In my case, an example of a non-exotic site is Youtube streaming 4k 60fps videos. I tried with latest Firefox a few months ago and it was still stuttering and glitchy. But Chrome plays smoothly with no issues. I previously mentioned that 4k playback has been a long-standing issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28783904

On one hand, my computer is fairly old ... but then again, Chrome works fine on that same old hardware.

What firefox cannot do and chrome can is HDR playback.

No, even if I download the 4k 60fps file using yt-dlp with forced h264 codec settings locally to my harddrive, Firefox still can't play the mp4 file smoothly.

So it's not really a streaming issue or h264 vs VP9 codec issue. The Firefox core engine doesn't seem optimized to playback 4k and 8k high-frame-rate videos with low cpu utilization. Even VLC for 4k and 8k isn't as smooth as Chrome. I don't know what the Chrome team did but they really optimized that code path to play back hi-res videos.

Oh and a while ago I noticed (on a more modern system) that enabling hw decode makes chrome ignore the aspect ratio of the video and displays it like the pixels are square. Again Firefox handled it fine.

(Linux, h264 in both cases)

And look no further than Google themselves: https://labs.google.com/search/install

I'll give you one example: I sometimes can't open OpenAI API documentation due to some stupid Cloudflare captcha checks. No, on Firefox, however many times I click that checkbox, I can't go through the verification, just to read some static content. Not even if I disable adblock and tracking protection.

I don't even see a checkbox at all on Chrome or Edge.

Sure, technically nobody is excluded: Just solve the captcha! Fraud heuristics are only reasonable, right?

But it's all fun only as long as your situation occurs within the 90th or 95th percentile of all data labeled "good customer". Good luck if you're out side of that...

I mostly use Chrome on Linux (fully Google distributed, closed source Chrome...so not Chromium) and I see those cloudflare captchas at a much higher rate than I do when using Windows or macOS.

Enabling JS is not enough, so I think its liked to privacy plugins, or running inside a container.

What if it's Google themselves? From my original post:

> [...] and that often includes Google sites/apps

What google site or service requires Chrome?

Sure, it's a lab experiment or whatever, but these are just words, and the effect is that I have to use a different browser to be able to use them, for absolutely no technical reason. (The LLM is running on Google's servers and provides plaintext. I think Firefox could handle that.)

Just visit this on Firefox if you want to see for yourself, including a big "install Chrome" call to action: https://labs.google.com/search/install

On Google Docs, paste as markdown, copy and paste from menus, paste without formatting, etc. only works on chrome. This functionality could be done with standard APIs, but instead google uses a hidden, pre-installed extension to implement it.

Offline mode doesn't work on firefox for either gmail or google docs.

Google doodles don't show up on Firefox Mobile, unless you spoof a chrome user agent.

Youtube has repeatedly had serious performance problems on Firefox.

Do you happen to have any examples? I’m curious to see how broken/what the issues are.

A few sites would silently break, e.g. restaurant online order pages, but work in Chrome. Never really looked into why, it was just annoying and intermittent (might work one month but not the next).

YouTube occasionally had some issues. For a while it was on an old version of Polymer that used Shadow DOM V0 (experimental) instead of V1.

A good list is here https://webcompat.com/issues?page=1&per_page=100&state=open&... keep in mind some of these are "is extremely slow in Firefox". Sometimes that's just that Firefox didn't have the same set of optimizations (not necessarily even fewer optimizations, just not ones built against) and other times that's deeper seeded like the Shaw DOM V0 example where the fallback for the page was to use some older.

Among them: Logging into some of my financial accounts doesn't work on Firefox. Enterprise software and gear like VMware and management UIs of various devices on the network. (They foolishly hard-coded their devices to reject any UserAgent strings that weren't Chrome, IE, or Edge.) Sites that use some kind of poorly-implemented tracking/fingerprinting to make sure you're a human. (I would routinely get stuck in infinite CAPCHA loops even on normal sites.) For a while, Slack video/audio calls did not work on Firefox because Slack chose to use codecs that FF didn't support. Video calls on FF are still hit-and-miss on various platforms, ran into it on Facebook just the other day.

These are all just off the top of my head, of course. There are plenty more that I've forgotten.

That is just the nature of using a niche platform. I primarily use Linux on the desktop. I have to keep a Windows install around for the times that I need to do something that can't be done on Linux. Resources are limited and so high marketshare platforms are prioritized. That's just how it is.

    > I have to keep a Windows install around for the times that I need to do something that can't be done on Linux.