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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

I did as well. DuckDuckGo, ublock origin, privacy badger. I haven’t used Firefox seriously in 5 years or so and I’m very pleased with the experience.

To be honest, it’s best to use an independent company for your internet browser. Google’s incentives and business model no longer matches web browsing for someone who cares about privacy.

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Did it ever?

I'm the last person to defend google, but in the beginning a reasonable argument could be made that what they wanted was better performance of javascript and website rendering in general. Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple were the only engine developers in town. Two were the default on their OSs and Mozilla was the choice of those who made a choice. So there was no real incentive to compete on performance.

Chrome was introduced by Google with the idea of improving performance of webbrowsers in general so they could do more with web-apps. That did seem somewhat reasonable at the time.

But since Chrome became the market leader, the incentives have changed.

Google used to pay people working on Firefox, including the lead engineer at the time, Ben Goodger. They pulled them to work on Chrome. Had they wanted, they could have invested more in Firefox to improve its performance. But what they really wanted was full control over their own Web browser.

> Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple were the only engine developers in town.

And KHTML team in a cave.

and pi.hole. Privacy at its best.

> I haven’t used Firefox seriously in 5 years

Do you mean "I haven't used *Chrome" ..."? Otherwise I don't understand what you're trying to say.

I don't think he/she meant "Chrome". It makes no sense to me if you substitute "Chrome" for "Firefox", considering the context of the comment and its parent comment.

They used Chrome previously and now they switched to Firefox and are happy with it, despite not having used it seriously in 5 years.

Ah, so maybe the meaning was "I've just switched to Firefox after having not used it seriously for five years". It's interesting that that interpretation was so obvious to so many people but not me!

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