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Comment by ultimoo | Hacker News Reader

> To get the protections, you’ll have to break your habit of using Google’s Chrome browser, which by some estimates has more than half of the worldwide browser usage. Safari and Firefox have less than 20 percent combined.

This point is key here. I switched to FF about 6 months ago and every time I'm showing something to co-workers they will usually remark how unusual it is that I'm not using Chrome. Chrome is the de facto engineer's browser and for good reasons to boot. Here's hoping FF catches up and becomes that some day.

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Firefox (and Firebug) used to be THE environment used to develop for the web. Things changed and will change again. Chrome isn't some magic immortal browser.

This. Let's all please not forget that FireBug is probably the reason Chrome's dev tools are so good. Someone will eventually fill that space.

Well, FF+FB ruled supreme back when there were no decent alternatives, particularly on Windows - which was a very popular platform back then.

We're talking pre-2008, which is before smartphones, most people were browsing on Windows, and the only real alternative to MSIE on Windows was... Firefox.

Of course, it's great that Firefox was there, and that Firebug was developed, and it probably did contribute to the fact Chrome Dev tools are so good.

People used to think that Chrome will never take over IE on Windows. Most people will just keep using the default browser. I think that was valid.

I don't really understand how Google managed to get people to switch. Is it just ads on google.com?

I think it was that and the ui. It looked much cleaner and better than any other web browser, you could even customize it with themes and so on to match your personal taste. I guess people saw the ads and decided to try out their favorite search engines new product.

I want to say that developers and smaller Saas companies might have played a role in this. Smaller businesses are not as big on ensuring everything works across browsers. Most developers use Chrome, so the likelihood of an issue popping up in Chrome is less than other browsers. When an issue does come up with someone using IE and the customer just wants it to work, the easiest solution is to just get them to download Chrome. Many of these customers don't really care what browser they're using and will gladly listen to whatever instructions customer support tells them.

At some point Firefox started being unstable and sluggish to my recollection. At this point Chrome was up and coming but it was pretty fast and clean. So we tried it and switched over. Now there is lots of inertia to switch back. Also if you use a lot of Google services, you can count on them been well tested with Chrome.

I switched back to FF with Quantum. It was faster and the devtools weren't noticeably different--in fact, devtools was better because of CSS grid support. I'm still disappointed by the comparably small add on ecosystem, but I haven't been tempted to switch back.

I'm not sure if you've seen this already, but if you install the "Chrome Store Foxified" addon, you can install any Chrome extension in Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-...

Interesting. Thanks for the link. How well does this addon work? Have you found the behavior and performance be pretty seamless between the two?

I've never had to use this myself (all the addons I want are already in addons.mozilla.org), but I've heard that it works pretty well in the past. (Interestingly, there are a bunch of reviews claiming the auto-download feature doesn't work anymore, so you might have to use something like http://crxextractor.com/first).

Firefox has been the standard for years after IE. Then Google invested huge resources in pushing Chrome and succeeded because they released at the right moment a super simple and optimized product compared to the huge behemoth Firefox was becoming. Things are quite different though now, and FF can fight Chrome in the same league speed wise then win hands down when it comes to privacy. Turning the tables back is definitely possible, but won't be easy or immediate though due to the amount of resources Google can invest in advertising for its products, which are orders of magnitude bigger than what the Mozilla Foundation could use.

Can someone help me figure out the set of privacy features that I miss out by using Chrome even with all the appropriate extensions/settings enabled (e.g. uBlock Origin etc) when compared to using FF?

Can't say as a developer I've ever felt crippled using Firefox over Chrome.

I always thought of Opera as the quintessential engineer's browser. I switched away from Chrome a couple years ago and haven't looked back since. It's fast, has tons of extensions and works well for pretty much everything.

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