4 ms·

I didn't flip because of features, everything was working just fine for me. I flipped beacuse Chrome, at the time, was incredibly faster and snappier than Firef

I didn't flip because of features, everything was working just fine for me. I flipped beacuse Chrome, at the time, was incredibly faster and snappier than Firefox. And it remained like that for a long time. I bet a ton of users switched for the same reason.

dman 5y ago
Having much better autocomplete in the URL bar is what caused me to switch.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  Fascinating! For me, Firefox does much better autocompletion in the URL bar than Chrome, and that kept me from switching.
jasonvorhe 5y ago
Exactly this. Chrome was fast, Firefox wasn't. It still isn't: https://arewefastyet.com/mac/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/mac/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 I'm glad there are alternatives to Chrome though.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Wait don't the graph show that Firefox is mostly faster. Lower on the graph means better.
- varispeed 5y ago
  On my Linux laptop I am running Chromium. Do you know if it is going to have this feature or is it just in Chrome. I think websites on Chromium look better than on Firefox and that's important for me. But if that feature is going to be in Chromium too, maybe I'll look how to remove that feature, but I'll have to learn how to compile the whole thing. I tried couple of times but always got stuck somewhere.
  - hmry 5y ago
    Yes, it will be in Chromium as well. It's meant to be a complete replacement for tracking cookies after all. It remains to be seen how much of it you will be able to turn off in the browser settings, as opting out is not implemented yet IIRC. If it turns out you cannot completely disable it, and you still want to continue using a Chromium-based browser without FLoC, you will have to use a fork. Vivaldi and Brave have already announced they will remove it, and I'm sure Ungoogled Chromium will do the same.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  Hmm, in many of the benchmarks there, it is even performing better than Chrome and the like. What makes you say, that it still is not fast? Which one of the benchmark results do you assign more importance than the others and why?
- fmajid 5y ago
  How much of Chrome’s speed advantage (if it even exists any more) comes from hogging RAM to speed things up at the expense of everything else on the system? Truly a tragedy of the commons, compounded by Electron apps like Slack that I unfortunately have to run as a corporate mandate.
ralfn 5y ago
Also, doesn't firefox still contain things like pocket.io and other 3rd party data integrations? I don't know the current situation but I stopped considering Firefox an alternative or mozilla more trust worthy than Google at that moment. There are still alternatives but that's more things like the default gnome webbrowser. At heart Firefox's financing model is as broken as Google's. Yet all the real alternatives aren't investing in the actual development. Give me a competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button or something similar as only business model and I'll switch. At the end of the day that sort of thing needs financing and Mozilla's strategies aren't at heart different. And I don't know current leadership but I haven't heard the all clear yet. Is firefox currently more privacy conscious? People just assume Firefox is a clean browser but last I checked those assumptions were still marketing and not reality.
- yoavm 5y ago
  A competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button as a business model? Sounds like you're staying with Chrome forever then. Mozilla aren't more holy than the pope, but of course they are more trustworthy and privacy oriented than Chrome. You can see it basically everywhere: containers, cookie management, uBlock support etc. They're not perfect, but they are creating a browser, while Chrome is becoming essentially an ad delivery tool (surprise, surprise, an ad company creating an ad delivery tool).
- deftnerd 5y ago
  It's getpocket.com, actually. The io one is just a domain for sale. You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration... But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing. After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright. That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1] Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018. This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-2019-short-form-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...
drowntoge 5y ago
Same. I actually resisted switching to Chrome for a while because I didn't want to lose functionality that I had accustomed to in Firefox which was lacking in Chrome back then, (mostly in the form of extensions like Firebug) but the difference in speed and resource usage between the two had become undeniably apparent at some point and that's when I decided to switch and learn to live without the features that I'd leave behind. This particular incidence doesn't in any way disprove the argument that just a few flashy features is sometimes what it takes to get a lot of users to flip to a new -and in some cases, inferior- product though. As software history repeatedly acknowledges, that is fundamentally true.
freebuju 5y ago
I flipped long ago because of a stupid stubborn ui design decision chrome stuck with. In hindsight, if chrome listened to my (user) needs I would probably still be using it. Assuming the privacy bug hadn't caught up with me that is. (Who am I kidding? No one sane should be using chrome as a personal browser in 2021) The biggest crime chrome made was to add a flag that enabled users to use a bottom address bar then completely remove it months later. This felony was enough to make me export all my passwords and move them to another Chromium-based browser that had the single feature I had longed for. Funny enough it also opened up my eyes to bitwarden and haveibeenpwned. Maybe all this was sort of due. I occasionally use vanilla Firefox for testing out ads and other links.
oweiler 5y ago
Not only was Chrome much faster, it also didn't leak memory (which was my biggest gripe with FF at that time).

dman 5y ago

Having much better autocomplete in the URL bar is what caused me to switch.

sanxiyn 5y ago
Fascinating! For me, Firefox does much better autocompletion in the URL bar than Chrome, and that kept me from switching.

jasonvorhe 5y ago

Exactly this. Chrome was fast, Firefox wasn't. It still isn't: https://arewefastyet.com/mac/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 https://arewefastyet.com/mac/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60 I'm glad there are alternatives to Chrome though.

