[moxie]

What always strikes me about these pleas is how familiar they sound. They're reminiscent of all the things we "should" -- eat better, exercise more, lower our carbon footprint -- and I suspect they all see just about the same level of long term success.

Firefox did well when their only real competitor (MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad in order to preserve the relevance of the desktop OS and their dominance in that area.

Now that they have a competitor (Google) which is actively trying to make their own browser good in order to increase the relevance of online services and their dominance in that area, Firefox hasn't fared so well.

I don't necessarily disagree with the author of this post, but it doesn't seem like moral high ground alone is going to make Firefox any more successful than the other things we "should."

What I wonder about is what larger systemic or structural shifts would have to occur for Firefox and the other "shoulds" of the world to have a chance.

[ookdatnog]

The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons. But even so, if a small, dedicated group of people are convinced, they can keep the ethical alternative just alive enough that it remains a somewhat viable alternative.

I don't think vegetarianism will ever be the norm, but there are enough vegetarians to create a market for vegetarian food. This creates options for people who don't want to eat meat for ethical reasons, increasing their freedom to live life the way they want without it being prohibitively inconvenient. A similar argument can be made for desktop Linux or using Firefox.

[TAForObvReasons]

Vegetarianism can be the norm, but for that to happen one of two things must happen: either the cost of meat has to be prohibitively expensive ("the stick") or vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large ("the carrot"). Neither of those things have happened yet.

For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a common use case. Ethical arguments attempt to do the former, but imho nothing short of google charging for chrome will increase the cost.

Mozilla needs a killer web app that people want to use. Something like gmail that attracts millions of people, with features added to Firefox (new APIs or whatever) to make the app much more effective.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Firefox for Android allows you to install extensions. Most notably, it allows you to install an adblocker like uBlock Origin.

Chrome for Android does not.

I'd consider that a killer feature.

[Can_Not]

Also Firefox on mobile is already much better.

[sametmax]

> vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large

That is just a question of habit and education. If you are used to veggie food, the meat is not appealing to you. Tastes are things we build, not stuff we are born with.

Vegetarianism will not become a norm, if it does, because of one factor only. For such a strong cultural habit, you need several factors. It may happen under a combination of the following:

- meat production is costing too much ressources (land, water, energy, etc) compared to the food it produce - meat production does manage to feed the growing propulation; - mass meat production will revealed to be more and more unhealthy, either by nature, because of the artificial products we use for it, or because of the pollution it causes; - it's effect on global warming will trigger a similar reaction as the one we had about CFC.

I doubt it though. I see more and more people consumming less meat around me, I'm a vegetarian myself, but I can't see a shift happening any time soon.

BTW, morality is a very weak factor. It never stopped people to drink and do something stupid, it never stopped people from bying iphones built by children, and it never made them choose a proper president.

[Grishnakh]

>it never made them choose a proper president.

The election system in the US prevents that from ever happening.

[reitanqild]

> For Firefox to gain market share, either the perceived "cost" of using Chrome has to skyrocket or Firefox has to be superior for a common use case.

It wouldn't hurt either if we nerds, pros, superusers etc etc stopped spreading FUD like "Chrome is way better".

[angry-hacker]

It's not FUD since Firefox does have many flaws. While I don't like Google and Chrome, for an average user it is better to use.

[endemic]

Just curious, why is Chrome better for you? I switched back to Firefox after e10s landed, and tbh they are now functionally equivalent (for me, at least). I now choose Firefox because I find myself more aligned with Mozilla's philosophy, and to promote cross-browser consistency.

[dkuntz2]

Is e10s the default now? I thought you had to enable it yourself, and some extensions weren't huge fans.

[qplex]

People are far removed from seeing the actual results of their decisions.

Humans are also very good at self deception. Even if you sort of know your beef is butchered, it carries little meaning since you never have to see it happen.

Same goes for Google stealing your data or Apple making pretty phones with slave labor.

Basically pretty much everybody needs to be smacked hard with a stick now and then and told what kind of picture they are really painting.

[icebraining]

Humans are also very good at self deception. Even if you sort of know your beef is butchered, it carries little meaning since you never have to see it happen.

