Chrome is powerful and fast, but there are question marks over its privacy.
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WHEN IT COMES to browsing the web, more than six in ten of us use Google’s Chrome browser. Its dominance has slipped slightly in recent years, but that only tells part of the stor y. Beneath Chrome’s hood is Google’s open-source Chromium browser and Blink web engine, which renders web pages and performs other core tasks, including navigation, running scripts, and security. Virtually all other web browsers—including Microsoft Edge—now use Blink rather than develop their own proprietar y engines.
While Apple continues to plow its own furrow with WebKit, the only other standout is Mozilla’s Gecko engine, used to power its Firefox browser. Unlike virtually any other browser comparison, then, we’re not simply splitting hairs between two browsers who share large portions of code from the open-source Chromium browser project; we’re genuinely comparing apples and pears.
Any comparison, then, must start with Blink and Gecko. For the most part they work in a practically identical manner, so when you open a website in either browser, you see no difference. Behind the scenes, however, there are many differences—in the past, websites often produced multiple versions of a web page, each one optimized for a different browser or web engine.
Those days are long gone, and one reason why so many browsers have switched to Blink is because most sites focus solely on producing pages that work with it. Gecko does its best to keep up, but there are some pages that won’t load properly (if at all)—however, Firefox users can simply try the pages in Edge without having to go near Chrome at all, although it’s obviously still a faff.