For the past 6+ years I only use Chrome rarely and as an Internet Explorer replacement.
It was my only reason to launch Chrome on my job laptop and it's been six months that I use Google Meet daily on FF without issue.
For whatever reason, the experience just isn't there. Maybe it's Mozillas fault, maybe it's Google's, maybe it's even Apple's.
401 - Chrome
446 - Firefox
546 - Safari
511 - Chrome without any extensions
433 - Clean firefox install
500 - Clean edge install
On an AMD Ryzen 7950X3D / 5600MHz RAM
Interestingly, I got substantially different results depending on whether I used chrome with my typical extensions or not. Looking at the flamegraph, I don't seem to see the full picture of why there's such a substantial difference. Bitwarden/React Developer tools (the 2 primary extensions I use) don't seem to make enough of an impact to account for the roughly 40% performance increase seen without them. The browserbench javascript accounted for ~38.6% of the overall time taken for the benchmark, but the sum of my extensions was only 6.5%. I'm not incredibly familiar with browser performance profiling, so there's probably more to the story.
457 - Chrome
444 - Safari
348 - Firefox
202 ± 4.7 - Chrome
184 ± 5.0 - Firefox
171 ± 2.6 - Safari
The "give me examples" is sort of a moving target, anecdotally I have run into many more completely or partially broken sites when using Firefox as compared to Chrome and Safari. It is likely that some or all of those examples are now fixed but the pain in the moment is enough to keep me from using the browser long term.
It works fine for me.
The web interfaces for both Jitsi and Zoom fail to recognise my web camera. I've gone through the permissions settings a dozen times and Firefox says that it sees camera, but it only displays a black feed. Vivaldi correctly accesses the camera on both sites.
imascientist.org.uk makes it "impossible" to sign up for outreach sessions under Firefox. The div with the sessions has a `max-width` parameter, but the contents are significantly larger than this width, resulting in the buttons being outside the rendering area and inaccessible. I have to go into the dev tools and edit the CSS every time I open the page.
These are just the issues that I've dealt with today. Don't get me wrong - I'm literally typing this in Firefox at this moment. However, it doesn't help anyone to pretend that these issues never pop up. I simply feel that the benefits outweight these annoyances.
zoom worked without problem.. both audio and video..
imascientist.org.uk i opened the registration page and it showed without problem buttons where in the end of the page as i would expect.
It look like it is something in your end and not with firefox..
On imascientist.org.uk I don't see a sign up button, only login.
When you have a site not working as expected, start Firefox in "Troubleshoot Mode" (alt-key then in the menu at the top Help > Troubleshot mode) that starts Firefox with addons turn off. If the site works, restart and turn of addons one by one to you see which one creates the problem.
I've occasionally run into relatively minor visual issues (I think from before the :has pseudo-class was made generally available in FF) but I cannot think of a single instance where a site was unusable and then worked when I tried it in Chrome.
Do you have some examples of websites that really behave that differently depending on the browser you're using?
Having lived through the "best viewed with..." days I'd hoped we were past all that by now!
But I still use of because of the cookie Mgmt mainly, and secondly because we need at least one alternative browser engine on desktop... Safari WebKit is a fork (or the original if you prefer), it's not really that different.
* duolingo.com (mic does not work) * mediatest.webex.com * webserial in general
I don't know your specific reasons. But commonly this is just familiarity bias.
That doesn't say that X is better than Y in general (it often isn't) just that you know X better than Y and therefore it's better for you.
It's why I've never been able to switch to emacs despite trying it out. It's why I'm forever stuck on Ubuntu, despite the fact that there are DEs/distros out there that suit my use case better, probably.
It’s probably fixable, though. One of these days when I have some surplus time I’d like to grab a copy of the Firefox source, see how practical changing its UI is, and figure out if the root cause of lack of polish is technical or organizational. If it’s the latter a fork may be in order.
(Mozilla and Goog were smart to start offering account-based sync because this creates a moat for regular adoption. But anyone can and should go window-shopping for browsers - it's cheap entertainment, at the very least.)
Any non OSS browser makes me feel weird. The amount of trust you place in a browser is insane.
I use FF, too, but I can see why someone wouldn't want to: It's just not a very good Mac app. Weird windowing and focus bugs in fullscreen mode. Keyboard shortcuts that randomly stop working. Zero scripting capabilities (it used to have the bare minimum, but Mozilla bizarrely ripped it out), and just poor integration in general. My system-wide shortcuts — the ones that are so important I've added them to every context menu on the system? That's a big nope because FF devs apparently think showing poxy extension icons is more important.
Google had the good sense to copy Safari's keyboard shortcuts in Chrome. Mozilla didn't.
The bookmark manager is straight out of Windows 95. Awful UX.
I do like Firefox, but it's just not up to snuff on macOS.
Firefox may be open source, but Mozilla is a company with a paid development team. It is exactly these types of issues - UX, UI - on which the dev team should be working. I'm sure that a lot of features come from the open source community, but the polish and sound implementation is on the dev team.
For what it's worth, Firefox on KDE is fine.
And I don't mind dated UX of bookmarks manager, I even think that compared to other browsers it is the most usable one.
I wish it was! Unfortunately it's not.
Of course, that is exactly the model used by Mozilla. It exports search query data to Google for capture, by default, in return for payment.
"Thank goodness for Mozilla and all its collaborators."
Indeed, thank goodness for long-time Mozilla collaborator Google, LLC. Mozilla employees left to join Google beginning in 2005. They wrote Chrome.
Without Google's payments to Mozilla, who knows what might happen.
What is "real" privacy.
There is no small amount of telemetry by default in Firefox, far more than Chrome. Unless one changes each of these settings, Mozilla collects data about Firefox users. Defaults can only be changed by editing the source and compiling Firefox. Almost no one does this.
"One can change settings but one cannot change the default unless edit source and compile. Almost no one does this."
There are some popular Firefox forks that have several improvements over security and privacy. Check LibreWolf and Waterfox for example.
But what if the computer user does not care to share information with Mozilla.
Information such as:
(a) IP address
(b) the software is used/when the user is online
(c) the user's preferred websites
(d) how the software is used
(e) settings the user changes or does not change
and so on.
This is information sharing with Mozilla by default. It is not "opt-in". It is "op-out".
Is having control useful for "real privacy". Is it useful for data collection and surveillance. Who should have control.
Firefox has over 37 million lines of code. The compiled program requires hundreds of megabytes of storage space. Based on LOC and binary size it is larger than the Linux kernel. Compiling Firefox on "average" computers will take hours and will require a powerful computer. It is not an easy process and can easily fail due to its numerous dependencies.
I use a text-only browser that compiles in less than a minute on an older, underpowered computer to a 1.2 MiB static binary. There are no mandatory dependencies. It is from this browser that I type and submit this reply.
I am back again to remind people that profiles suck on Firefox, container tabs are not a great solution, and there are tons of extensions that Chrome has that Firefox doesn't.
So just 3 very simple examples of why someone would use Chrome over Firefox.