I was recently at a local IT meetup, a majority of us were senior developers. And a topic took turn to browsers and Chrome at some point, so of course I've had to voice my two cents about Chrome monopoly and Firefox :) . A few guys were genuinely surprised and asked me "You are using Firefox?" as if it was something unthinkable. To me this was incomprehensible. I'm using FF on Windows since beta and FF on Android since its release and I'm baffled why doesn't anyone else (well, advertising is the answer of course).
I use it. It works well. The new lens thing is cool. You really have to spend a while scouring tech forums to find out how you are a sinner for using it.
Yes, it obviously works well. I use it occasionally too. The question is why, culturally, there hasn’t been the same push towards something else when all the reasons we migrated off IE now apply to Chrome. Maybe Google permanently won the “browser placement on the internet’s homepage” game?
I'm saying all of this as a FF diehard since before it was named FF... right up until today. I'll use FF until they pry it from my fingers.
Back in the IE6 vs. FF days... IE was inferior in every way. IE was crashy, had no tabs, pathetic/hostile developer tools, insecure, poor support for open web standards, etc.
But today?
The difference is that Chrome is really good, with great developer tools. It's a great user experience.
FF only really wins in terms of better extension API (allowing things like uBlock Origin) and the "moral superiority" of not being created by an advertising company, and serving as a bulwark against a browser engine monoculture. And among real privacy diehards, they're probably using something like PiHole which makes uBO perhaps superfluous for them.
But it doesn't out that even developers who should know better apparently DGAF about those things.
Firefox is kind of mixed. I use it sometimes. One of the things everyone recommended was tree style tabs so I got those and was kind of amazed that to make them look ok you are supposed to get some custom css in your editor and send it to some obscure folder deep in the file system. And now the appearance has changed because some update worked differently with the hacked together css? That seems kind of clunky. Though maybe I'm doing it wrong.
From the browser point of view I don't really worry. I do have various other browsers and such like if Google were to be annoying. Their browser share has dropped from a peak around 90% to more like 67% I think.
I am a bit wary about their dominant position in advertising, though people still google stuff and see google ads if they use other browsers.
Firefox's keyboard shortcut for new incognito tab is objectively wrong (Cmd+Shift+P vs. Cmd+Shift+N). It turns out that even if you're one of those weirdos that configures his web browser, it's impossible even for you to change it because Firefox has a separate shortcut for "Reopen Closed Tab" (Cmd+Shift+T) and "Reopen Closed Window" (Cmd+Shift+N) instead of just having one, which is even dumber. If I close the last tab of a window and press Cmd+Shift+T the right thing to do is just to do nothing? Really?
No one at Mozilla will ever have the conviction and power to fix this design misstep. I had a bunch of other reasons typed up but finding out that this will be wrong forever is actually enough for me.
I hate ads more than anyone and I'll switch if I'm forced to but Firefox is just a bad knock off of a browser forever playing catch up with the real thing. But I'm glad someone's doing it.
Because 1) Google pushes it hard with their extremely popular web services, and 2) it feels more snappy than Firefox.
I mean I use Firefox, but any time I have to open Chrome for whatever reason, it just feels like the UI is responding a handful of milliseconds faster than Firefox, even on very powerful hardware.