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.
We’ve run our trustworthy browser poll at about the same time of the year, three years in a row now. Each time we’ve asked, “Which browser do you trust?” and each time the majority of you have answered emphatically: Firefox.
Of course this isn’t a scientific study, it’s a collection of web polls, and the result doesn’t mean that Firefox is more trustworthy than Chrome or Tor (or Opera, or anything else for that matter), only that the people who filled in our poll think it is.
And that’s important.
Browsers are our gateway to the web and a critically important part of the way we ensure our privacy and security online.
Most of us aren’t going to consult Bugtraq or pore over independent speed tests when we choose our browser though. Some, perhaps many, will follow the recommendation of a person we trust on IT matters or pick one based on our perception of the browser and the company that makes it.
If you want to get online then you need to choose a browser you trust or live with one that you don’t.
It seems like many of you do exactly that.
We’ve always suspected that a large number of Internet Explorer users are using a browser they don’t trust because it’s a choice forced upon them by their corporate IT departments.
This is evident in a ‘trust gap’, the difference between the proportion of votes the software gets in our trustworthy browser poll and proportion of users who visit that poll using that browser.
Internet Explorer received fewer that 3% of the votes but was used by 11.9% of the people who visited our 2015 poll, giving a ‘trust gap’ of -9.2 percentage points.
What’s surprising is that the ‘trust gap’ for Chrome is even larger than Internet Explorer.
In fact, of the browsers used by more than a handful of visitors, Firefox is consistently the only browser with a positive score:
Browser Trust Gap
| Firefox | Chrome | Explorer | Safari | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 19.5 | -12.3 | -5.2 | -0.9 |
| 2014 | 19.5 | -8.6 | -8.2 | -1.2 |
| 2015 | 14.3 | -19.6 | -9.2 | -1.1 |
Firefox has soundly beaten Chrome over three polls in three years, but during that period the number of people visiting our polls using Chrome has increased and the number using Firefox has decreased.
Perhaps Firefox users are just more willing to fill in online polls or maybe we’re just learning to live with software we don’t trust.
Image of web browsers courtesy of Shutterstock.com
Just one comment: When talking about the “trust gap”, wouldn’t it be more correct to use the proportion of users of a certain browser that found it the most trustworthy, rather than the absolute numbers? You claim that the “trust gap” of Chrome is greater than that of Explorer, yet only 25 percent of Explorer users in your test believes it the most trustworthy browser, compared to 50 percent of Chrome users.
Actually, I’d really like to see the numbers for alle the browsers expressed in the number of votes divided by the number of users in the quiz.
I did, I obviously didn’t explain myself very well though 😦
“This is evident in a ‘trust gap’, the difference between the proportion of votes the software gets in our trustworthy browser poll and proportion of users who visit that poll using that browser.”
21.3% of respondents voted Chrome the most trustworthy but 40.9% of visitors to the poll used Chrome. The trust gap (21.3% – 40.9%) is -19.6 percentage points.
No, I did get what you did, and your explanation in the article of what you did was easy to understand. What I’m doing is questioning whether your way of measuring the trust gap really measures what it is you set out to measure.
It is not entirely surprising to find that the trust gap, measured in percentage point difference, is bigger for Chrome than for IE, when only about 12 per cent of the pollers used IE (assuming the 3 per cent who voted IE actually used IE), but over 40 per cent used Chrome. That’s more than three times as many users, and so it’s likely to get a higher trust gap just by the number of users. Chrome could have gotten 30 per cent of the votes and still had a bigger trust gap.
Looking at the same numbers from the relative amount of users who found a given browser to be the most secure to the total amount of users using the browser, we have that of the 12 per cent who used IE, only 3 per cent found it the most secure. That’s 1 in 4, or 25 per cent of IE users. For Chrome, the numbers are 1 in 2, 50 per cent of users believing it to be the most trustworthy browser – a considerably lower trust gap. (assumption: the overwhelming majority of votes for both IE and Chrome were cast by users of the browser they voted for)
Now, both measures have their merit, but I wonder why you did not at least use the latter way in addition. Intuitively, I find it a better measure of a trust gap than the percentage point difference between users and votes.
