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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Remember that Chrome beat Explorer by being faster. Users care about that more than they care about privacy et al.

Now - Chrome is slower vs Firefox Quantum's new privacy because of the ad networks. The ad networks have had no incentive up until now to improve their shitty code.

If people start switching to Firefox and turning on privacy more to get faster browsing - they will lose the game entirely.

All that's needed is for a modest uptick in usage of this mode and for some ad networks to get scared. They spend some of the pile of money they swim in to not ruin everyone's browser experience and bam - we get a less crappy internet.

If they don't shape up - then we get a faster internet with better privacy. Even better.

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Don't forget that Google advertises Chrome on the most popular website in the world google.com, as well as in a lot of it's products. Chrome also ships with Android, the most popular mobile operating system.

I assume these channels are a huge reason why people adopt it. I love the new Firefox and use it every day but, unfortunately, I don't think it will come close to Chrome's market share by just being slightly better.

Google even does scummy bundling of chrome with popular downloads. I don't understand how people don't have problem with that.

"Hey, I've noticed you have Google Calendar installed on your phone! You're missing a bunch of other crapware! Install it now!"

Never. Enable. Notifications. They're just product management spam.

This isn't much different than people complaining Edge nags Chrome users to switch, but not minding Google sites nagging the heck out of Firefox and Edge users: If you already are on Chrome, as most people are, you don't see Google harassing people since you're already onboard.

I've heard a lot of chatter amongst non-tech people about Facebook etc spying on the public. I think the general population is finally starting to care a little bit about privacy, so that might help Firefox's numbers a bit.

I think that Chrome still has an edge in performance when you consider the UI globally. In Firefox when creating a new window keypresses and mouse clicks are ignored until some point in the new page initialization. Before that they events are swallowed

In contrast in Chrome the keypresses are taken into account immediately, even if the window takes a bit longer to initialize as a user I don't have to wait, I can type my query, let Chrome do it's thing and eventually I'll get my result. In Firefox I have to wait until the adress box is ready before I can type something. Even if the whole process is faster it means it still takes more of my attention time.

> If people start switching to Firefox and turning on privacy more to get faster browsing - they will lose the game entirely.

I would love for this to be true, but there are a number of websites that simply refuse to proceed unless you whitelist them from script/adblockers (mainly news so far but even e-commerce sites could require you to submit to their analysis tools e.g.: Bloomberg).

Many sites that do that eventually roll back the blocking. I just close the tab when I get blocked or find another way to read the content.

Someone needs to write a browser extension to block the adonis ad-blocker-blocker. You can find it in base64encoded JavaScript on some news sites (like mashable).

I don't think Firefox+tracking protection uptake is going to put more pressure no the ad networks than adblocker uptake has done already...

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