Google simply saw where Microsoft failed in their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy and figured out a way to do it better. By all accounts, Chrome has a bigger stranglehold on the web than IE ever did, and if you don't use Chrome you'll get a sub-standard experience in most of their products and services.

It says as much that Microsoft ditched their own browser engine for Chromium, so even if it's not Chrome it's still Google-driven.

Mozilla could have got in front of this by making Gecko/Servo as easy to embed as Chrome, so we'd see more alternative browsers based on Firefox tech.

All of this Chrome popularity comes from hijacking with "additional offer" in Windows software installers where people just mindlessly click "next next finish" and then they didn't event noticed their browser changed. Google got their users by dirty tactics, not because their browser was good and gained interest of the public.

Yep, it’s so sad.

Every time Firefox is mentioned, there is someone that goes like “I have tried it but it was so buggy/slow for me”

And meanwhile, I’m using FF as my daily driver with zero issues. And I’m quite sensitive to buggyness or performance issues.

I've been considering the switch to FF, but there have been a couple of very specific annoyances that I haven't been able to find a workaround for, so I'm stuck on Chrome for the time being...

1. When copypasting messages from discord (I do this a lot for notetaking purposes) it randomly inserts a large number of newlines into the pasted text for some reason.

e.g. instead of "[8:15PM] username: message" it shows up as

  [
      8:15pm
  ]
  username
  :
  message

2. Also I think this may be related to the fact that I use a wacom tablet instead of a mouse and it's really hard to reproduce but sometimes when scrolling on a webpage it just randomly like. jumps to different pages in quick succession, as if it's clicking links on the page very rapidly when I scroll.

None of these happen with Chrome. idk if it's a bug or just something configured weirdly on my end.

Or worse: In this very comment section is someone complaining that the CEO takes home a lot of money while the company stagnates. You know, like pretty much every midsize company out there.

They took "Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good" as a personal challenge.

And that should really be virtually irrelevant. Even if FF ran at half speed and used 2x battery people should still run it out of principle.

(And for the record, it doesn't.)

You mean the FireFox that won’t even allow you to persistently install an unpacked extension without installing a whole different version of the browser (Developer Edition, maybe also nightly)? I’ll take enabling dev mode any day. In fact I’ve had that enabled for more than a decade anyway.

I switched back to FF, but honestly, I find it annoying that there isn't a better option. Firefox is (for me) the least-worst option. I really miss the existence of a browser that I actually like.