I did as well. DuckDuckGo, ublock origin, privacy badger. I haven’t used Firefox seriously in 5 years or so and I’m very pleased with the experience.

To be honest, it’s best to use an independent company for your internet browser. Google’s incentives and business model no longer matches web browsing for someone who cares about privacy.

Did it ever?

I'm the last person to defend google, but in the beginning a reasonable argument could be made that what they wanted was better performance of javascript and website rendering in general. Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple were the only engine developers in town. Two were the default on their OSs and Mozilla was the choice of those who made a choice. So there was no real incentive to compete on performance.

Chrome was introduced by Google with the idea of improving performance of webbrowsers in general so they could do more with web-apps. That did seem somewhat reasonable at the time.

But since Chrome became the market leader, the incentives have changed.

Google used to pay people working on Firefox, including the lead engineer at the time, Ben Goodger. They pulled them to work on Chrome. Had they wanted, they could have invested more in Firefox to improve its performance. But what they really wanted was full control over their own Web browser.

> Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple were the only engine developers in town.

And KHTML team in a cave.

and pi.hole. Privacy at its best.

> I haven’t used Firefox seriously in 5 years

Do you mean "I haven't used *Chrome" ..."? Otherwise I don't understand what you're trying to say.

I don't think he/she meant "Chrome". It makes no sense to me if you substitute "Chrome" for "Firefox", considering the context of the comment and its parent comment.

They used Chrome previously and now they switched to Firefox and are happy with it, despite not having used it seriously in 5 years.

Ah, so maybe the meaning was "I've just switched to Firefox after having not used it seriously for five years". It's interesting that that interpretation was so obvious to so many people but not me!

I switched to Firefox developer edition couple weeks ago before this incident. Reason: my laptop temperature goes up to 80C+ with about 10 tabs opened in Chrome, whereas with Firefox it stays around 60C. But with this sync and cookie fiasco I am never going back, even if they fix the CPU optimization issue in a future update.

I recommend the Google container as well https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-contai...

I actually use Chrome for everything Google, and Firefox for everything else. It's a constant reminder that I need to stop using Google services. I don't open it much anymore, just to check my gmail which still has a few emails going to it, and to find my android whenever I lose it.

Does gmail really not work in another browser like Firefox? Seriously? How is this possible?

It works fine in Firefox, I do it for the intentional isolation. To me, chrome browser is "google browser"

Almost everything runs just fine in Firefox.

Google software seems to be chrome-optimized, but it's usually only slightly slower on Firefox - it still works.

Some google websites are chrome only because of the use of some non standard plugins.

Do you have any details of which ones? I have not discovered any so far - everything seems to work just as well in Firefox (e.g. gmail, youtube, search, maps, adwords, adsense, analytics, cloud console, webmaster tools are the ones I requently use on Firefox with zero issues)

Google earth and Google hangouts

It works, but it uses non-standard extensions that are only present in Chrome, so it runs slow in Firefox, especially since their latest update.

> I hope this is a wake up call that privacy implications need to be seriously considered during product design

Maybe am too cynical, but I think it would be a wake up call to hide such features better in the future. This is Google we're talking about here.

I think it did hurt and visible in their stats otherwise they wouldn't do it so soon.

the problem here is that Google's incentives are directly opposed to user privacy