I never understood this argument vis-a-vis butchering, since it implies pastoral farmers are particularly immoral people, unlike "regular" people who would stop their behaviour if only they'd see the results. Is that really your view?

In my opinion, the opposite is true: growing up ignorant of how it works is the only reason why they may be shocked when they find out. If it was a common sight, people would be OK with it just like most people growing up in farms are.

[qplex]

The argument does not imply that killing animals for food is wrong, but that it is wrong to disconnect people from that reality and expect them to make moral decisions.

[Bartweiss]

I've always been conflicted on the "don't know how it's made" argument. On one hand, I've known people who learned about farming practices and butchery and were horrified (but most went back to meat after a brief stretch of dissonance). On the other hand, I grew up knowing what butchering an animal involves. It never turned me (or a lot of other people) off of eating those animals.

I think you're right - it's not that ignorance is required, just that the moment of discovery is a bit shocking.

[vixen99]

You're right about self deception but this is a tricky subject. Would you consider worldwide milk production and its products on the same level as your two examples with Google and Apple? Difficult to see how you can get milk without having to handle the question of what to do with male calves. As to butchering, we can know about it and if the 'how' is unacceptable (often is) then we can ensure the law is applied and modified when better solutions are found. Some kind of public access to slaughter houses should be encouraged and people should indeed be acquainted with the raw facts while ensuring they are able to appreciate the consequences of decisions which may be merely emotive feelings decoupled from fact. Both are needed!

[FatalBaboon]

One argument that has good traction lately around me is data privacy. It remains the killer argument of Firefox against Chrome.

What's old is new again.

[Grishnakh]

>Vegetarianism can be the norm, but for that to happen one of two things must happen: either the cost of meat has to be prohibitively expensive ("the stick") or vegetarian dishes have to be more appealing to the public at large ("the carrot"). Neither of those things have happened yet.

That's not really true, about them being appealing. There's several Italian pasta dishes that are quite tasty which I frequently make for myself because they're super-cheap: spaghetti, penne, etc. Pasta plus a tomato-based sauce is totally vegetarian AFAIK, and what kind of weirdo doesn't like spaghetti? (Of course, a lot of people eat it with meat sauce or meatballs, but that's not necessary for the dish.)

There's also macaroni & cheese; lots of people like that.

Of course, the problem with these dishes is that 1) personally I don't want to eat spaghetti or pasta every single night, and I'm probably not alone there, and 2)you don't get much protein this way.

The problem with vegetarianism is that there just aren't a lot of good plant-based protein sources that are actually appealing, and you need this for a balanced diet. Meat is a simple and easy way to get lots of high-quality protein into your diet.

I believe vegetarianism is going to die out in the next century, as artificially-grown meats are developed and commercialized. If you can eat filet-minion-quality beef cheaply and without having to kill a cow to get it, why bother being a vegetarian?

>Mozilla needs a killer web app that people want to use. Something like gmail that attracts millions of people, with features added to Firefox (new APIs or whatever) to make the app much more effective.

The problem with this idea is that it breaks the whole idea of the web, which rests on open standards. Web browsers aren't supposed to be walled gardens that are incompatible with each other, they're all supposed to show web content the same way. We should not be going back to the bad old days of site X needing browser A to work.

The main thing that differentiates browsers is features and extensions. Edge, for instance, is a mostly unusable browser because it doesn't support all the ad-blocking extensions that Chrome and Firefox do. Performance is also a big feature, and Firefox has been lagging there for some time by sticking to having a single process.

Personally I think that Firefox would be fine if they'd stop wasting time and effort on bullshit features like Pocket and work on making it the fastest, most memory-efficient browser possible, which also best supports uBlock Origin and other advanced features. It'd probably also be a good idea if they could support Netflix viewing out-of-the-box the way Chrome does. If they got all that right and working really well, and touted themselves as being "spyware-free", they'd have sufficient marketshare to be relevant and hold their position, which is all they really need to do. They don't need to be #1, they just need to be large and influential enough to keep the others in line and prevent fragmentation of the web like we had in the IE6 days. If 40% of the market wants to be suckers and use Edge and look at copious ads, let them; they don't matter as long as they're not a clear majority.

