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I have been a happy Firefox user for 15 years... maybe more. I have seen people use and complain Internet Explorer in my younger days, from version 6 to 7, etc

I have been a happy Firefox user for 15 years... maybe more. I have seen people use and complain Internet Explorer in my younger days, from version 6 to 7, etc. Even though I mention Firefox to them, they stay with IE. What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009. It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it. I see this a lot in my career as well (software engineer) - when some cool, flashy new toy comes backed by companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun/Oracle. etc. Anyway.. I only recently found out there was a thing called hardened firefox. There is me thinking "Oh! This might be worth a look" - and it is basically firefox with private settings enabled, etc, in the config section. (which is what I have been doing for years. lol) I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. However, even if you use something else, I would not be surprised in modern Windows listens in on your microphone "for advertising" purposes. I might not be able to eliminate privacy issues, but if I can reduce the best I can, I will. Back to browsers - I hear good things about Brave. Not used it, though. Happy with FF.

pharmakom 3y ago
Some things (e.g. Slack calls) will not work in Firefox. It’s pretty annoying. Personally I still use Firefox.
- prox 3y ago
  But if Slack developers would use Firefox, they could support it? Chicken/egg problem?
- dimask 3y ago
  If we are talking about a paid service (like slack), not supporting firefox imo means it is a bad product. A service for which one pays for should not force them use a specific browser. This is essentially an argument of not using slack, not firefox.
  - maccard 3y ago
    I'll tell my employer that I refuse to take video calls because my preferred browser doesn't support it?
pyrale 3y ago
> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009. The power of endless money for advertising. Some users think it doesn't have that much impact, but being nudged on every other web page to make the switch is much more powerful than that nephew who talks to you about it once.
- dark-star 3y ago
  My guess is that i wasn't marketing. It was because FF was dog-slow back then and Chrome was (still is) blazingly fast
  - girvo 3y ago
    Most non-technical users don't give a crap about how fast or slow their browser was: if they did, they would've switched from IE to Firefox the first go 'round. To downplay the fact that google advertised Chrome on google.com is to rewrite history, in my opinion.
    - prox 3y ago
      It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time, especially with lots of tabs open. It was only with the Quantum (?) engine that FF became a lot faster. Webpages loading that bit snappier really was a big deal back then, probably for a lot of developers especially. Google was still riding on the “Do No Evil” vibes till about 2012-2014 I would wager.
      - rstuart4133 3y ago
        > It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time, It will be interesting to see what happens next year in that case, because FF+UBO will be much faster than Chrome with a nobbled ad blocker. If your right and speed is what everyone cares about there should be a mass migration back to Firefox. But I doubt it, because we have already have a similar experiment. FF+UBO on Android is blazing fast compared to Chrome on Android. Chrome not supporting extensions on Android means the situation is nothing like desktop where Chrome and Firefox are roughly comparable (and always have been). On an ad laden site FF+UBO is going to load a page several times faster. More to the point to me, ads on desktop are often "out of the way" of the main content, but on mobile that consume roughly 1/3 of an already small screen. Like the ancestor poster, I'm stunned that nobody uses Firefox mobile (I'm defining 0.49% market share as nobody). Performance wise the difference is enormous - yet clearly no one cares. Which also means, you and I and other nerds notwithstanding, it likely no one cared about Firefox's performance versus Chrome when they switched on the desktop. Marketing, bundling, breaking of Firefox on Google's home sites look to fit the facts much better.
ggjkvcxddd 3y ago
>I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Really? That seems hard to believe. I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time. Not sure what the state of things is now. This is HN, so another huge reason to use Chrome is for the devtools, which I've always had a very good experience with and know pretty well. I've always found other browser devtools miserable to work with in the past, though I admit I haven't invested serious time into learning them. All that said, the adblocking fiasco may well get me to try out FF again as my daily browser. But personally I had very clear reasons for abandoning it originally, it wasn't just cargo cutting
- gitaarik 3y ago
  Performance? Yeah there was once a time that Chrome was a bit snappier than Firefox, but nothing significant. I think it's mostly the placebo effect of people just thinking they are using a faster/slower browser. Development of devtools was indeed quite good early on in Chrome. But Firefox already had the Firebug extension, which was basically the first kind of browser devtools as far as I can remember. And then Firefox also eventually implemented the devtools natively, and Firebug eventually disappeared. And that did take some time while Chrome had the devtools already native. But still Firefox with their open plugin system allowed for Firebug to evolve, and Chrome's devtools (and also Firefox's) was for sure inspired by Firebug. So why do people use Chrome really? Placebo, hype, lack of historical context, and ignorance of privacy, I would say.
