Really? That seems hard to believe.
I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time. Not sure what the state of things is now.
This is HN, so another huge reason to use Chrome is for the devtools, which I've always had a very good experience with and know pretty well. I've always found other browser devtools miserable to work with in the past, though I admit I haven't invested serious time into learning them.
All that said, the adblocking fiasco may well get me to try out FF again as my daily browser. But personally I had very clear reasons for abandoning it originally, it wasn't just cargo cutting
If you experienced poor performance the common explanation at the time was that you either had a profile folder that had accumulated all sorts of stuff that somehow caused a slowdown, or had some unfortunate extensions installed.
This is a fair point. Personally, I don't recall seeing a big difference between the two. Maybe there was. Perhaps it was not that bad so it wasn't as issue for me.
As for dev tools, I have been happy with Firefox - but then when I am doing web development I am testing on various browsers, anyway. So I use dev tools for all of them.
Nowadays I don't think there's a big performance gap one way or the other.
I was long time fan of FF while living in Ireland and the UK, but when I moved to Sweden and later Germany I was effectively forced to switch to Chrome.
Being required to interact with websites in other languages regularly meant that FF (circa 2018) was just not an option. The chrome experience for translating webpages was vastly superior to any other browser, which I needed to use 3rd party translating apps to get anywhere. These were clunky, low performance black boxes that I tried to live with and failed.
I see now that other browsers are starting to properly do built-in translation, but Chrome was way ahead for a long time. So for non-English speakers I imagine Chrome was a must use tool for a long time.
Moving countries and languages means the translate function becomes a priceless necessity on a daily basis, and Chrome's and Edge's built-in translation features are second to none, so I switched away from FF when I moved country. Firefox third party translation addons exist but they always felt clunky and flaky being often slower and sometimes failing where Chrome and Edge would breeze through.
Better privacy is nice but convenience and saving time and frustration is nicer. Beret me all you want but it's not a hill I'm willing to die on.
I wonder if I am just imagining things or if they use a different service for translation or, if the same, if it is being throttled.
A lesson of how sometimes "ship it now and improve later" could make huge damage to the reputation of a product.
Lately I've been advocating change to Firefox more than ever. Do you want to guess what's been the reply I've heard back more? "But Firefox is clunky and much slower than Chrome!"
They had a bad experience due to slowness compared to Chrome at the time, and that impression still lives on today, putting an end to any slight possibility of migration. At least until a friend explains the situation as it is nowadays. Thankfully they mostly listened and some agreed to try it.
If chrome does it for you for dev tools, then use it for that. No need to use it for general browsing.
Development of devtools was indeed quite good early on in Chrome. But Firefox already had the Firebug extension, which was basically the first kind of browser devtools as far as I can remember. And then Firefox also eventually implemented the devtools natively, and Firebug eventually disappeared. And that did take some time while Chrome had the devtools already native. But still Firefox with their open plugin system allowed for Firebug to evolve, and Chrome's devtools (and also Firefox's) was for sure inspired by Firebug.
So why do people use Chrome really? Placebo, hype, lack of historical context, and ignorance of privacy, I would say.
That said, I'm not convinced by this flashmob against Chrome. I like Google direction and Google philosophy behind Chrome, including its position on adblockers. So I hardly have any reason to switch to Firefox. Chromium is open source, Firefox is financed by Google, so it's hard for me to be convinced that Chrome somehow is bad. Especially when Firefox makes one bad move after another bad move (integrating weird third-party services within Browser, like Pocket or VPN or whatever).
And, yeah, I don't care about my privacy that much, especially not on the level to actively fight for it. I care about security, and that's about it.
But I do believe people want uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome.
I have used Firefox forever, I never switched to Chrome as it knew it never was fully open-source. The point of open source is that you're able to build the thing from sources with the exact functionality as in binary file they release.
The web is extremly important for everyone, and it is important that we still build an open web for everyone. When people use projects like Chrome, they let Google decide the direction of the web, just like Microsoft did with IE.
That Firefox was sometimes slower than Chrome and sometimes lacked features has never been a big productivy hit for me. Neither has web pages that didn't work in Firefox. In the worst cases I just need to start Chromium. I lose max 1 minute. That is nothing to sacrifice for keeping the web open.