[jonotime]

In regards to the meat eating arguments:

1. There are no special chemicals or compounds (protein, iron, etc) in meat that can not be found elsewhere.

2. The protein myth is strong in the US, but it is hard to find almost any food that lacks it. Have you ever known someone who was protein deficient, anywhere? It is estimated that 6% of the US is veg and 40% of India is vegetarian. And these people are typically healthier then the rest, not deficient.

3. Speaking of India. You think vegetarian food cant be made to taste good, or is too bland? They have had it mastered for thousands of years. The point is not that Indian food is good, but that vegetarian food is not necessarily bad. Just because you had one bad veggie burger, does not mean there is not great veggie food out there that would appease most of the world.

4. And speaking of taste, taste is not a static condition. Yes, there are some things we have evolved to like, but your taste buds themselves are malleable - not fixed as most people will tell you if you go on a diet for a couple weeks.

[Grishnakh]

>1. There are no special chemicals or compounds (protein, iron, etc) in meat that can not be found elsewhere.

I never said there were. The problem is that they are not easily found elsewhere, in an appealing form, in sufficient density, like they are in meats. If you really love lentils or some crap like that, more power to you. The rest of us think a lot of that stuff is nasty.

>2. The protein myth is strong in the US, but it is hard to find almost any food that lacks it. Have you ever known someone who was protein deficient, anywhere? It is estimated that 6% of the US is veg and 40% of India is vegetarian. And these people are typically healthier then the rest, not deficient.

Wrong. Look at the average height of people from India. Now look at the height of children of Indian parents who immigrate to the US. Compare it to their own families back in India, to eliminate the effects of socioeconomic differences between groups/castes there. There's a huge height difference, and it's because of the readily-available protein in the diet. The kids end up growing much taller than the parents even, and much taller than their cousins back home. I've seen it myself up close. It's not genetics, it's diet: childhood nutrition has a huge effect on height.

So no, it's not a "myth", and yes, lots of people are protein-deficient, it's just not as readily-apparent as people who are visibly malnourished as in truly impoverished places where they're literally starving to death.

And as for American vegetarians, they fall into at least one of two groups (there's a big overlap): 1) people who are already adults, and probably aren't extremely physically active/athletic, so they don't have the high protein needs that growing children do and can take advantage of, and 2) people who are basically religious about their vegetarianism, so they're extremely well educated about what foods contain what, and go to a LOT of trouble to make a balanced diet out of it (whereas the rest of us just throw a little meat into our diet and avoid excess and otherwise don't have to spend a lot of effort or attention on our diets).

>3. Speaking of India. You think vegetarian food cant be made to taste good, or is too bland? They have had it mastered for thousands of years.

Yeah, if you like Indian food. People who didn't grow up with it frequently don't. At least it's not nearly as bad as some southeast Asian foods, like Indonesian, but it's pretty much inedible to western people unless they tone down the spices.

>Just because you had one bad veggie burger, does not mean there is not great veggie food out there that would appease most of the world.

No one's made a good veggie burger, and that's because it's impossible. If they could do it, they would do it, because there'd be a lot of money in such an invention. They all taste like cardboard. The only way you're going to make something taste like real beef is to either use real beef, or chemically or biologically replicate the beef somehow. You're not going to achieve that by growing some readily-available plants and mixing them up somehow; that's like thinking you're going to build a Ferrari out of typical bicycle parts.

>4. And speaking of taste, taste is not a static condition. Yes, there are some things we have evolved to like, but your taste buds themselves are malleable - not fixed as most people will tell you if you go on a diet for a couple weeks.

Basically you're advocating somehow either forcing or convincing entire societies of people to suddenly change their taste preferences. That's not likely to happen. And don't forget, here in many western nations (esp. the US and UK probably), we are exposed to the cuisines of other nations a lot (though sometimes they're heavily modified to sell to Americans--Chinese food is infamous for this). It's not like Americans have never tasted Indian food; we have. There's lots of Indian restaurants here, plus various other exotic cuisines (middles eastern, Ethiopian, etc.). It hasn't caused Americans to all suddenly switch.

[jonotime]

I was not specifically addressing you. I was just laying out some of the dated arguments about why humans need meat. But anyway, you are saying in many ways how YOU personally dont like lentils and veggie burgers. I already addressed this in 4.

