Why did I move from chrome to firefox? Stability.

I don't know if it's just me, but nowadays, chrome just sucks so much firefox manages to be better. Chrome tab crashes occur more often than ever before and it uses a shitcrapton of memory. I remember the days where chrome was lean and small and fast. Those days are long gone.

I've been sailing firefox for a year now, and to my great surprise, it has gone from being an absolutely terrible memory hog and crash-o-meter to being fairly efficient and stable. Sure it is still a bit on the heavy side of memory, but in the meantime it doesn't lose my work every few days.

I never had a crash, and thus never felt the need to switch.

Yeah, on linux Chrome just chews through my battery.

That was pretty much the same story for me. On the negative feeling about google, I seems that Google has done massive work trying to get your whole life (online and offline) into their databases. The whole point is to "enhance" the experience of you as a user and business as a google customer. I am not comfortable with the convience-privacy tradeoff but many people are.

Strange my understanding is the point of chrome was cost savings for google - e.g. Billions in bandwidth fees annually saved with improvements to http/2 and vp8... it had nothing to do with data collection. Have you tried chromium?

I think features play can play a role. I switched to DuckDuckGo a long time ago more because of their extra features than because of Google. The old Opera was also moderately successful because of their proxy-like feature (it was pre-rendering webpages and compressing the result) that was very appreciated by mobile users. Before their downfall they also integrated peer-to-peer file sharing and chat.

I believe that maybe Firefox has a card to play with decentralization. Think something like IPFS or MediaGoblin easy-to-use integration.

I think the problem is that once you consider "features" in general, it tends to diffuse attention from what is absolutely essential. Of course nobody can know what is essential. But someone with vision needs to kick everything non-essential into touch and pick something.

My vote is for speed. Then again, I use almost no non-core features of any browser.

That repulsion is also starting to sell, in my opinion.

I had a not-so-positive opinion of Google pretty early on, but it was mostly just a what-if. What if Google with its huge databases gets breached? What if they decide to just make a fortune by selling it all on the black market?

Then came along Snowden, NSA scandal, PATRIOT Act. That added onto this what-if: What if the NSA gets breached? What if some crazy dictator gets to power?

Well, and now we have Trump. A man who manages to seem all at the same time like such a crazy dictator, like a marionette and like an incompetent moron who constantly leaks classified information to the world.

I wouldn't be surprised at all, if in the next three months or so, he somehow managed to leak the NSA databases.

He'll still have an 80+% approval from his base though. And there's only around 2% voter regret. And in the Gallup daily polling, he's up 5% following his disastrous foreign trip on which he curtsied to dictators and criticized allies and has Germany looking like it's going to take its marbles and go home. Right now there's just no awareness of the consequences of what he's doing because the signal to noise ratio is so poor.

I'd like to see a project (even a productize variant of it) that'd make it easier to drop Google, Apple, Microsoft. Something like Lineage OS on the phone, Fedora or Endless on a NUC, and an IPv6 based VPN for the cloud connection between phone laptop and server - which just figures out how to make the proper connection in the background. A cluster option to either a local or remote server instance (2nd NUC, or a Pi, or AWS or other). All the software is out there to make this fairly well possible, it's just non-trivial to setup. I'm even willing for some services to be non-free, e.g. FastMail because email servers are a pain to maintain.

For me, switch from IE to Firefox was "Negative feelings about Microsoft". I think that there are more others like me, so repulsion does work.