[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.