Why Firefox?

Firefox is open source software, developed by the non-profit organisation, the Mozilla Foundation. As such, it is independent from the interests of any one specific company although a large portion of its funding comes from Google for its placement as the default search engine within the Firefox browser. It is also highly extensible through the add-ons and plugins, which allows users greater control over how the browser acts as compared to Internet Explorer or Chrome (and it’s open-source’d version, Chromium). It should however be noted that this extensibility through add-ons is a double-edged sword and as such add-ons also have great power to subvert the browsers normal activities as well as enhance them.

If you are uncomfortable with Google as the default search engine, this can be changed through the ‘Manage Search Engines…’ option from the pull-down menu of the search box. Some more pro-privacy search engines that are worth considering are Startpage and DuckDuckGo.