I am not mandating that Indian food replace everything else. I am saying there is plenty of good cuisine out there that does not include flesh. Like you said we are brought up eating meat in the US. This is nothing more then a cultural tradition, not a requirement. While vegetarianism is not necessarily free or easy for everyone, it is very accessible. It is lazy to continually blindly support an industry based on violence (or argue for it in your case).

You like its "easily packed density", but somehow hundreds of millions of vegetarians manage to survive. Hm.

And, like you said there are more people eating less meat which is an indication of this cultural change. Speaking of impossible vegetarian burgers, what you say cannot exist already does. In fact it is even called Impossible. I have tasted one. To me they are disgusting. But that is because they actually taste like flesh. These were designed for meat eaters, not vegetarians. Of the people I tried it with, only the meat eaters had any appreciation for it. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/21/482322571/sil...

[ionised]

Me, I hate spaghetti.

I won't eat white pasta (or white rice/bread) in general.

[shaftway]

> what kind of weirdo doesn't like spaghetti?

Type 2 Diabetics?

[ajbetteridge]

"the carrot"

I see what you did there.

[Razengan]

> The public at large will never be swayed to use less convenient alternatives for ethical reasons.

There have been countless practices which were once the convenient norm but are now seen as archaic or barbaric, at least in some parts of the world;

Slavery, serfdom, monarchies, dowry, arranged marriage, virgin sacrifices, involuntary circumcision, blood feuds, war crimes, excessive pollution... I'm sure the transition period in each of those cases was anything but convenient, and in some places it's still nigh impossible to convince people to stop these practices.

I think it's not so much "swaying" the public at large but continuing to provide sufficient education to them, and the technology to ease the transition, then at some point the transition just happens on its own. Of course the inverse is also possible and people sometimes revert to old and worse practices.

[asveikau]

> Slavery, serfdom, monarchies, dowry, arranged marriage, virgin sacrifices, involuntary circumcision, blood feuds, war crimes, excessive pollution...

To be clear, we are comparing all this to using chrome and having browser homogeny?

[Razengan]

I found that amusing while writing it too :P but the comment I replied to brought up vegetarianism and seemed to be making a general point about ethics vs. convenience.

[asveikau]

I think it illustrates that people can disagree with what constitutes unethical actions - the higher the requirement that everybody agree on what is unethical, the more heinous the crime has to be. So most of us will agree on the items in your list, but eating meat or using Chrome will be harder to get consensus on.

[patates]

> involuntary circumcision

I'm a theological non-cognitivist, coming from a Muslim family. Putting involuntary at the front does not make circumcisions which had the consent of an underage kid OK. I'm very sensitive about this, and while I love my parents, I still feel violated because of their decision.

Just wanted to share. No offense or anything taken from your comment of course.

[jonotime]

OP here.

Funny how this conversation sided into vegetarianism. Because I am one who sides with the moral issues - as a vegan, Firefox, Linux user. I represent the ones mentioned here who will go the extra mile, which is typically the harder route to do what is right, not what is easiest.

However, I dont think this route is for everyone. And I think legitimate competition between browser features is key. I do use both browsers, but only when necessary with Chrome (Chromecast and Netflix, some Google products like Photos). However I think there is not a concrete answer which browser is a better user experience. And these things change over time. Yes, when Chrome came out it was a great fast experience (mostly because there were no addons and there was no cruft in the beginning), but Firefox overtook it in the benchmarks several times since. Its been back and forth.

These reputations are strong, but dangerous. I'm a developer and still come up against the "Java is slow" argument. I'm no fan of Java, but I find it to be anything but slow these days. Yes, back in the early applet days it had a bad name and decades later it cant shake that reputation. This is technology! Things change fast. Dont get stuck in the fud.

[sabujp]

googlers need more kale in their diet

[emn13]

This is a misleading comparison. You imply that firefox is far behind chrome in terms of general quality. Although I use chrome a lot, I also use firefox daily. And the quality difference is essentially nil(1). In many relevant ways firefox was at times better; but the details shift from release to release. I certainly isn't true that typical users would run into huge problems by using firefox.

