[Arubis]

I keep a Chromium browser kicking around on my personal machines basically for the sole purpose of using Google properties, particularly Hangouts. Firefox is fine on virtually everything else, but absolutely drags on stuff owned by the Goog.

[giancarlostoro]

Have you tried faking your browser user agent to Google? I've seen it say "such and such doesn't work on any browser other than Google" and with one simple trick, managed to get things running on Firefox just fine. I wouldn't be surprised if any "degraded experience" is due to code that assumes Firefox is IE (like a very poorly written "else" code block) and just refuses to run optimal code that works fine on Firefox.

I'm not going to use Chrome outside of work (I hate to say it but their dev tools are just hard to walk away from - please Mozilla, invest in your dev tools more).

[zamadatix]

This usually works out well for the sites just never bothered to test for Firefox and threw up the banner but it can end up going pretty poorly/silently-and-annoyingly-start-failing-halfway-through for sites that threw up the banner because they knew they didn't do feature detection and assumed Chrome or Chrome's behavior. I.e. "better than nothing if you are dead set on never installing Chrome" but, outside that, worse off than just going to your copy of Chrome for all but your most regularly visited websites that throw the "only supported in" banner.

[idle76]

Yep, this is part of the reason I avoid google like the plague. Everything else works like a charm in FF, so why would I use an inferior product? Granted, I don't use youtube, but everything else has better alternatives away from big evil.