#Firefox for mac m1 free#
#Firefox for mac m1 windows#

I imported my Chrome bookmarks, passwords, extensions, personal info and more, but when I turned on sync using my Microsoft account, my bookmarks were replaced by a set of old bookmarks that I had not used in years. I didn’t care much for the way Microsoft has implemented sync. Not everything is lollipops and roses, though. It feels more Mac-like to me than Chrome.

#Firefox for mac m1 windows#

Edge looks like a Mac browser, not like a Windows browser with a Big Sur facelift. Microsoft also has designed the Mac version to fit in with the macOS design language. (Microsoft has its own store for native Edge extensions as well.) I’ve not found any among the 24 installed on Chrome that don’t work on Edge. This time around, they’re much more stable. I tested Edge for Mac when it was first available and it was hit-or-miss whether Chrome extensions would work reliably. You can also set Edge to use Strict levels when you use InPrivate browsing, which is similar to Chrome’s Incognito mode.Įdge’s Chromium roots means it can use most of the extensions available for Chrome. Microsoft Edge offers users three levels of protection against tracking. (See Forbes contributor Zak Doffman’s piece on Chrome’s privacy excesses.) Though Edge and Chrome are similar, they differ greatly on privacy.įor example, Edge gives users three levels of tracking protection from which to choose – Basic, Balanced and Strict, with Balanced the default. Of course, one of the many reasons both Mac and Windows users are wary of Chrome is because of the amount of data it harvests from users. Chrome doesn’t have this (though there are extensions that emulate it), but Microsoft Edge does – and it’s a lot easier on the eyes, with a manila-colored background. Safari users enjoy an excellent Reader Mode feature that strips out ads and other distractions, providing you with just text. Chrome has this in a feature dubbed Tab Freeze, but with Edge you can control how long before tabs are suspended.

#Firefox for mac m1 free#

As I work with the two, Chrome consistently uses significantly more memory than Edge when the same pages are loaded.Īnother example where Microsoft is ahead of Google on resource management: Sleeping Tabs, which suspend web pages after a specified amount of time to free up CPU and memory. When I launch Chrome on an Intel-based Mac running macOS 11.2.3, it takes around 900 megabytes once loaded. Although Edge is built on the same foundation, Microsoft has tuned it better. Firefox was known as a memory and resource hog at the the time, a reputation that now dogs Chrome. When Chrome originally launched in the late 2000s for Windows, it was touted as a leaner alternative to Firefox, which in turn was considered an alternative to Internet Explorer. But it’s not the only feature that makes it a great browser to use on a Mac, and certainly make it a better pick than Chrome. T took me about 10 minutes of using this new version before I was sold. You can also see the gmail tab not doing anything for a while, even though I was scrolling from the second it switched to that tab, then it unfreezez.There's also another website that I scroll through, and you can see that it takes a while for the content to appear.Microsoft Edge for Mac with vertical tabs pinned open. the main things that you can see there is me clicking on tabs, and the tabs don't switch for a while. The top memory hogging processes are firefox ones:Īlso - here's a video demonstrating the slow-down. I've been asking around in mac forums, and there seems to be a general consensus that if I was doing the same thing with Safari instead of FireFox, it wouldn't have any problem handling these amounts of open tabs. I think it's a total of about 50 - 70 tabs.

On my M1 macbook, I have a few Firefox windows open (mostly minimized - don't know if that makes any difference), with a few tabs in each.