Mercury Browser

Despite Chromium’s dominance over the browser market, it’s safe to say that Firefox has a dedicated user base. It may not be as high as one may hope, if at least to even things out, but the majority of the ones using Firefox primarily do so due to privacy and security considerations.

The privacy-focused crowd will claim that you need to make a few adjustments to vanilla Firefox to get it to work its best, through a process also known as hardening. Mercury Browser takes the foundation of Firefox and provides users with the changes and optimizations to improve the browser’s security, privacy, and performance.

If you appreciate what Firefox has to offer, but don’t want to go through the hardening process, then an already modified fork of it like such can help. This one in particular features a series of patches and optimizations ported over from popular solutions like LibreWolf, Waterfox, and others, offering a tighter package that is very easy to work with.

As for the other modifications, there are quite a few. All telemetry and related data reporting are disabled by default, while Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are both on. Pocket is also a goner.

It’s also important to mention that some optimizations were also made to the compiler: namely, AVX, AES, LTO, and PGO. The gist of it is that these should net users higher performance gains over stock Firefox.

I should note that the browser does not come with any preinstalled extensions, so no built-in ad-blockers or anything like that come packaged by default. That shouldn’t be a problem, however, as you can browse the Firefox extensions website and install anything you need.

Overall, Mercury Browser looks to be a viable fork of Firefox. Its optimizations to foster enhanced security and user privacy are notable, and I had a pleasant experience overall with the browser. It was snappy,