The webRequest API does allow to intercept and cancel HTTP requests, it has been part of Chrome extensions API since 2011.
The power of endless money for advertising. Some users think it doesn't have that much impact, but being nudged on every other web page to make the switch is much more powerful than that nephew who talks to you about it once.
However she thought it was totally fine as she was used to it :S
No, it wasn't.
Quick reminder, the issue with IE was webpages loading broken, or not loading at all.
People that used that crap didn't switch because "Chrome was a bit snappier than FF", they switched because all of a sudden every webpage, many sotfware install wizard, and even billboards on the street told them to switch to Chrome. Some "toolbars" installed it without asking. They probably never had heard of FF or Opera before.
It will be interesting to see what happens next year in that case, because FF+UBO will be much faster than Chrome with a nobbled ad blocker. If your right and speed is what everyone cares about there should be a mass migration back to Firefox.
But I doubt it, because we have already have a similar experiment. FF+UBO on Android is blazing fast compared to Chrome on Android. Chrome not supporting extensions on Android means the situation is nothing like desktop where Chrome and Firefox are roughly comparable (and always have been). On an ad laden site FF+UBO is going to load a page several times faster. More to the point to me, ads on desktop are often "out of the way" of the main content, but on mobile that consume roughly 1/3 of an already small screen. Like the ancestor poster, I'm stunned that nobody uses Firefox mobile (I'm defining 0.49% market share as nobody). Performance wise the difference is enormous - yet clearly no one cares.
Which also means, you and I and other nerds notwithstanding, it likely no one cared about Firefox's performance versus Chrome when they switched on the desktop. Marketing, bundling, breaking of Firefox on Google's home sites look to fit the facts much better.
All the people coming up with revisionist bs about firefox being bad just don't realize that 1) there wasn't only Firefox, Opera was also present (chrome was basically a ripoff of Opera's ux) and that 2) the incumbent back then was IE. The gap between IE and firefox/opera was way larger than whatever people claim the difference was between firefox/opera and Chrome.
Adobe used to bundle Chrome by default with Acrobat Reader for instance. - this was how a LOT of people got Chrome the first time.
So, convenient that they pushed something that half the web and browsers didn't pay much attention to, but they did because they wanted interactive apps and things inside a browser. And hey, this was at the time fancy UIs and frameworks were popping up. Were they prescient or just riding the wave? Or were they perhaps doing that plus also pushing the wave in the direction that best suited what they were good at and also made them lots of money in advertising.
So when we say marketing, we have to include all that advertising now just for a browser, but also for everything that google was pushing in synergy with it.
Poor performance is also what drove me back to Firefox. It still has the clipboard bug, however.
This is fine. My comment is not aimed at everyone who switched -- though I am likely still referring to the majority of people.
I do remember the ACID test being the main selling point of Chrome over the other browers. Yes, from memory, I do believe Chrome was faster. My attitude to this, however, was that it was new and eventually, would be adding new features, etc.
I understand that there are people out there who switched for other reasons.
We had Firefox 0.3 which was very, very slow browser but still much better than Internet Explorer. There was a lot of mental gymnastics involved to get pages display at least similar for both browsers.
When Chrome 1 was released, it was absolutely awesome. Minimal interface. Focused on browsing. Incredibly fast, it just executed JS stupidly quick and we could create web app interfaces that didn't lag
You can still download Chrome 1 and see what it's about. It was basically what users wanted: supports more CSS features than other browsers, starts fast, executes JS fast, provides adequate developer console, renders pages correctly.
It took all of us by storm because it was genuinely good software. That era was the era of good software, not spam advertising.
Today, in 2023. this is not true any more and you are entirely correct when asking why people would use Chrome. Answer is: laziness, lack of info, apathy, lack of knowledge.
Because it works. Advertising works. That's the bane of the conflict of interest between companies and users of Ad blockers. We (technical users) cannot complain that companies should not use and abuse Ads, because at the same time we (humanity as a collective) constantly show once and again that Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.
Just because something works, doesn't mean you should do it. Using a gun or knife to threaten someone with death if they don't hand over their wallet works. Do you think people should complain/do something about it, or should they just let muggers get away with it "because it works"?