1: on a desktop. I also regularly use FF/chrome/edge on a laptop, where FF's slowness+ power usage is possibly slightly noticeable (not very), and I also use multiple browsers on mobile, where FF clearly is behind (though it's not clear how much of that is due to FF+chrome, and how much is due to websites simply only ever testing on mobile chrome and possibly iOS - not that it does the end-user any good)

The difference between the browsers is overstated. If it weren't for vendor lock-in effects, you could use FF today and barely notice the difference.

[seba_dos1]

In my experience, while Firefox does lose with Chromium when it comes to slowness (e10s and APZ helps a lot, but still doesn't win), it definitely wins when it comes to power usage and leaves Chromium in dust.

[yAnonymous]

For starters, Firefox lacks in speed, security and stability compared to Chromium and this is not a matter of opinion, but hard facts. Sandboxing is not fully implemented, there's no process/tab separation and Webkit renders most pages faster than Gecko.

The developer tools are slow, lacking in features and can reproducibly be crashed. FF is relying on broken extensions for things that should be core functionality. The "Awesome bar" is so mediocre, I wonder how it got its name.

I've been using FF for about 10 years and tried to stick with it, but there are so many quantifiable things that it's worse at that I recently switched to Chromium and it did make my life and work faster and easier.

If your statement was true, I'd still be using Firefox.

[emn13]

I suspect you're using many extensions. Most users do not, at least according to FF's stats.

Process sandboxing is not a user-visible feature; it's (1) a largely hypothetical security feature (hypothetical in the sense that it's not empirically obvious that complete sandboxing is better than alternatives), (2) a means to discourage locking and make the browser snappier.

Note that by now, firefox does use process sandboxing, and indeed has used process sandboxing for the most critical bits (plugins-i.e. flash) for years. Benchmarks do not back up your claim that Firefox is a lot slower than chromium; nor is that my experience. For a long time, scrolling was smoother on firefox than on chrome - I often read long webpages in auto-scroll, and chrome was janky on some pages firefox was not - and the reverse was true too (although to this day, when it works, it never works as well on chrome as it does on FF, for some reason).

The FF developer tools have at times lacked some features, but there have also been features they've had before chrome, e.g. the rendered font display. I can't right now think of a devtools feature in chrome that I'm missing in FF. I certainly debug in both all the time.

For a very long time, font rendering on windows was better, and hi-dpi worked while it didn't on chrome.

Chrome's a good browser, and it's still snappier today. But the difference is really splitting hairs at this point. There are much larger differences in day-to-day usability that people put up with all the time. I don't buy that chrome's undeniable strengths are sufficient to be noticeable unless you're actively looking for them; and chrome also has bugs and issues other browsers don't; it's not a pure win.

[Nexxxeh]

Firefox is unusually slow on my low-end Windows tablet, while Opera/Chrome is grand. My desktop will power through anything, so Firefox on there.

My phone, however... Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin is the best mobile browsing experience I've ever had.

[soylentcola]

Yep. For people who run Android and don't have superuser privileges for system-wide ad blocking, I typically recommend Firefox and uBlock Origin for a simple way to at least improve web browsing. On mobile it's even more important than desktop I find. On your larger screen and faster machine with a broadband connection, ads are an annoyance. On mobile, they tax the relatively weaker hardware, use up more data, and can pop over/fill the whole screen without much effort and ruin any attempt at productive browsing. It's no wonder people don't bother leaving the silos of Facebook and friends where at least their ads are just inline with the "content" instead of popping over and constantly getting in the way of what you're trying to read.

[Eridrus]

I want to use Firefox on mobile... but it sucks at video.

[TwoBit]

It's largely a problem of Web sites making mobile Web pages not follow the Standards but rather use browser specific code.

[namaemuta]

On mobile the most I use (if not the only one) is Firefox for the simple reason of allowing me to add ad-blockers as extensions.

[glogla]

It's not quality of Firefox.

On desktop it's google having (almost) monopoly on search and abusing it market its other products.

On mobile, it's Google abusing its power over the platform to make OEMs use Chrome in the same way MS pushes OEMs to ship Windows and Secure Boot and various other shit.

