It really is about speed - both load time and rendering. Sadly, I can start Firefox and while it's loading I can start Chrome, IE and Opera and they all finish before Firefox (not an accurate metric, I realise). I love Firefox but speed rules sometimes.

The only reason I'm keeping Firefox installed on my machine is Firebug. Although, I have to mention that during my last small JS project I only used Google Chrome's built-in developer tools, and I liked what I saw. Maybe FF 4.0 will be a game changer, but for the moment the actual FF is just too darn slow for a daily usage.

You might want to look at Dragonfly (Opera's competitor to Firebug):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1117798

I am afraid it already is too late. Google just plainly out-innovated them, and there isn't any quick fix to revert that.

I'd wait until FF 4, FF for Android, Weave, and a few of the other labs innovations are out before writing Firefox off yet.

Agreed, I am a huge fan of Weave and FireFox. While I do agree that Chrome is also an excellent browser, I would hardly say it is evident that Chrome has out innovated FireFox, especially this early in the process.

I found that turning off addons helps a tremendous amount - on both Windows and Linux. Also, 3.6 appears to be much faster. I don't think Chrome is a safe browser.

It does help, but for me personally FF is pretty worthless without the addons. No firebug? No gestures? What's the difference between it and IE at that point?

What about Chrome, before it added extensions? What about Safari? There are a vast number of ways that other browsers are better than IE, the extensions are just one component of that.

Some of the other browsers definitely have a feature set that's more compelling without extensions. FF really doesn't for me though. The two things I can think of are a slight increase in speed, and the awesomebar (which actually negates some of the speed advantage because it's so slow).

It renders correctly?

That's definitely nice for me the developer, but it doesn't really matter much for me the consumer. It's a pretty small handful of sites that haven't been wrangled to work in IE. Maybe we'll see more growth in CSS3, Canvas, etc, in use on sites that care less about IE, but for now in practice, that's not much of a difference.

Definitely a valid point, most websites render fine in IE7 and up (though IE6 is losing ground quickly). However, though most people won't examine it beyond their use, easier development generally means better web experiences, so it is in their best interest to use a (more) compliant browser. If nothing else, it's good to encourage more to use FF over IE for that reason.

And personally, I love CSS3 tricks that JavaScript isn't really ideally suited for, and Canvas is a very welcome addition.