- masfoobar 3y ago
  "I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse..." This is a fair point. Personally, I don't recall seeing a big difference between the two. Maybe there was. Perhaps it was not that bad so it wasn't as issue for me. As for dev tools, I have been happy with Firefox - but then when I am doing web development I am testing on various browsers, anyway. So I use dev tools for all of them.
  - input_sh 3y ago
theodric 3y ago
I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox. It also didn't have the bug of occasionally losing things I told it to grab into the clipboard. Poor performance is also what drove me back to Firefox. It still has the clipboard bug, however.
- masfoobar 3y ago
  "I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox..." This is fine. My comment is not aimed at everyone who switched -- though I am likely still referring to the majority of people. I do remember the ACID test being the main selling point of Chrome over the other browers. Yes, from memory, I do believe Chrome was faster. My attitude to this, however, was that it was new and eventually, would be adding new features, etc. I understand that there are people out there who switched for other reasons.
vbezhenar 3y ago
I'm using Safari for day-to-day browsing (because I like its UI and iPhone sync) and I use Chrome for development. Firefox developer tools are not as convenient to me and Firefox does not support WebUSB which I need for some tasks. Also I always found Firefox filled with little irritating bugs when I tried to switch to it. That said, I'm not convinced by this flashmob against Chrome. I like Google direction and Google philosophy behind Chrome, including its position on adblockers. So I hardly have any reason to switch to Firefox. Chromium is open source, Firefox is financed by Google, so it's hard for me to be convinced that Chrome somehow is bad. Especially when Firefox makes one bad move after another bad move (integrating weird third-party services within Browser, like Pocket or VPN or whatever). And, yeah, I don't care about my privacy that much, especially not on the level to actively fight for it. I care about security, and that's about it.
- veidelis 3y ago
  Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
- olavgg 3y ago
  Most people don't need features like WebUSB support. But I do believe people want uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome. I have used Firefox forever, I never switched to Chrome as it knew it never was fully open-source. The point of open source is that you're able to build the thing from sources with the exact functionality as in binary file they release. The web is extremly important for everyone, and it is important that we still build an open web for everyone. When people use projects like Chrome, they let Google decide the direction of the web, just like Microsoft did with IE. That Firefox was sometimes slower than Chrome and sometimes lacked features has never been a big productivy hit for me. Neither has web pages that didn't work in Firefox. In the worst cases I just need to start Chromium. I lose max 1 minute. That is nothing to sacrifice for keeping the web open.
  - gorhill 3y ago
    > uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome. The webRequest API does allow to intercept and cancel HTTP requests, it has been part of Chrome extensions API since 2011.
zmxz 3y ago
I'm one of those who used Internet Explorer 5.0 and was there to complain about Internet Explorer in general. I'm not sure why you are amazed with Chrome transition, but let me give insights from experience. We had Firefox 0.3 which was very, very slow browser but still much better than Internet Explorer. There was a lot of mental gymnastics involved to get pages display at least similar for both browsers. When Chrome 1 was released, it was absolutely awesome. Minimal interface. Focused on browsing. Incredibly fast, it just executed JS stupidly quick and we could create web app interfaces that didn't lag You can still download Chrome 1 and see what it's about. It was basically what users wanted: supports more CSS features than other browsers, starts fast, executes JS fast, provides adequate developer console, renders pages correctly. It took all of us by storm because it was genuinely good software. That era was the era of good software, not spam advertising. Today, in 2023. this is not true any more and you are entirely correct when asking why people would use Chrome. Answer is: laziness, lack of info, apathy, lack of knowledge.
j1elo 3y ago
> It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it. Because it works. Advertising works. That's the bane of the conflict of interest between companies and users of Ad blockers. We (technical users) cannot complain that companies should not use and abuse Ads, because at the same time we (humanity as a collective) constantly show once and again that Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.
- water-your-self 3y ago
  Ads are a theft from word of mouth. Advertising spend should be regulated.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Adverts are a theft of time and attention, they are manipulative brainwashing by companies with more resources than the majority of countries.
    - xvector 3y ago