Firefox could be perfect (and it isn't, because what do you know, developing good software takes insane amount of money) and it wouldn't help.

[moxie]

Yes, Google has market leverage. However, when IE was Firefox's competitor, MS was in just as powerful of a position, and Firefox was a success. They were a success because they clearly had the better browser.

These days, that's no longer the case. I know that I certainly did not switch from Firefox because of Google's marketing efforts or underhanded tactics.

But what if you're right? In a world where, I agree, it takes an insane amount of money to develop good software, where Google has more of that money than Firefox does, and where Google has really effective market leverage, do the "shoulds" have a chance? Is the future we want even a possibility?

I don't personally think that it is, which is why I wonder what larger changes we would need to see for that to become true.

[pitay]

What did cause you to switch?

What follows here are my observations on what are the advantages/disadvantages of the two browsers:

The biggest advantage to Chrome that I can think of is it has its own implementation of Flash in it, rather than using the Flash plugin. This allows Chrome to not have another container process, unlike in Firefox which does spawn a container process for Flash, which uses a ton more CPU cycles for the inter-process communication. This makes some sites crawl because of all the junk that is added to them, probably for advertisement networks.

Other than that, Firefox seems to give you more freedom with what extensions can be installed on it and allows a larger variety of addons that is available at the main addons site, third party sites can be used, although that is going to get more difficult in the future. But it is better than Chrome with from what I understand is going to disallow extensions from anywhere other than the Chrome store. An example of what will not be on the Chrome store is 'Cleaner for Facebook', which I remember because the story was so recent. Here is the story 'How Google obliterated my 4 year old Chrome extension featuring 24k+ users' at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12442048 .

[fixermark]

Also not the GP, but at the time: process isolation. The process sandboxing Chrome did that allowed only a subset of it to crash was novel and compensated for their relatively young browser engine gagging and dying from time-to-time. Once I could develop and use plugins without bringing down the entire browser session, I never looked back.

Nowadays: inertia and familiarity. Firefox is sometimes faster and sometimes slower, but there's not enough of a difference to tip my hand, and I already have Chrome configured the way I want (including extensions, multiple sessions, and the keyboard accelerators and widget positions that have burned themselves into my brain). And the cross-platform sync works great; I don't know if Firefox's is better or worse, but it would take more than 0 time to set it up, so I don't care yet.

It's also completely integrated with Chromecast, which I use and enjoy.

[sangnoir]

> What did cause you to switch?

I'm not GP, but I switched because Chrome had better dev tools. For a while, I was using Firefox for browsing and Chrome for dev, but I ended up using just Chrome. It also didn't help that Firefox dropped its 1st party browser sync (Weave) and Chrome had bookmark & history syncing natively

[icebraining]

Firefox dropped its 1st party browser sync (Weave)

No, it didn't. It was renamed to Sync and incorporated into Firefox itself. It works great, it's end-to-end encrypted and it supports nifty features like Send Tab To Device[1] (unlike in Chrome, where you have to either bookmark or keep the tab open on the origin device and then trawl for it on the destination).

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-tab-to-d...

[parley]

I love Firefox and use it heavily every day as main browser for 99% of web browsing, which is a big reason why I also donate money to Mozilla.

However, Sync has a dissappointing property: Despite the (simplified) claims on the most readable user facing pages about it, it will not sync your open tabs across devices. It will only sync your last 100 (?) active open tabs on each device.

I will happily admit to being an outlier with >100 tabs per device, and I'm very grateful to Mozilla for this free service they're providing me. I also understand that any such service may need an upper limit.

However, had there been any mention of this fact anywhere other than the bugzilla issues I found while trying to figure out why Sync was (in my perception) not working properly, I wouldn't have tried it. I'd love it if they were just accurate about this in their feature description.

[Libermentix]

In my opinion, that is exactly what made Chrome popular. Focussing on Dev-Tools, but that's a very expensive undertaking (it took firefox an extension to make this possible -> Firebug ftw). However, market success from other companies e.g. Stripe have shown that optimizing for developers today is by far the most effective way to get into market.

MS did the same thing, although back then they used ActiveX extensions or certain proprietary IE implementations that simplified the transition from old fat-client development to web-development.

