Firefox just doesn’t have enough advantages yet that would convince someone comfortable with Chrome to switch over. While privacy is an ever growing concern, it isn’t a strong enough feature for most people.
At the end of the day, this is the end-all-be-all argument to the Facebook and Google duopoly. People just don't give a goddamn (excuse the language) about their data - they simply do.not.care.
I believe my generation (Y), and possibly a few after us (X, etc), will be known as the generation(s) who didn't think privacy/data was that big of a deal - until one day it was.
We are the guinea pig.
This wasn't meant to be a plug, just a happenstance of "if you like 'x', have you seen 'y' based on it?". =]
[0] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
Sadly, Mozilla also seem to promote containers as an alternative to user profiles, while they're nowhere near as full-featured - sharing saved logins and bookmarks between my "personal" and "work" containers is almost never desireable. Managing and switching profiles, on the other hand, is virtually unchanged since the Netscape Communicator days.
Firefox has mostly strived, in the Quantum era, to stay mostly-ish compatible with Google's interpretation of WebExtensions, from what I can tell.
I'm at the point of installing chromium just to be able to manage my videos, but I refuse to give in.
My main browser is Firefox, but I have to switch over to Chrome more often than I would like. Electron is also based on Chromium, isn't it? IMHO, the rise of Electron just reinforces Chromium's status and I think Microsoft is going to accelerate that trend (I'm guessing MS adopted Chromium because of Electron).
Other web developers may want to chime in but I rarely have cross-browser problems between Firefox and Chrome. I can't recall the last one.
The only time I encounter a problem with Firefox is looking at people's codepens where they're using webkit only prefixes or a draft API.
I do use Gmail, and don't have any but have long planned to move to Outlook.com.. perhaps knowing about this ShadowDOM issue will spur me on to make the move.
Google only has one product that's truly best-of-breed (Maps) and I don't mind using it, but don't want to be entirely in any one vendor's ecosystem. I would say Youtube is the best of its kind, but it's really held up by its community, not functionality as Maps is. Outlook may not be the absolute best for privacy either (it's also no-charge), but it at least gets me to a place where I'm well diversified.
Google Maps, Youtube, InoReader, Outlook, DuckDuckGo all on Firefox with containers is a good enough of a spread for me.
If one cannot avoid it, I think it's a better idea to create Chrome desktop shortcuts for Gmail/YouTube and use Chrome exclusively for that, if you cannot use a desktop email client for Gmail and VLC/mpv/youtube-dl for some reason.
Moreover, once you give in on this, what's Google going to do next? Use APIs only in Chrome that Mozilla needs to implement only after they're made public in Chrome by literally looking at the source code? There's always going to be a lag if that's the dynamic, so there's always going to be the perception that Firefox is behind.
Moreover if Firefox adopts it, it makes it more likely to be adopted by Apple too, since Google's now not the only kid on the block to support it and now you turned it into a de-facto standard.
Mozilla already partially caved to Google in pursuit of the "best browser" as perceived by the average user. That was on DRM. Now I say partially because at least they made it opt-in, but so they caved and next Google came up with this thing.
If you going to keep paying ransom, you're going to have a lot of hostages.
+1. I'm hopeful of Servo. So far it (ServoShell) also a good 50MB smaller than Electron which would be a very good reason for developers to switch. It'll all depend on API compatibility at the time of release I guess.
In Firefox, macOS was showing 4+GB of memory usage and formulas would take hours to run. I switched to Safari where memory usage was closer to 1-2GB, but it had this habit of refreshing the page as soon as you switched away (before a formula would finish running). I finally switched to Chrome and memory usage was about 1-2GB and heavy formulas behaved in a way more predictable manner.
Using both for years, Chrome has just been faster and more reliable. I don't do web dev professionally, but I use multiple browsers in tandem and often try to use one full time every once in awhile. On my old laptop, I'm pretty sure Chrome was the only one to support webGL for whatever reason. At work we're stuck with Firefox 38.3.0 ESR (Cent6/7) and Prometheus Alert Manager (and I also believe Prometheus graphing interface) has broken widgets, but Chrome works. Chrome has always seemed to better support the very few websites that require crazy performance. This was even the case when we would have an ancient version of Chrome and a new version of Firefox. It sucked when Firefox switched plugin architecture and Google Hangouts never added support. Now Google Meet does not support Safari.
I'm not saying any of these comparisons are "fair" but its what I deal with day-to-day.
Kind of, only because Google uses the ShadowDOM API to break its product on competing browsers and playing into it will only reinforce this behavior.
Today I'm browsing the Adidas website, and the images don't load for any of the products in Firefox.
https://www.adidas.com/us/ultraboost-all-terrain-ltd-shoes/B...
Apparently they're WEBP images and my version of Firefox (version 64) doesn't support them, but searching online I read that the upcoming Firefox version 65 is suppose to fix that issue.
Strangely enough, the images were working fine a few weeks ago on the Adidas website, but I had a different Firefox issue. When I clicked the images to see the fullscreen view and zoomed in, they wouldn't pan or drag correctly, so 80% of the image was hidden off the screen. In Chrome, they worked as expected.
That's one example, but as I said, I get these kind of issues almost daily from companies that should know better. I still primarily use Firefox because I have no trust in Google, but I'm forced to open Chrome on a regular basis to resolve random quirks.
I loaded the page with Firefox 65 beta and all the images worked for me. The site doesn't seem to be serving WebP images to Firefox. When I checked all the image types via Page Info they were mostly JPEGs with some PNGs and one SVG image.
There's probably some other reason why the site is broken for you. Have you perhaps changed your browser's user agent string and so the site is giving you WebP images because it thinks they will work?
So, I'm left scratching my head and using Chrome to browse the site.
As someone who always has too many tabs open, I consider this a plus.
I do however think you can disable this in about:config : browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand
For what it's worth, Chrome stopped doing this for me in a recent update (I think version 71).