      Ads are fine. I've discovered so many fantastic products through them (did my research before buying, of course.) And they are also the only business model we have been able to think of that enables the free flow of information on the scale we see today. Unless governments step up to foot the bill for Maps, YouTube, Reddit, etc, ads are all we've got. I've never seen an ad that "stole" my time and attention. They are easy to scroll past and/or ignore. If an ad is stealing someone's time and attention, perhaps they need to work on their concentration and discipline instead of blaming the ad.
      - MikeRichardson 3y ago
        Oh, ok. So next time I get one of those full page ads that darkens the entire page - I should just concentrate really hard at reading the barely visible content. Maybe it will go away if I scroll really really fast.
jona-f 3y ago
I've been a melancholic Firefox user since it was called Netscape... Tried Brave on my phone, but it managed to generate 90mb of network traffic in 10min where another browser takes 5mb. No idea what it did, I instantly lost trust.
- meekaaku 3y ago
  Started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix, then it was renamed Firebird, then again to Firefox. It does exactly what I want from a browser, not more not less. Chrome I only use for debugger.
frereubu 3y ago
> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome. I use Firefox as my main browser, but there are times when I'm forced to open Chrome to do something (e.g. buy visitor parking permits from my local council) even with uBlock Origin disabled. As a non-technical user, if that happens to you even once, what motivation would there be for you to go back? As far as those users are concerned "Chrome works, but Firefox doesn't".
- Twisell 3y ago
  Another way to phrase it: "Because chrome is the new IE, it's prevalence broke the web standards so you have no choice" It's an argument, but not a good one. Don't be evil they said...
  - DanielHB 3y ago
    this has gotten much better due to the existence of Safari, if a website supports Safari AND Chrome it most likely works fine in Firefox as well It is very uncommon these days for actively maintained websites to not support Safari/iOS users
- masfoobar 3y ago
  "Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome.." Well I am not one of those people. Back in the late '00s I was testing in IE6, 7 and maybe 8 as well as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. I remember, back then, my boss telling me to "only worry about IE" when writing a demo web application. One day I came in and my boss slaps a peice of paper down at my desk, wondering why a customer saw this on their screen. At first I was like "WTF" as it was a bunch of rectangles scattered around. The penny dropped and tried it in firefox.. same result. It was at this point I started to care about ALL main browers regardless of what anyone told me. It is not as bad today, but my mind set is no different. Should not be testing on just one browser.
loveparade 3y ago
A decade or so ago when Chrome was first released there were good reasons to switch to it. It was better than Firefox in almost every way, especially speed. Today that's no longer the case, but there also isn't a huge reason to switch to Firefox. They're all kind of the same, especially to the average user who doesn't strongly care about privacy.
jpc0 3y ago
> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. When Chrome originally released firefox was better than IE but chrome was head and shoulders above both of them. Moving to Chrome from firefox at the time was a breath of fresh air. Nowadays there's very little difference, there was a short period of time I found Firefox faster but now I doubt most users would be able to tell the difference in performance
- tim333 3y ago
  Same here plus you get used to whatever you use in terms of how the commands and extensions and the like work. I've got Chrome, FF, Safari and others and tend to go with Chrome as it's what I'm used to. Also with FF I'm not sure how to translate the text from foreign languages. I tried some extensions but nothing so far works quite like Chrome where you just right click anywhere and click translate.
dimask 3y ago
Also FF long time user. Ime FF is pretty much fine nowadays. It used to have problems, but it got a huge leap in performance around 2017 when they improved multithreading support. Since then it is pretty much fine, aside from the occasional awkward unsupporting webpage. What I do not understand is not why people do not use FF, it is why people use Chrome instead of Chromium, Brave or some other chromium-based browser that is not google or MS. Surely it is not that much more effort to install one of these than chrome.
zzzcsgo 3y ago
[dead]
jklinger410 3y ago
> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. I can't think of a single way using Chrome and therefore having "less privacy" has affected me negatively. In fact, having an internet that just works has allowed me to be more productive. I'd love for someone to articulate how cookies or tracking has actually harmed them in any way.
Ir0nMan 3y ago
>What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released I'm not sure how old you were at the time but do you really remember that history well and did you compare the two browsers yourself at the time? I was a die hard Firefox user from the beginning until Chrome came out. I remember trying Chrome for the first time and being amazed at how much faster it was. Not just a little faster, way faster and how it could handle more tabs without slowing down. It was so far superior performance wise and that is what got me and many others to switch.

