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Comment by jgon | Hacker News Reader

Incorrect. If Firefox had not put it in, nothing would have happened because programmers have (largely) decided to give chrome a majority market-share amongst them, and advocate it to their non-technical peers, increasing its market share amongst that group as well.

If programmers actually used firefox and advocated it to the point where it had a majority market share then maybe their refusal would carry some weight.

But as it stands the web dev community has said loud and clear what their priorities are, and this is just a natural consequence of that.

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I don't understand anyone's desire to support a Google-backed browser.

Speed mostly.

I also use FF in day-to-day both due to privacy concerns and general fitness for my style, but chrome's dev tools are objectively superior, you have to face it...

People might be less likely to use Chrome if it was branded as "the DoubleClick browser". :)

I used to make an effort to use FF, but it gradually got slower, froze up more often, had problems with content I was viewing.

The final straw was when they had a big update. Instead of fixing any of these issues, they gave me the ability to call people with service I don't use by clicking a link :/

Similar boat here. I abandoned Firefox back in the day due to the memory and freezing problems, and general lack of responsiveness compared to Chrome. The difference in everyday use was massive here; we went from having a browser that could hardly handle having 3 tabs open while using a gigabyte of memory, to one that worked flawlessly and used a fraction of the resources. Firefox then put in a lot of effort fixing those issues. By this time though, Chrome's built-in DevTools was more robust for my tastes compared to Firebug or the horrific early versions of their built-in replacement. I had a good development setup, all the addons I needed, and a fast browser. I simply had little reason to switch back.

I did spend a brief period swapping back to Firefox for the sake of perceived privacy, but then they started bundling all sorts of third party bloatware and it was just too much. I'm not a superfan of the information I imagine Google collects from my using Chrome, but the browser itself is just too good to give up. Firefox now only gets opened to verify cross-browser functionality of frontend UIs I work on, and on rare occasions when I want to use a proxy in a browser without it being used system-wide.

I personally think that firefox got a lot better recently. I've been using ff dev since it launched, and it's been pretty good. And in speed tests, it's started to beat Chrome, although things may have since reversed.

But then, I'm not a web developer

>I'm not a superfan of the information I imagine Google collects from my using Chrome, but the browser itself is just too good to give up.

If you don't want to send information back to Google, don't use Chrome.

Use Chromium instead. It's Chrome, but without the spyware, and only has the open-source components.

It won't work for Netflix though, but for all your other browsing, it should work exactly the same as Chrome. Keep Chrome around for Netflix.

I've got chromium working for Netflix on Linux, haven't tried on windows though.

When it was launched, Chrome/Chromium had 2 advantages over Firefox: Speed and superior developer tools.

Chrome was unbelievably quick: the moment you clicked on the launcher and browser 'chrome' (heh) appeared instantaneously, Firefox was comparatively sluggish, and notoriously memory hungry (though that might have been the fault of sloppily written plugins)

I do.

Browser can be either better technically, or you might have valency for certain design decisions.

If there is a browser vendors that claims certain social values, but is constantly failing to execute them in the design, you might as well just use the technically better one that does not pretend to protect the values you consider worth protecting. You will be spared of the constant disappointment.

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