What has been going on at Google Chrome HQ recently? The world’s dominant web browser, which just logged its 5 billionth Android download has been having a bit of an identity crisis these past few weeks. From the decision to kill ad blockers to the recent news that there are over 11 thousand cookies in Google Chrome tracking your every move on the web, it has never been more attractive for Chrome users to think about changing their web browser.
Step forward Mozilla with a reinvented version of Firefox for Android.
Firefox Preview is available now in beta and claims to be twice as fast as the regular Firefox browser
Speed is one of the main features that lay behind a positive web browsing experience. Fast loading times is one of the main reasons Chrome grew into the dominant position it now finds itself. Sure, there are other tricks web browsers can pull and tools they need to be able to keep us safe online, but speed usually trumps them all. If a website doesn’t load quickly enough, you go to another website. If this happens a lot, you download Chrome.
It could be Chrome’s impressive speeds that have the led the Chrome team to believe they could cut corners elsewhere. If this is the case though, they may need to reevaluate their recent decisions as Mozilla is now pushing a leaner and much faster version of Firefox called Firefox Preview. The beta version of Firefox Preview is available now to download here.
Although Mozilla has stripped down Firefox to prioritize speed with Preview, the foundation is still calling Preview a fully-featured web browser. As you would expect with a Firefox browser, privacy sits at the heart of Preview’s very being.
Taking the lead from Mozilla’s previous Firefox Focus browser, Preview has tracking protection enabled by default. If you prioritize privacy when you’re browsing the web, this gives Firefox Preview an 11-thousand-point lead over Google Chrome.
If we all prioritized privacy in this way, Firefox Focus would be the most popular browser on the planet and it isn’t. Focus hasn’t been a major success for Mozilla as even the most privacy-minded web users still want their web browsers to offer more than zero trackers. Firefox Preview then, is designed to find the sweet spot that could attract more web users. It has tracking disabled by default, has been stripped down to boost speed, but still has many of the core functions most web users look for in a browser.
Mozilla has even added new features to Preview to show that even though it is up to twice as fast as the regular Firefox browser, it still packs a feature-filled punch.
One such new feature is Collections, which will help users stay organized. The blog post announcing the new browser described Collections like this, “Make sense of the web with Collections, a new feature that helps you save, organize, and share collections of sites. Quickly save and return to tasks like your morning routine, shopping lists, travel planning and more.”
Firefox Preview is an evolution from past learnings the Mozilla Foundation has discovered from past projects. It is hard-earned experience that has guided the development of this latest new offering in the web browser market. This means that Preview should see its fair share of success as it is based upon real user experience. If you couple this to the troubles going on at Chrome, we could see a fair few of the 5 billion make the switch. Of course, when something is so dominant and has been for so long, it becomes easier to deflect attempts to steal your crown.
