> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close

In what sense? Feature set, user experience, security, stability, performance, developer experience?

Genuinely curious. I switched from Chrome last year and have yet to find a single aspect in which I’d say Firefox would lead, with the exception of privacy.

Crash safety. If Chrome crashes, you get one single, short lived pop up to restore your tabs. If you miss it or can't click it for some reason, though luck.

Firefox, on the other hand, will simply always reopen your tabs and prompt you, in case the crash was its fault. In fact, losing ~50 open tabs in Chrome was what made me switch.

The tabs are still there even if you miss the prompt. Either press Ctrl-Shift-T, or select the three dots => History and the tabs are there, under the "Recently closed" section. The caveat is that you have to restore the tabs before you've browsed enough pages that the tabs are pushed out of the recently closed tabs. Also, I simulate Chrome crashing by sending SIGSEGV signal to it, but I'm pretty sure this applies even if Chrome crashes for real.

There are several URLs to crash Chrome in various ways, listed at the bottom of chrome://chrome-urls

For a lot of crashes (mostly due to X bugs - I have an "interesting" setup) I couldn't find those tabs in recently closed. I'll try to simulate it and maybe open a bug report; if it's only in my case this might be less of a general issue than I thought.

As a user it feels like all of the major browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. Is there anything other than bug fixes and performance improvements happening in that space these days?

Well we are seeing major browsers limit control in recent updates, so that's the new major browser race it seems. Safari and Chrome are locking down what you can do with extensions, which limits what you can do to protect your privacy online.

web standards are always evolving and updating. A lot of users don't appreciate that it's happening but it is. Firefox and Chrome do a pretty good job of keeping up. Chrome also adds a lot of proprietary additions to push the envelope as well as differentiate Chrome as well.

> A lot of users don't appreciate that it's happening but it is.

That kind of backs up what I was saying, doesn't it? The browsers are good enough for most of the users most of the time and the new features matter to fewer and fewer people.

Render consistency.

I was doing automated image capture of some data sites and diffing them to see if they changed. Chrome would jitter. Firefox drew the same bits every time.

> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close...

Source? Based on which criteria? If you have even the slightest belief in the wisdom of the crowds, you'll realize that there must be something really appealing in Chrome which has resulted in its 68% market share. Compare that to Firefox's 7%.[0]

[0]: https://netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx

There's no secret sauce to chrome. It's single super power which made it the standard for non-tech users is googles ability to slap a bar on every single one of their sites telling users to use chrome. Google told them, so that's what they did. End of story.

I don't think that's the whole story. Chrome was more user friendly from the beginning. It took FF years to drop the rigid, Windows XP style UI and become more user friendly. At the same time, FF doesn't offer the same level of syncing your data across all your devices like Chrome does. And when it comes to system resources, say what you want about Chrome's tab memory management, but FF on macOS is not a pleasant experience either (extensive CPU usage and heating problems).

I have tried to switch back to FF (and even to Edge), but every time I realize Chrome - despite all its problems - is a much smoother experience. YMMV.

Chrome also used A LOT to shady patters to get installed as a default browser on windows, mostly using third-party installers of unrelated software.

it's a shame, really.

In the early day every driver CD and a large portion of online installers had chrome bundled and pushed. Pretty sure almost every preinstalled system also had chrome. If I don't miss remember, even game installers occasionally pushed chrome. It was very noticeable and I remember quite well the annoyance of having to go to advanced setting and unselect chrome several times during reinstalls of windows 7.

They did have a different memory profile (might still have one in macos, I wouldn't know since I don't use mac), and the UI is each to ones own, but I few programs outside of AOL installers has been as pushy as chrome during the beginning.

User friendliness was not the problem. Neither was the XP style.