Which I agree, but as long as society doesn't consider it harmful enough to ban it on Law (like the other activities you mentioned are), there's no reason (save the moral one) for a company to change practices. The incentives are just not there.
I definitely agree we should keep complaining. But at the same time, until things have changed radically, it would be foolish to expect that these complaints will achieve anything at all. Votes and such, that works much better!
That reminds me of that chinese restaurant that sold opium-laced noodles, to keep customers loyal: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-29312562
Advertising spend should be regulated.
And they are also the only business model we have been able to think of that enables the free flow of information on the scale we see today. Unless governments step up to foot the bill for Maps, YouTube, Reddit, etc, ads are all we've got.
I've never seen an ad that "stole" my time and attention. They are easy to scroll past and/or ignore. If an ad is stealing someone's time and attention, perhaps they need to work on their concentration and discipline instead of blaming the ad.
But this is the problem, because their intended purpose is not the user experience. A lot of people block the ads because they find them distracting, and actually part of the intended purpose of ads is to distract your attention to them.
There is no "users of Ad blockers" vs "technical users", using an ad blocker is not some sort of purpose of why I use a browser.
Tried Brave on my phone, but it managed to generate 90mb of network traffic in 10min where another browser takes 5mb. No idea what it did, I instantly lost trust.
Chrome I only use for debugger.
Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome. I use Firefox as my main browser, but there are times when I'm forced to open Chrome to do something (e.g. buy visitor parking permits from my local council) even with uBlock Origin disabled. As a non-technical user, if that happens to you even once, what motivation would there be for you to go back? As far as those users are concerned "Chrome works, but Firefox doesn't".
It's an argument, but not a good one. Don't be evil they said...
It is very uncommon these days for actively maintained websites to not support Safari/iOS users
Well I am not one of those people. Back in the late '00s I was testing in IE6, 7 and maybe 8 as well as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
I remember, back then, my boss telling me to "only worry about IE" when writing a demo web application. One day I came in and my boss slaps a peice of paper down at my desk, wondering why a customer saw this on their screen. At first I was like "WTF" as it was a bunch of rectangles scattered around. The penny dropped and tried it in firefox.. same result. It was at this point I started to care about ALL main browers regardless of what anyone told me.
It is not as bad today, but my mind set is no different.
Should not be testing on just one browser.
Today that's no longer the case, but there also isn't a huge reason to switch to Firefox. They're all kind of the same, especially to the average user who doesn't strongly care about privacy.
When Chrome originally released firefox was better than IE but chrome was head and shoulders above both of them.
Moving to Chrome from firefox at the time was a breath of fresh air. Nowadays there's very little difference, there was a short period of time I found Firefox faster but now I doubt most users would be able to tell the difference in performance
What I do not understand is not why people do not use FF, it is why people use Chrome instead of Chromium, Brave or some other chromium-based browser that is not google or MS. Surely it is not that much more effort to install one of these than chrome.
I can't think of a single way using Chrome and therefore having "less privacy" has affected me negatively.
In fact, having an internet that just works has allowed me to be more productive.
I'd love for someone to articulate how cookies or tracking has actually harmed them in any way.
I'm not sure how old you were at the time but do you really remember that history well and did you compare the two browsers yourself at the time? I was a die hard Firefox user from the beginning until Chrome came out. I remember trying Chrome for the first time and being amazed at how much faster it was. Not just a little faster, way faster and how it could handle more tabs without slowing down. It was so far superior performance wise and that is what got me and many others to switch.
I have seen people use and complain Internet Explorer in my younger days, from version 6 to 7, etc. Even though I mention Firefox to them, they stay with IE. What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009.
It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it.
I see this a lot in my career as well (software engineer) - when some cool, flashy new toy comes backed by companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun/Oracle. etc.
Anyway.. I only recently found out there was a thing called hardened firefox. There is me thinking "Oh! This might be worth a look" - and it is basically firefox with private settings enabled, etc, in the config section.
(which is what I have been doing for years. lol)
I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. However, even if you use something else, I would not be surprised in modern Windows listens in on your microphone "for advertising" purposes.
I might not be able to eliminate privacy issues, but if I can reduce the best I can, I will.
Back to browsers - I hear good things about Brave. Not used it, though. Happy with FF.