Since Mozilla announced its new browser engine Servo (or the programming language used for it - Rust) I was interested where this project is going. After some time we finally got the first larger bit of Servo into Firefox, which eventually lead way for Quantum - the new rendering / core pipeline in Firefox. Mozilla did a good job in starting a great wave of marketing efforts, which eventually brought back a few tiny shares of the larger portion that has been lost in the previous years.
Like many others I immediately tried out the new Firefox "Quantum", which did not feel so much faster back then. However, compared to the "old" Firefox it also felt like it was definitely going in the right direction from a UX feeling. Recently, I completed that experiment from back then by going Firefox as my main browser for work.
The reason for choosing Firefox as my browser for work-related topics is simple: containers. All other browsers (at least to my limited knowledge) do not have such a feature. In Chrome I could use profiles, which is not as nicely integrated and has a quite bad UX (separate window for each profile, no possibility to open links from one profile in another profile etc.). Among containers Firefox now feels snappier than ever before and is more than usable - I even consider using it as my primary web browser for web development even though here I will potentially hang on a bit longer on Opera / Chrome.
So what is containers about? Containers represent a nice mechanism for placing a complete browsing session in a dedicated space. I can have a container for client a, client b, some personal stuff, some social media stuff. Whatever things you'd like to have grouped and not conflicted / exchanged with other sessions should go in one dedicated container.
Containers also represent a solution for having 2 sessions on the same website. They are also great for demo purposes (you can create and delete containers as you need them). With the Firefox Containers extension I can receive an email in one container and open a link contained in the email within another container. Ah and containers run all in the same browser Window - they can be distinguished via colors that you can just set as you want.
With Microsoft surrendering to Chrome and Chrome taking over the web we - as users of the web - need to make a stand for open technologies. Choosing Firefox at this time is not only great to show to Mozilla that we care for their recent investment in technologies, but also that we do not want a monoculture (or single-vendor) web to become reality.