I trust Firefox more than Chrome. But the UI in Chrome is better, in my opinion. Such the dilemma.
Firefox with the Beyond Australis addon ftw 😀
Yet Google funds Mozilla.
Firefox recently switched its default search to YAHOO! so I imagine it’s funding will be coming from them instead of Google now.
That said, you’re absolutely right—the major source of funds for Firefox was Google for years and years (I actually mentioned this in one of my earlier articles on the subject) so a lot of code was written on their dollar.
Opera is also a made-over Chromium, which is almost identical to Chrome (and yet Opera gets much higher trust scores than Chrome). Tor browser was initially developed by the US Navy and DARPA and is built on top of Firefox, which was heavily funded by Google.
And of course Safari shared the WebKit rendering engine with Chrome until quite recently.
So Google is *everywhere* in browser land.
A more varied ecosystem would be a good thing but browsers are large, sophisticated, under constant attack and given away for free.
This is great. I just have one comment though. I feel like instead of voting on which browser is more trustworthy, that instead it should be supported by hard facts. That way, you can say objectively which browser respects your privacy more, rather than saying which browser more users trust.
They are different questions – we aren’t trying to recommend one browser over another, we’re trying to find out how people feel about a choice they’re more or less forced in to. The question is worth asking for the comments alone.
I think the question of which browser is empirically most trustworthy is essentially unanswerable because you can’t separate browser software from the process and organisation that makes it.
In other words you can access some hard facts, but you still have to interpret them whilst another bunch of hard facts is unknowable to you and might change the outcome entirely.
The recent bugzilla leak would have made a mockery of any assessment we made a year ago on the basis of the then-available hard facts about Firefox.
Ditto for Tor – its security depends on how many of the entry and exist nodes the NSA (or Mossad, or the FSB) owns.
Another factor in judging the browsers and determining the browser trust score is that iPhone users who participated in the survey are stuck with using the Safari browser and still don’t have the option to use Firefox. That would cause a greater positive gap.
Yeah, I would also like to see all the browser revealed. But what I really want to know if you grouped Pale Moon in with Firefox or was it under the “Other” section?
Anyways, I too would use Firefox, not because it’s safer in privacy or security, but it’s way more customizable than Chrome, Opera, Safari and IE.
Though, my actual browser was Pale Moon because it gives me more freedom than Firefox(customization, flexibility and user choice/options), in my opinion. Not only that, their user forums are way much nicer and helpful.
“Surprisingly, it also soundly beat the newest entrant to appear in our poll – the post-Snowden privacy poster boy, the Tor browser.”
I suspect that many of us do not consider Tor because of the fear that using it might make you subject to more scrutiny.
As far as ‘Vanilla’ browsers go, Firefox is my bet. But I still vote for Tor.
One really has to tweak “about:config” in FireFox based browsers for maximized security.
Chrome and Chromium derivatives do not come close as they all leak WebRTC (exposing private IP addresses and hardware IDs) with no way to disable it.
WebRTC Network Limiter is your friend …
It can be disabled in Mozilla based browsers:
Open a new tab or Window
enter about:config
accept the warning
search for: media.peerconnection.enabled
Change the value to FALSE
Close the page.
Close the browser and re-open it.
I wonder how many people who take part in these polls have the slightest microscopic iota of objective, tangible and verifiable evidence to back up their poll response…1%? 0.1%? 0.01%? How many of these voters have ever heard of Browserscope. PC Flank, Qualys BrowserCheck or actually tested their browser(s) at one of these sites to see how efficient & secure they are?
BTW my browsers overall scores at Browserscope.org today were: Chromodo 89%, Cyberfox 87%, IE 11 77%…IE 11 consistently finishes in 3rd place when I test the 3 browsers on my PC.