Now that this is gone, focussing on debugging and open-sourcing is a better choice for a web-browser to win dominance. Chrome did just that: Opensourcing the core - attacking one of Mozilla's core promises - and adding proprietary google eco-sytem add-ons on top of that.

So imho what made you change to Chrome is similar to what made everyone of us developers back then adopt IE (i.e. simplifying development). And when Chrome started gaining traction, the google-lead team started implementing proprietary APIs that we now struggle with when we consider an open non-proprietary web.

I use firefox everyday, for dev and regular, and I'm happy to be a user. But I also see a lot of sites that just start breaking because they have been implemented with Chrome in mind. For where I am standing, I try to encourage our team to develop for FF first, test in Chrome and then EDGE/IE, that way it's most likely that anyone can access the site without breakage. And yes, this also means that sometimes it takes some overhead, but I'm willing to take that for the sake of an open web ;-)

[dogma1138]

Firebug is better than chrome dev tools mostly.

The problem is stability especially for development, a rogue JS script can still kill a browser, chrome loses a page, Firefox loses its mind.

[michaelmrose]

Firefox has had browser sync for ages and continues to have it as far as I know.

[pitay]

Thanks for the reply.

So it seems people have switched because of:

* Process Isolation

* Dev Tools

* Bookmark and History Syncing

* Chromecast

Also some people have mentioned performance, but this is unclear.

[toyg]

> MS was in just as powerful of a position, and Firefox was a success.

But the success parameters were very different. At the time, gaining a 5% to 10% market share for non-MS browsers on the desktop was considered raging success. Firefox never gained a majority market share, they likely never even reached 25%.

Nowadays, "success" requires 30% of a much larger market including gazillions of mobile devices, fighting not 1 incumbent but 3 on a multitude of different hardware and software platforms, in a scenario (web standards) evolving faster than ever before. The posts have moved quite dramatically.

> what larger changes we would need to see for that to become true.

Mozilla could flip the bird at Javascript and implement something that the hordes of desktop-orphan developers might adopt enthusiastically. More, I think Mozilla should partner with Microsoft, which is the only way to break the Apple-Google "axis of webkit".

[maftieu]

I think people think Chrome is a best browser is because it performs better on Google products than any other browser. And as people are using GMail, Youtube or other, they see Chrome as the best browser.

[rubber_duck]

Actually GMail and YouTube are the only tolerable experiences using FF.

Try watching random FB video, Twitch streams, etc. on a Linux FF and you'll get greeted with a nice "please download Adobe Flash" or some such nonsense.

With Chrome it just works, it bundles Flash, I don't have to care which version it is, how to get it for my system, etc.

I would like to use FF because the theme makes it match my Gnome theme (silly but it would make me switch browsers) but it just breaks on multimedia.

[michaelmrose]

Many distros manage to actually bundle flash which then just works out of the box. This isn't a Firefox issue its your distro.

[dogma1138]

Again blaming the "user" would get you no where.

You have something that works out of the box, and something that doesn't.

Doesn't matter why it's your fault, you are using it wrong, it's your operating system, you aren't holding it properly these are the excuses of poorly designed products.

[verroq]

Sorry but that is just not true, Firefox has miserable DOM performance that results in laggyness, freezes on pages that work fine with Chrome. Until the Firefox people accept that their browser sucks can they finally try to make it better.

There is no sandboxing (in the works for how many years now?), their pdfjs is not as fast as the chrome native plugin, they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin that crashes every time, one frozen tab still freezes the entire browser.

No I don't want to use Chrom{e,ium}. I wasn't tricked into choosing google. I just want something that works.

[maftieu]

Maybe it works best on Chrome, just because more and more web developpers test and optimize their app/site for... Chrome? (I've really saw this). Is this the return of the "IE era"?

[verroq]

Yeah Chrome is starting to snowball, it is easier to tell users to use Chrome instead of fixing Firefox quirks.

[carussell]

> they force me to use the insecure and terribe flash plugin that crashes every time

You mean Adobe's terrible plugin. It's a totally black box. Mozilla has nothing to do with the plugin development.

