Firefox beats Chrome and Tor in our trustworthy browser poll

  • 19 October 2015
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by Mark Stockley on October 19, 2015
 
For the third year running Mozilla's 'browser wars' veteran, Firefox, has burned the world's favourite browser, Google Chrome, in our trustworthy browser poll.
 
Surprisingly, it also soundly beat the newest entrant to appear in our poll - the post-Snowden privacy poster boy, the Tor browser.
The Tor browser, which uses Firefox as its base, is designed to be the last word in privacy and security but it seems the message isn't out there yet; it scored so few votes (6%) that it ended up making up the numbers in our 'other' category.
 
                

Browser Trust Gap

 FirefoxChromeExplorerSafari
201319.5-12.3-5.2-0.9
201419.5-8.6-8.2-1.2
201514.3-19.6-9.2-1.1
 
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Interesting survey. I've used Firefox for many years now but never thought that a lot of users of Chrome and IE considered it more trustworthy than the browsers they were actually using!
 
As the author points out this may partly be because many corporate users are obliged to use IE even though they do not personally trust IE but it's not clear why Chrome users might think the same way as I would have thought that the vast majority of these would be home users.
 
Incidentally, all my (non-techie) friends that I have asked simply use the browser that comes with the OS, or the one that they are familiar with. Thus Windows users have always used IE (even though MS now give you a choice, these folk started with IE and stick with it) and if they get an android phone/tablet, then they use Chrome whereas if it's an Apple product, they stick with Safari. I guess  this is human nature.
When I first heard of Firefox many years ago I changed to it because I heard it was safer than Internet Explorer due to not using activex. I've been using it ever since (love my add-ons).
 
People (like me) may be avoiding Chrome because of privacy concerns (real or imagined). Google, to me, is the epitome of Orwell's "Big Brother."  Chrome also isn't as customizable as FF. (Love the Classic Theme Restorer.)
 
Firefox has definitely slowed down a lot though, compared to the earlier versions. That is annoying. But old habits die hard.
does anyone know about TOR for windows 10? should I stick with firefox?

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