pharmakom 3y ago

Some things (e.g. Slack calls) will not work in Firefox. It’s pretty annoying. Personally I still use Firefox.

prox 3y ago
But if Slack developers would use Firefox, they could support it? Chicken/egg problem?
dimask 3y ago
If we are talking about a paid service (like slack), not supporting firefox imo means it is a bad product. A service for which one pays for should not force them use a specific browser. This is essentially an argument of not using slack, not firefox.
- maccard 3y ago
  I'll tell my employer that I refuse to take video calls because my preferred browser doesn't support it?

pyrale 3y ago

> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009. The power of endless money for advertising. Some users think it doesn't have that much impact, but being nudged on every other web page to make the switch is much more powerful than that nephew who talks to you about it once.

dark-star 3y ago
My guess is that i wasn't marketing. It was because FF was dog-slow back then and Chrome was (still is) blazingly fast
- girvo 3y ago
  Most non-technical users don't give a crap about how fast or slow their browser was: if they did, they would've switched from IE to Firefox the first go 'round. To downplay the fact that google advertised Chrome on google.com is to rewrite history, in my opinion.
  - prox 3y ago
    It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time, especially with lots of tabs open. It was only with the Quantum (?) engine that FF became a lot faster. Webpages loading that bit snappier really was a big deal back then, probably for a lot of developers especially. Google was still riding on the “Do No Evil” vibes till about 2012-2014 I would wager.
    - rstuart4133 3y ago
      > It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time, It will be interesting to see what happens next year in that case, because FF+UBO will be much faster than Chrome with a nobbled ad blocker. If your right and speed is what everyone cares about there should be a mass migration back to Firefox. But I doubt it, because we have already have a similar experiment. FF+UBO on Android is blazing fast compared to Chrome on Android. Chrome not supporting extensions on Android means the situation is nothing like desktop where Chrome and Firefox are roughly comparable (and always have been). On an ad laden site FF+UBO is going to load a page several times faster. More to the point to me, ads on desktop are often "out of the way" of the main content, but on mobile that consume roughly 1/3 of an already small screen. Like the ancestor poster, I'm stunned that nobody uses Firefox mobile (I'm defining 0.49% market share as nobody). Performance wise the difference is enormous - yet clearly no one cares. Which also means, you and I and other nerds notwithstanding, it likely no one cared about Firefox's performance versus Chrome when they switched on the desktop. Marketing, bundling, breaking of Firefox on Google's home sites look to fit the facts much better.

ggjkvcxddd 3y ago

>I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Really? That seems hard to believe. I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time. Not sure what the state of things is now. This is HN, so another huge reason to use Chrome is for the devtools, which I've always had a very good experience with and know pretty well. I've always found other browser devtools miserable to work with in the past, though I admit I haven't invested serious time into learning them. All that said, the adblocking fiasco may well get me to try out FF again as my daily browser. But personally I had very clear reasons for abandoning it originally, it wasn't just cargo cutting

gitaarik 3y ago
Performance? Yeah there was once a time that Chrome was a bit snappier than Firefox, but nothing significant. I think it's mostly the placebo effect of people just thinking they are using a faster/slower browser. Development of devtools was indeed quite good early on in Chrome. But Firefox already had the Firebug extension, which was basically the first kind of browser devtools as far as I can remember. And then Firefox also eventually implemented the devtools natively, and Firebug eventually disappeared. And that did take some time while Chrome had the devtools already native. But still Firefox with their open plugin system allowed for Firebug to evolve, and Chrome's devtools (and also Firefox's) was for sure inspired by Firebug. So why do people use Chrome really? Placebo, hype, lack of historical context, and ignorance of privacy, I would say.
masfoobar 3y ago
"I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse..." This is a fair point. Personally, I don't recall seeing a big difference between the two. Maybe there was. Perhaps it was not that bad so it wasn't as issue for me. As for dev tools, I have been happy with Firefox - but then when I am doing web development I am testing on various browsers, anyway. So I use dev tools for all of them.
- input_sh 3y ago

theodric 3y ago

I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox. It also didn't have the bug of occasionally losing things I told it to grab into the clipboard. Poor performance is also what drove me back to Firefox. It still has the clipboard bug, however.

