Browser Skirmish

I'm old enough to remember the "Browser Wars," when Internet Explorer wrested the crown from Netscape Navigator as the desktop's king of the mountain for web browsing. (I'm also old enough to remember using NCSA Mosaic in my college computer center, so there's that.) These days, Chrome and its myriad offshoots dominate – in large part due to the ubiquity of Chrome on mobile platforms. But here is one man's story of his own browser skirmish to explain both how and why the battle was won by Firefox.

Anyone that knows me knows I'm a diehard Apple guy. I'm the guy waiting in line at the opening of the first Apple Store in my area. I'm the seventh guy in line in 2007 when they released first iPhone. I'm the son of a guy who waited in line in 1977 for an Apple ][ so he could write actuarial software in Pascal... the roots run deep. Thus it is only natural that my browser of choice for most of my recent compute history would be Safari.

However, there are always occasions where you may need an alternate browser for specific purposes. In the late 1990s, when the early battle lines were being drawn between IE and Navigator, there was a schism in the world wide web; certain pages would be completely inaccessible if you used the "wrong" browser. The "best viewed in Netscape" and "best viewed in Internet Explorer" logos on pages of the day weren't mere recommendations, they were effectively mandates. Likewise today, where there are certain pages that are rendered "better" on one browser versus another.

For me this manifest itself at work. We use a lot of Google's G Suite, and our developers are particularly fond of writing their functional specifications in Google Docs. Google Docs is a great, great browser app... but when documents get long and complicated, Safari couldn't keep up. Unsurprisingly, Chrome did a fine job of rendering these complicated documents. Thus, about a year and a half ago I started using Chrome for specific purposes at the office.

Once you've conceded to a life of Browser Flipping, you start to discover other conveniences. I quickly fell into a "personal browser/work browser" work flow, where I'd keep my persona (cookies) for my personal browsing in Safari and my work persona in Chrome. This made things like checking email significantly easier, since I use GMail for both – no more need to log out/log in at the beginning and end of the workday.

However, there was a fateful day at the office that had a lasting effect on my browser choice: an upgrade to Safari that accompanied macOS 10.13 High Sierra broke logins to our corporate wifi controller – I couldn't attach to our wifi network anymore. Because I spend a lot of time on work-related activities (a lot), my use of Safari had dwindled down to logging into our network and checking email. And just like that, Safari lost the browser skirmish to Chrome.

But the story doesn't end there. About a year ago, while researching network security topics as part of my day job, I started becoming more curious about the information that was being shared by my browser. As a huge consumer of Google services, a lot of my digital life was spent interacting with Google, and (now) all of it was done using Google's lens to the world wide web. What caused me to make my next change was a coincident set of two events.

1. The release of Chrome 69 in September 2018 came with a behavior change that required me to log into my browser in order to log into my Google services. Now, the lens through which I view non-Google web properties can report back to Google on what I'm seeing.
2. I listened to a podcast by Michael Bazzell, in which he described his preference for Firefox due to its Containers Extension. (I can't find the specific episode of the podcast, but he talks about Firefox in his blog as well.)

Wait a minute: I was disenfranchised by Google, so I could use a "third party" browser, and gain the capability of segmenting my personal browsing and work browsing through containers? Sign me up! And from that day forward, I have been a Firefox-only user.

(Except... a recent change to Firefox's security behavior broke logins to our wifi access controller at the office. Arrghh. This time, though, instead of keeping Chrome around for logging into our corporate wifi, I downloaded and installed Brave (based on Chromium), which is now effectively my login application at the office.)

A lot of you folks have probably tried Firefox in the past. I strongly encourage you to give it another opportunity. It has been a great, great, great "daily driver," and the containers extension has made a significant difference in my browsing experience. When I'm reading blogs or news feeds I'm no longer creepily inundated by Amazon ads for things I had glanced at previously (all Amazon activity is in its own container). I can keep multiple tabs open with GMail using different personas without confusion on their part or mine – containers conveniently color-code the tabs to clearly differentiate the different containers. And sensitive things like banking, etc., are kept isolated from literally everything else.

I've been a vocal advocate around the office for Firefox, but I feel the message is significant enough to take to a wider audience. One of these days we can talk about mobile browsers, too. (Spoiler alert: I've demoted Safari on my iPhone.)