I finally ditched Firefox for Brave, and Mozilla's stagnation is to blame

Published Aug 26, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT Graeme Peacock is a seasoned Linux expert with more than 15 years of hands-on experience. He has worked extensively with Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch Linux, Qubes, and Fedora, gaining deep proficiency in everything from routine terminal operations to highly customized system builds. Graeme began his journey with Ubuntu, quickly mastering the command line and essential system administration skills. A year later, he moved to Arch Linux, where he spent nearly a decade refining his expertise through the installation and configuration of multiple minimalist systems. After some time, he moved to Gentoo, where he configured and compiled both server and desktop environments using normal and hardened profiles and frequently compiled custom kernels. Graeme moved to Qubes in 2016, where he has remained ever since. Graeme has extensive experience with highly configurable tools such as Vim, Neovim, and Emacs, and he maintains his own complex configurations. He is also highly proficient with Bash, Zsh, and dozens of utilities. Graeme holds a B.S. in software engineering and has a strong passion for programming and web development. He is proficient in Golang, Python, Bash, JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, and CSS. He also has considerable experience with Docker and is currently working on learning Kubernetes. Brave is doing what Mozilla won't. Mozilla hasn't innovated in years. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of waiting. I have limited options, yet Brave ticks the right boxes. Here are the reasons I left Firefox behind. Brave and Chromium simply have a vastly superior web-extension ecosystem. With a deep set of users and developers, they have the momentum and resources to keep it interesting. While I love Firefox (and Mozilla), key problems have pushed me away, and Brave is moving in the right direction. Why I moved from Firefox A relatively barren ecosystem, annoyances, and dwindling quality After many years, I got sick of Mozilla’s lack of innovation. I dream of a browser that tries new ideas, but Mozilla is not the company to do that. From its early days following Netscape, when Mozilla created a browser unlike anything before it and popularized tabs, add-ons, and much more, the company has barely moved the needle in the past 15 years. Sure, it has leaned toward privacy (not heavily enough, in my opinion), but it hasn’t really done anything else. Mozilla's killer feature was its add-on ecosystem. When the company sacrificed it at the altar of WebExtensions, its primary value proposition evaporated overnight. At the time, there was plenty of uproar because the change reset over a decade of Firefox culture. The browser became just another mundane option, and it slowly conceded ground to Chromium over the next 10 years. Firefox's Quantum overhaul addressed a big performance issue and kept the browser relevant for another eight or so years, but the trajectory was downward, and there wasn't any reason to stay. Performance issues began to creep in after 2020, when Mozilla laid off 250 staff members. They weren't huge problems, but I could hear the creaks—DNS caching for one. I have a slightly different DNS setup, and when my system starts up, it doesn't fire immediately. If I launch my browser then, Firefox obviously struggles to resolve domain names and seems to cache those results. I sit there for 60 seconds, waiting for a website to load. It irks me to no end. Profile refreshes are another annoyance that gets under my skin. Every year or so, Firefox complains that I should refresh mine. Things become sluggish, startup takes longer, and my frustration grows. The thought of setting up all my add-ons again, without a restore process, has me running the palm of my hand down across my face. Why on Earth should I need to do this? As a programmer, I know it isn't a technical limitation but rather a deliberate design choice. Given the dwindling performance, the relatively barren web-extension marketplace, and a distinct lack of innovation or quality-of-life features, I moved to Brave. Why Brave appeals to me Innovation and moving in the right direction The feature that really grabbed my attention was Brave's anti-fingerprinting measures. A fingerprint is a representation of your browser and system configuration as a unique mathematical token. You can change your IP all you want, but it still identifies you among millions. To throw off detectors, browsers like Firefox typically try to make everyone look the same. However, I find that an impossible task because people often change their settings, skewing their fingerprint into uniqueness. I've long believed that randomness is the answer because it's much easier to do—every request should randomize your configuration (lie to trackers), tweaking it slightly and giving you a new mask every time. Brave is the only browser I know of that does something even remotely close to this (called Farbling), and it impressed me a lot. In addition to that, Brave leverages Chrome's far superior web-extension ecosystem, which has a much larger range of options. Rarely do I go without one the way I did on Firefox. It's something I bet Mozilla envies but won't admit it already had in years gone by. Brave's healthy selection of web extensions comes from Chromium's gargantuan hold over the browser market (around 68%), and with that, and many people using it, come solutions for almost any problem I encounter. From missing extensions to on-page rendering issues, Chromium has the largest pool of users and developers, so a fix is always just around the corner. On top of that, the company behind Brave seems to want to innovate. It offers privacy-related tools, quality-of-life features for Brave Search, a private search index, and even an encrypted AI chat history. These might not blow your socks off, but it's doing things—actually trying to solve problems people care about. Why should I wait when there's a fantastic alternative? I grew sick of waiting for Mozilla to do something. It was solving problems in the wrong areas, like a VPN service, Pocket, or getting rid of tab groups. I don't think it knows how to make a good browser anymore. The people at Brave seem to have more passion for what they do, and they make the right calls. With Mozilla's inaction, a smaller ecosystem, and an alternative browser that cares about privacy just as much, I moved to Brave. I think Mozilla is a great company, and it's always pushing for stronger privacy online—through awareness campaigns or sensible input on web-standard specifications—but I can't wait forever. I need something that appeals to me now, and Brave is doing just that.