masfoobar 3y ago
"I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox..." This is fine. My comment is not aimed at everyone who switched -- though I am likely still referring to the majority of people. I do remember the ACID test being the main selling point of Chrome over the other browers. Yes, from memory, I do believe Chrome was faster. My attitude to this, however, was that it was new and eventually, would be adding new features, etc. I understand that there are people out there who switched for other reasons.

vbezhenar 3y ago

I'm using Safari for day-to-day browsing (because I like its UI and iPhone sync) and I use Chrome for development. Firefox developer tools are not as convenient to me and Firefox does not support WebUSB which I need for some tasks. Also I always found Firefox filled with little irritating bugs when I tried to switch to it. That said, I'm not convinced by this flashmob against Chrome. I like Google direction and Google philosophy behind Chrome, including its position on adblockers. So I hardly have any reason to switch to Firefox. Chromium is open source, Firefox is financed by Google, so it's hard for me to be convinced that Chrome somehow is bad. Especially when Firefox makes one bad move after another bad move (integrating weird third-party services within Browser, like Pocket or VPN or whatever). And, yeah, I don't care about my privacy that much, especially not on the level to actively fight for it. I care about security, and that's about it.

veidelis 3y ago
Everyone is entitled to their opinion.
olavgg 3y ago
Most people don't need features like WebUSB support. But I do believe people want uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome. I have used Firefox forever, I never switched to Chrome as it knew it never was fully open-source. The point of open source is that you're able to build the thing from sources with the exact functionality as in binary file they release. The web is extremly important for everyone, and it is important that we still build an open web for everyone. When people use projects like Chrome, they let Google decide the direction of the web, just like Microsoft did with IE. That Firefox was sometimes slower than Chrome and sometimes lacked features has never been a big productivy hit for me. Neither has web pages that didn't work in Firefox. In the worst cases I just need to start Chromium. I lose max 1 minute. That is nothing to sacrifice for keeping the web open.
- gorhill 3y ago
  > uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome. The webRequest API does allow to intercept and cancel HTTP requests, it has been part of Chrome extensions API since 2011.

zmxz 3y ago

I'm one of those who used Internet Explorer 5.0 and was there to complain about Internet Explorer in general. I'm not sure why you are amazed with Chrome transition, but let me give insights from experience. We had Firefox 0.3 which was very, very slow browser but still much better than Internet Explorer. There was a lot of mental gymnastics involved to get pages display at least similar for both browsers. When Chrome 1 was released, it was absolutely awesome. Minimal interface. Focused on browsing. Incredibly fast, it just executed JS stupidly quick and we could create web app interfaces that didn't lag You can still download Chrome 1 and see what it's about. It was basically what users wanted: supports more CSS features than other browsers, starts fast, executes JS fast, provides adequate developer console, renders pages correctly. It took all of us by storm because it was genuinely good software. That era was the era of good software, not spam advertising. Today, in 2023. this is not true any more and you are entirely correct when asking why people would use Chrome. Answer is: laziness, lack of info, apathy, lack of knowledge.

j1elo 3y ago

> It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it. Because it works. Advertising works. That's the bane of the conflict of interest between companies and users of Ad blockers. We (technical users) cannot complain that companies should not use and abuse Ads, because at the same time we (humanity as a collective) constantly show once and again that Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

water-your-self 3y ago
Ads are a theft from word of mouth. Advertising spend should be regulated.
- ta1243 3y ago
  Adverts are a theft of time and attention, they are manipulative brainwashing by companies with more resources than the majority of countries.
  - xvector 3y ago
    Ads are fine. I've discovered so many fantastic products through them (did my research before buying, of course.) And they are also the only business model we have been able to think of that enables the free flow of information on the scale we see today. Unless governments step up to foot the bill for Maps, YouTube, Reddit, etc, ads are all we've got. I've never seen an ad that "stole" my time and attention. They are easy to scroll past and/or ignore. If an ad is stealing someone's time and attention, perhaps they need to work on their concentration and discipline instead of blaming the ad.
    - MikeRichardson 3y ago
      Oh, ok. So next time I get one of those full page ads that darkens the entire page - I should just concentrate really hard at reading the barely visible content. Maybe it will go away if I scroll really really fast.

