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.
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