[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.

[Libermentix]

Indeed, I love Firebug and have been an avid user since it first came out.

For the rogue JS, that is indeed a problem. From a development perspective though, I even think this is a good thing: stuff that bricks your browser needs to be optimized first. the moment we'd allow a more easy grip in terms of development, a lot of slow stuff will find its way into the codebase.

[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.

[michaelmrose]

Web developers continue to use an inferior solution to deliver rich content on the web.

Adobe offers such technology under a nonfree license.

Open source browser Firefox can't include flash because of the license.

Purely open source distros also cant include this.

Oems can and should ensure end users don't have to worry about this.

Distros less concerned about purity may choose to set this up for their users.

Not only is this not mozillas problem it's a wholly imaginary one. The set of people who CAN install their OS but are incapable of installing an additional package is very nearly the empty set or at least it will be when said user doesn't learn to install software on their shiny new OS.

If that's too hard tell the people that work on the package manager gui and tell them how they ought to do better. The answer however isn't making it easier to go to the vendors website and download an exe.

The ficticious grandma that people want to cater to will experience Linux when it comes preinstalled on the pc she bought at Walmart and if flash doesn't work out of the box tell dell.

[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.

[michaelmrose]

They can use competitors sites. I'm going to assume that you don't regularly go to physical locations receive terrible service and blame Honda and Ford.

[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.