jona-f 3y ago

I've been a melancholic Firefox user since it was called Netscape... Tried Brave on my phone, but it managed to generate 90mb of network traffic in 10min where another browser takes 5mb. No idea what it did, I instantly lost trust.

meekaaku 3y ago
Started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix, then it was renamed Firebird, then again to Firefox. It does exactly what I want from a browser, not more not less. Chrome I only use for debugger.

frereubu 3y ago

> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome. I use Firefox as my main browser, but there are times when I'm forced to open Chrome to do something (e.g. buy visitor parking permits from my local council) even with uBlock Origin disabled. As a non-technical user, if that happens to you even once, what motivation would there be for you to go back? As far as those users are concerned "Chrome works, but Firefox doesn't".

Twisell 3y ago
Another way to phrase it: "Because chrome is the new IE, it's prevalence broke the web standards so you have no choice" It's an argument, but not a good one. Don't be evil they said...
- DanielHB 3y ago
  this has gotten much better due to the existence of Safari, if a website supports Safari AND Chrome it most likely works fine in Firefox as well It is very uncommon these days for actively maintained websites to not support Safari/iOS users
masfoobar 3y ago
"Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome.." Well I am not one of those people. Back in the late '00s I was testing in IE6, 7 and maybe 8 as well as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera. I remember, back then, my boss telling me to "only worry about IE" when writing a demo web application. One day I came in and my boss slaps a peice of paper down at my desk, wondering why a customer saw this on their screen. At first I was like "WTF" as it was a bunch of rectangles scattered around. The penny dropped and tried it in firefox.. same result. It was at this point I started to care about ALL main browers regardless of what anyone told me. It is not as bad today, but my mind set is no different. Should not be testing on just one browser.

loveparade 3y ago

A decade or so ago when Chrome was first released there were good reasons to switch to it. It was better than Firefox in almost every way, especially speed. Today that's no longer the case, but there also isn't a huge reason to switch to Firefox. They're all kind of the same, especially to the average user who doesn't strongly care about privacy.

jpc0 3y ago

> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. When Chrome originally released firefox was better than IE but chrome was head and shoulders above both of them. Moving to Chrome from firefox at the time was a breath of fresh air. Nowadays there's very little difference, there was a short period of time I found Firefox faster but now I doubt most users would be able to tell the difference in performance

tim333 3y ago
Same here plus you get used to whatever you use in terms of how the commands and extensions and the like work. I've got Chrome, FF, Safari and others and tend to go with Chrome as it's what I'm used to. Also with FF I'm not sure how to translate the text from foreign languages. I tried some extensions but nothing so far works quite like Chrome where you just right click anywhere and click translate.

dimask 3y ago

Also FF long time user. Ime FF is pretty much fine nowadays. It used to have problems, but it got a huge leap in performance around 2017 when they improved multithreading support. Since then it is pretty much fine, aside from the occasional awkward unsupporting webpage. What I do not understand is not why people do not use FF, it is why people use Chrome instead of Chromium, Brave or some other chromium-based browser that is not google or MS. Surely it is not that much more effort to install one of these than chrome.

zzzcsgo 3y ago

[dead]

jklinger410 3y ago

> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. I can't think of a single way using Chrome and therefore having "less privacy" has affected me negatively. In fact, having an internet that just works has allowed me to be more productive. I'd love for someone to articulate how cookies or tracking has actually harmed them in any way.

Ir0nMan 3y ago

>What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released I'm not sure how old you were at the time but do you really remember that history well and did you compare the two browsers yourself at the time? I was a die hard Firefox user from the beginning until Chrome came out. I remember trying Chrome for the first time and being amazed at how much faster it was. Not just a little faster, way faster and how it could handle more tabs without slowing down. It was so far superior performance wise and that is what got me and many others to switch.