People have all kinds of weird excuses for not using Firefox.

Sometimes it feels like "Sure, Chrome sold my kids data to human traffickers. But I can't switch to Firefox because I really _need_ MIDI-2 over websocket support"

Sure, FF is not perfect but a lot of issues is due to sites being optimised for webkit and that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.

> that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.

And herein lies the rub. 20% of people, at best, will sacrifice convenience for freedom.

Firefox and Chrome overtook IE because they were move convenient to use (Firefox had tabs and extensions, Chrome had a more reliable multi-process architecture and more CSS/JS/... features faster).

IE didn't die until YouTube publicly dropped support for it.

Chrome is a lot more robust and secure against exploitation than Firefox is. This is a very unpopular fact, and every time I point it out the rabid Mozilla people get upset, despite it being the truth.

I use Ungoogled Chromium.

There’s no such thing. You use a Chromium that doesn’t report data back to Google, but the entire project is a Google project that pushes Google’s aims on the web.

Could you provide some sources for the true facts you're asserting?

I solved the security problem by using Firefox in VMs on Qubes OS. Works great.

Mmmm is there any source or a deep analysis from you for such a statement?

Once upon a time that may have been a very hard to dispute thing, but I'm not so sure anymore.

For starters, recent Firefox versions do proper process isolation per domain, similar to Chrome, which has long been claimed to be the primary security benefit of Chrome-based browsers.

In addition, the Firefox codebase is partially rewritten in Rust. This effort is incomplete and likely always will be, but it's still significant. Keep in mind that according to Google, 70% of security vulnerabilities in Chrome are related to memory unsafety!

* * *

I have used the internet since, well, since back when a 56k modem was a dream. I have had zero security incidents via a browser. On the other hand Google collect data on me 100% of the time I start a Chrome browser. "What if" versus "this actually happens" is the typical argument.

For a while FF on Mac was using a huge amount of CPU. For me it's fixed but YMMV.

Safari is lighter on the battery, but after trying it out with some extensions, it also uses more RAM than FF, so I don't know which is better in the end.

I'm a Firefox user but there have been plenty for me over the years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117216

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442618

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014968

These days the big ones for me are profile switching and the things leaked between containers.

There's a risk of them shutting down

I'm not sure what others reasons are, but I'll offer my own reasons for moving away from Firefox:

* An increase in semi-frequent crashing

* Sluggish performance

* Annoying post-update prompts (This might be true of most browsers at this point? I didn't bother tracking how often this occurred, but it felt like this was a prompt I was seeing more and more frequently in Firefox. I just don't care what new features have been rolled out - I just want the browser to be up-to-date on security patches.)

The UX for Firefox is bad, but I would say that most browsers UX is fairly bad. Edge has done some interesting things, but the way in how Microsoft is forcing it on customers is keeping me far, far away from ever using it as a daily driver.

I ended up switching to Brave and have been fairly satisfied with it for a few months at this point. I realize Brave is based on Chromium, but liked the pushback they had offered against YouTube/Google over the past while. I get that it's all marketing gimmicks, but I appreciated it regardless.

I've also used Opera in the past, but haven't re-installed it in something like 5 to 10 years at this point. It was okay from what I remember, but freezing was an issue, but got the sense that it was more because of some setting I had changed.

For reference, the noted problems with Firefox listed above were experienced on: Fedora 37 and 38, Windows 10 and 11. Laptops and desktops. Various low to mid tier specs. I usually have 2 to 3 browsers installed on various devices at any time for work.