[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.