[michaelmrose]

If pages lag or freeze it might be the developers fault. I realize some are providing complex app like experiences but most web sites are just text and images artfully arranged. Making this simple thing slow requires dedicated stupidity.

[dogma1138]

Users can't fix websites, they can fix their experience by switching to a browser that works.

[Veen]

This is right for me at least. I spend a big chunk of my day in Google Docs. I'd rather use Safari or Firefox, but I just can't deal with the janky Google Docs performance in those browsers.

Although occasionally a Docs tab in Chrome will go crazy and gobble up RAM and max the CPU.

[Scarbutt]

Agree with everything you said but you are blaming everything on google, mozilla dropped the ball with mobile, they were too late.

[blub]

They didn't drop the ball. They tripped on it and fell on their face. Remember FirefoxOS?

iOS not allowing competitors also stuck a knife in their back.

[aluhut]

I rather have people write such texts to encourage people to switch to Firefox then have Chrome installed accidentally because they again bundled it like some crappy AntiVirus software in the installer of another program (together with the google updater service and god knows what).

[ocdtrekkie]

One of those things I only realized recently: Google CEO Sundar Pichai's claim to fame at Google was the Google Toolbar. Under him, how can we expect Google to do anything but push pack-in bloatware?

Dark patterns like prechecked bloatware install boxes aren't going anywhere under him.

[aluhut]

Ugh. Nice find. Even more reasons to keep away.

[hoffcoder]

From my own experiences, Firefox is a better product than Chrome in a lot of ways. For my daily needs, Firefox can easily survive 150 tabs, while Chrome nearly chokes my machine in 30. Firefox on Android has a quaint reader mode, which I use to read at night. Firefox on Android supports extensions. It stays the most standard implementation of web standards that I know. I have been using it for over 5 years, and though I am forced to use Chrome occasionally (for Chromecast related work), it remains my primary browser. I will use it as long as I can.

[wallace_f]

>(MS) was actively trying to make their own browser bad

Is this conspiracy or fact?

[mpol]

The fact is, after releasing IE6 around the year 2000, MS dissolved the IE team. Only around 2006 a new team was formed to create IE7 (which wasn't much better).

Conspiracy mixed with facts is... At the end of the nineties, Netscape was pushing to make the browser the platform, instead of the desktop. MS was quite worried about that, they had a monopoly on the desktop and used that to create a monopoly with their browser, so Netscape had no chance to do what they wanted. MS succeeded, as in delayed the process, it took maybe 15 years, after the death of Netscape and the rise of Google, to have Google and others make a platform out of the browser. Having the web stagnate and locked in to a browser like IE6 was for MS a desirable situation.

[justinlardinois]

So it's conjecture. Going by Occam's razor, Microsoft just had no need to innovate because it had no competition.

[mpol]

And they had no competition because they had it destroyed with illegal practices. And all they got fined with was a slap on the wrist while earning billions.

More ontopic... IE6 was slightly better than Netscape 4, so almost everyone switched to IE6. Just as now Chrome is only slightly better than Firefox to a lot of people (not to me though). And a lot of people are switching to Chrome. If you trust Google (an advertising company) to not play the same tricks as MS did, then good luck with your Google Chrome :). Once Google has a lock on the browser market, who knows what will happen. Another lock-in, and more years of stagnation. Yes, more conspiracy :).

[fixermark]

Stagnation like Chromecast?

Google has market incentive to improve on the browser's capabilities that Microsoft did not.

[endemic]

I think Chromecast would fall under the "lock in" category.

[gordon_freeman]

Limiting features such as Google Docs offline access to only Chrome is bad. I don't see that as Google is making efforts to make chrome good. I see it as Google is trying to promote Chrome browser through the demand it has generated for its core products. That kind of exclusivity is what worries me most. Especially when Google built chrome on open source Chromium.

[javipas]

I do agree with you. It's difficult to convince anyone with those kind of arguments. As I've written on The Unshut, I'd say the problem is the perception of value:

http://theunshut.com/2016/09/26/firefox-chrome-and-the-perce...

When I switched to Chrome I did because it felt better. The decision would be tougher today because Firefox, Chrome and Opera (Edge has to mature) are great options and not that different in performance and features. Change is tougher now because the perceived value isn't really there in most cases.