature that is missed immediately on any other browser.

A PDF editor is built in as well, with page reordering, copying and pasting, deletion and export, so annotating a form no longer means installing a separate application. The sidebar now gathers tabs, bookmarks and history in one panel that opens with a keystroke, and it works with tab groups for keeping a large number of open pages organised. Artificial intelligence features are opt-in and can be switched off at any time – the stated policy is optional rather than mandatory, which is the right default for a tool used this many hours a day.

Thirty thousand extensions, and full access to the interfaces

The extension catalogue runs past thirty thousand and covers every ordinary need. More important than the number is what extensions are permitted to do: the interfaces that privacy and ad-blocking extensions rely on are not restricted here, in contrast to commercial browsers that have narrowed exactly the interface such extensions need. On a browser built around privacy, that is the difference between an extension that works and one that has been made decorative.

Account sync covers desktop, Android and iOS, with tabs, bookmarks and passwords moving between them. The iOS build necessarily uses the system engine, but sync and privacy protections are unaffected by that constraint.

A browser is the software you face longer than any other, and the organisation and business model behind it decide how your data is treated. There is no advertising business here, no cloud service to bundle and no commercial motive to assemble profiles; the only product is the browser. For a clean, uninterrupted place to work on the web, this is the most dependable long-term choice.