Installed Firefox Developer Edition after using only Chrome for awhile. Pleasantly surprised how well everything works, especially the dev tools pane -- feels more smooth than Chrome's dev tools.
This is weird. Some people claim that Firefox's dev tools are better, others claim that the Chrome dev tools are better and that Firefox doesn't even compare. I wonder who is right. Is this like comparing different car brands where you can never reach a good conclusion? I personally have always been using Firefox, so its dev tools are most familiar to me, but there have been times where I've run into unimplemented features that were implemented in Chrome.
In matters of layout, Firefox has tended to have a substantial lead. In matters of script debugging, Chrome has tended to have a substantial lead. In other places, it’s not so consistent.
Take debugging as an area where I think it is fair to say that Chrome is miles ahead at present:
Chrome’s debugger is fast; pausing normally takes under a second to finish updating the UI, and stepping mostly takes a slight fraction of a second. It is also particularly helpful, showing the values of variables at the end of each line when stepping through.
Firefox’s debugger is slow; pausing typically takes several seconds for the UI to catch up, and stepping tends to take a second or two, with some UI thrashing. It is unreliable in the presence of source maps (you put a breakpoint on line 1234 of the source? Well that translated to line 1 in what’s actually being executed, and breakpoints are no more precise than linewise, so… yeah). Firefox Nightly’s debugger is also currently completely broken for me at FastMail due to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1516941, so I’m having to spin up Chrome when I need to do any debugging, which I don’t like having to do. In the normal run of things, I stick with Firefox even through its slow debugger, because I do find that it does a better job in some areas of debugging (I think it was examining values and operating at varying layers of the stack).
For personal context: I’ve been a Firefox user since about 0.93, and have had Nightly as my daily driver most of the time for several years. I don’t much like Chrome. That doesn’t stop it from being better in certain areas, though.
This has been my experience too. Firefox is my primary browser but I never could get the debugger to work inside promises for some reason. The firefox layouting engine is amazing. I develop some crazy inefficient DOM layouts when prototyping and Firefox will happily chug through it while Chrome will choke. But when I have to debug I go back into Chrome..
7 billion people, probably room for at least 2 choices, especially given most other categories of services/products have 10x as many. I’d say the car or luxury brand reference is fitting, since it probably comes down to trade-offs/personal opinions.