Ygg2 5y ago
Wait don't the graph show that Firefox is mostly faster. Lower on the graph means better.
varispeed 5y ago
On my Linux laptop I am running Chromium. Do you know if it is going to have this feature or is it just in Chrome. I think websites on Chromium look better than on Firefox and that's important for me. But if that feature is going to be in Chromium too, maybe I'll look how to remove that feature, but I'll have to learn how to compile the whole thing. I tried couple of times but always got stuck somewhere.
- hmry 5y ago
  Yes, it will be in Chromium as well. It's meant to be a complete replacement for tracking cookies after all. It remains to be seen how much of it you will be able to turn off in the browser settings, as opting out is not implemented yet IIRC. If it turns out you cannot completely disable it, and you still want to continue using a Chromium-based browser without FLoC, you will have to use a fork. Vivaldi and Brave have already announced they will remove it, and I'm sure Ungoogled Chromium will do the same.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
Hmm, in many of the benchmarks there, it is even performing better than Chrome and the like. What makes you say, that it still is not fast? Which one of the benchmark results do you assign more importance than the others and why?
fmajid 5y ago
How much of Chrome’s speed advantage (if it even exists any more) comes from hogging RAM to speed things up at the expense of everything else on the system? Truly a tragedy of the commons, compounded by Electron apps like Slack that I unfortunately have to run as a corporate mandate.

ralfn 5y ago

Also, doesn't firefox still contain things like pocket.io and other 3rd party data integrations? I don't know the current situation but I stopped considering Firefox an alternative or mozilla more trust worthy than Google at that moment. There are still alternatives but that's more things like the default gnome webbrowser. At heart Firefox's financing model is as broken as Google's. Yet all the real alternatives aren't investing in the actual development. Give me a competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button or something similar as only business model and I'll switch. At the end of the day that sort of thing needs financing and Mozilla's strategies aren't at heart different. And I don't know current leadership but I haven't heard the all clear yet. Is firefox currently more privacy conscious? People just assume Firefox is a clean browser but last I checked those assumptions were still marketing and not reality.

yoavm 5y ago
A competitive browser and render engine with a patreon button as a business model? Sounds like you're staying with Chrome forever then. Mozilla aren't more holy than the pope, but of course they are more trustworthy and privacy oriented than Chrome. You can see it basically everywhere: containers, cookie management, uBlock support etc. They're not perfect, but they are creating a browser, while Chrome is becoming essentially an ad delivery tool (surprise, surprise, an ad company creating an ad delivery tool).
deftnerd 5y ago
It's getpocket.com, actually. The io one is just a domain for sale. You know, I was furious about the pocket integration and partnership when it first happened almost six years ago. I didn't like the idea of third-party integrations. I was also mad that they didn't bow to pressure from the community and remove the integration... But now, I kind of respect Mozilla for keeping it despite the community pressure. They were making money with the partnership, and money from sources OTHER than Google is a good thing. After two years of this, Mozilla realized that Pocket was making so much money on paid memberships that it was smarter to use some of their war-chest to buy Pocket outright. That's right, Pocket is owned by Mozilla now and has been for 4 years. [1] Now it's an important part of their financials. In their Auditors report covering all of 2019 [2], they say "Mozilla’s subscription revenues primarily consist of revenue from subscriptions to a service known as Pocket Premium". The subscription revenue for 2019 was over 14 million, triple what it was in 2018. This makes me more comfortable because I don't mind, in theory, subscribing to services that actually fund Mozilla. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-pocket/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po... [2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-2019-short-form-0926.pdf https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2019/mozilla-fdn-201...

drowntoge 5y ago

Same. I actually resisted switching to Chrome for a while because I didn't want to lose functionality that I had accustomed to in Firefox which was lacking in Chrome back then, (mostly in the form of extensions like Firebug) but the difference in speed and resource usage between the two had become undeniably apparent at some point and that's when I decided to switch and learn to live without the features that I'd leave behind. This particular incidence doesn't in any way disprove the argument that just a few flashy features is sometimes what it takes to get a lot of users to flip to a new -and in some cases, inferior- product though. As software history repeatedly acknowledges, that is fundamentally true.

freebuju 5y ago

I flipped long ago because of a stupid stubborn ui design decision chrome stuck with. In hindsight, if chrome listened to my (user) needs I would probably still be using it. Assuming the privacy bug hadn't caught up with me that is. (Who am I kidding? No one sane should be using chrome as a personal browser in 2021) The biggest crime chrome made was to add a flag that enabled users to use a bottom address bar then completely remove it months later. This felony was enough to make me export all my passwords and move them to another Chromium-based browser that had the single feature I had longed for. Funny enough it also opened up my eyes to bitwarden and haveibeenpwned. Maybe all this was sort of due. I occasionally use vanilla Firefox for testing out ads and other links.

oweiler 5y ago

Not only was Chrome much faster, it also didn't leak memory (which was my biggest gripe with FF at that time).