[criddell]

Plus Chrome just works better for a lot of sites. That might be because the site isn't properly coded, but users don't care. They just want something that works and more often than not, that's Chrome.

My main browser is Firefox, but I have to switch over to Chrome more often than I would like. Electron is also based on Chromium, isn't it? IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status and I think Microsoft is going to accelerate that trend (I'm guessing MS adopted Chromium because of Electron).

[Solvitieg]

I don't know about "a lot of sites". Very few, I'd say.

Other web developers may want to chime in but I rarely have cross-browser problems between Firefox and Chrome. I can't recall the last one.

The only time I encounter a problem with Firefox is looking at people's codepens where they're using webkit only prefixes or a draft API.

[dylan604]

In a couple of projects I'm currently working on, the CSS for them was causing me problems between the 2 browsers. Willing to admit that I don't have an intimate familiarity with CSS best practices. I look up what I think I'm trying to do, and then implement what I've found. I primarily use Firefox while I'm coding, and then only check with Chrome and Safari periodically. I've had to circle back to fix CSS issues specifically for WebKit not rendering as expected. Eventually, I can get to something that works across all the browsers I have access (no Android devices anywhere).

[strokirk]

Youtube runs noticably slower on Firefox for me, regularly climbing up to 30-40% cpu and activating the fan, while Chrome handles it with 15-20 cpu.

[AsyncAwait]

It's the same for Gmail, but this isn't Firefox at fault. It's Google doing this on purpose by using the old, experimental, non-standard ShadowDOM V0 API, which only Chrome supports, and then using that across its products to break non-Chrome based browsers. Please don't reward them by using Chrome just because of this. That only shows them that such abusive behavior works.

[BuckRogers]

That is very interesting, thanks for sharing that information. I never did use Chrome other than testing it out for less than a day, finding issues with various sites and uninstalling it. Firefox instead since it was in beta (Phoenix) and never left. Never had a real problem with it.

I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.

Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.

Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.

[criddell]

Enough people use Gmail and YouTube that maybe it would make sense for Firefox to add support for ShadowDOM V0 API? It might not be a W3C standard, but if Google uses it heavily then it's a defacto standard.

[AsyncAwait]

They could, except that would effectively show Google that it can dictate what other browsers implement, alter its products on rapid basis to regularly break them etc. and at that point there's almost no point to an alternative, since we'd we're fully back in the IE era again, which is why I don't think it's a good idea.

If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.

[criddell]

Firefox doesn't have the market share to push back on Google. The best way for Firefox to grow is to make the best browser from the user's perspective.

[aylmao]

> IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status

+1. I'm hopeful of Servo. So far it (ServoShell) also a good 50MB smaller than Electron which would be a very good reason for developers to switch. It'll all depend on API compatibility at the time of release I guess.

[feanaro]

Interestingly, this is the opposite of my experience. I browse solely on Firefox and don't encounter sites which only work on Chrome at all (at least as far as I can remember right now). I wonder what's different between our browsing habits that's causing this.

[unethical_ban]

What sites?

[pfranz]

I was doing some work with very large data sets in Google Sheets last week. I started hitting row and cell limits. Personally, I think a database is more appropriate for what I was doing, but spreadsheets are more grokable by non-techies.

In Firefox, macOS was showing 4+GB of memory usage and formulas would take hours to run. I switched to Safari where memory usage was closer to 1-2GB, but it had this habit of refreshing the page as soon as you switched away (before a formula would finish running). I finally switched to Chrome and memory usage was about 1-2GB and heavy formulas behaved in a way more predictable manner.

[raptorfactor]

Do you have examples which aren't Google sites?

[pfranz]

Is that really relevant? I'd be happy if you could point me to a more capable tool. Zoho and Excel Online have never really made it onto my radar, but if they perform better in this situation I'd check them out. A lot of people are tied to the constraints they have.

Using both for years, Chrome has just been faster and more reliable. I don't do web dev professionally, but I use multiple browsers in tandem and often try to use one full time every once in awhile. On my old laptop, I'm pretty sure Chrome was the only one to support webGL for whatever reason. At work we're stuck with Firefox 38.3.0 ESR (Cent6/7) and Prometheus Alert Manager (and I also believe Prometheus graphing interface) has broken widgets, but Chrome works. Chrome has always seemed to better support the very few websites that require crazy performance. This was even the case when we would have an ancient version of Chrome and a new version of Firefox. It sucked when Firefox switched plugin architecture and Google Hangouts never added support. Now Google Meet does not support Safari.

I'm not saying any of these comparisons are "fair" but its what I deal with day-to-day.

[AsyncAwait]

> Is that really relevant?

Kind of, only because Google uses the ShadowDOM API to break its product on competing browsers and playing into it will only reinforce this behavior.

[Guest10928391]

I get issues almost daily with well respected sites not working in Firefox.

Today I'm browsing the Adidas website, and the images don't load for any of the products in Firefox.

https://www.adidas.com/us/ultraboost-all-terrain-ltd-shoes/B...

Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them, but searching online I read that the upcoming Firefox version 65 is suppose to fix that issue.

Strangely enough, the images were working fine a few weeks ago on the Adidas website, but I had a different Firefox issue. When I clicked the images to see the fullscreen view and zoomed in, they wouldn't pan or drag correctly, so 80% of the image was hidden off the screen. In Chrome, they worked as expected.

That's one example, but as I said, I get these kind of issues almost daily from companies that should know better. I still primarily use Firefox because I have no trust in Google, but I'm forced to open Chrome on a regular basis to resolve random quirks.

[clouddrover]

> Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them

I loaded the page with Firefox 65 beta and all the images worked for me. The site doesn't seem to be serving WebP images to Firefox. When I checked all the image types via Page Info they were mostly JPEGs with some PNGs and one SVG image.

There's probably some other reason why the site is broken for you. Have you perhaps changed your browser's user agent string and so the site is giving you WebP images because it thinks they will work?

[Guest10928391]

It's a pretty standard Firefox installation (I also tried disabling uBlock and resetting my privacy settings), and I just confirmed the user agent looks normal, Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0. I think it broke when I moved last week from one EU country to another. Why that would make a difference, I don't know, but Adidas is now serving me WEBP images in Firefox 64 regardless of my browser settings, whether I clear cookies, use a private window, or choose different regional versions of the website.

So, I'm left scratching my head and using Chrome to browse the site.

[feanaro]

I'm on Firefox 64 and all the images load for me.

[mirimir]

I'm using Firefox 60 in this Debian VM, and that site is definitely serving WEBP, which I can't view (on anything).

[bmer]

I am able to access the website just fine. All the images show up for me (Firefox 64.0.2).

[Zarath]

My own personal anecdote is that Firefox spins my laptop fans audibly, while Chrome does not.

[criddell]

I was working on my taxes last weekend and I hit a bunch of them. ADP, the 401K and FSA provider sites, Aetna, and a 529 saving plan site are all ones I can think of off the top of my head.