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Comment by crushcrashcrush | Hacker News Reader

Honest question - why do people use Chrome? It’s from an arguably as-evil company as Facebook. Alternatives exist. What’s the draw?

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It is fast, responsive, has much better security history and architecture than all others, super convenient if you have multiple computers. I have absolutely no problems with Chrome, I already trusted my information with Google, so I always stay signed in as well, never had any issues.

Caveat: if something’s “free,” you’re the product. Google wants to pull as much metadata from you as possible. I don’t trust anyone who gives me something for free. I therefore limit how I use it.

I made my choices carefully and consciously. As I said, I entrusted Google with my data, my emails, pictures, history. I know that my data is never sold to anyone and always kept secure. Google is probably one of the most careful companies when dealing with private data in the world. I can delete or take a copy of it if I want as well. Needless to say, I disagree with the "you are the product" polemic.

>Google is probably one of the most careful companies when dealing with private data

>private data

Ah, the fabled "metadata is not data" defense. Sadly, given the scale and pervasiveness of Google, observing meta-data and cross-referencing your activity with others' activities is good enough to deduce most of the valuable information about you with reasonably good reliability. And this data, both by itself, and also aggregated with other users', is "good enough" for any privacy-busting use.

tl;dr: you are the meta-product.

Sorry, but what you say doesn't make any sense. What meta data are you talking about?

Firefox is free as well. You're not making your point very well.

I know, but you can donate to them. Chrome, you can’t.

So if Chrome added a donate link, you would be okay with them..?

> Caveat: if something’s “free,” you’re the product.

Always great to see this opinion on free news sites.

What browser do you use then?

Arachne for DOS

Firefox primary on MacOS and windows. Chrome only for work related tasks. Firefox or Safari on iOS, depending what I’m doing. Firefox in Debian.

You can donate to Firefox. Not to chrome.

A lot of people have Google / Gmail accounts, with which it integrates very well. Also, most people don't care about ads/tracking, as evidenced by the massive number of people who still have Facebook accounts. It is a leader in web standards and features (e.g. PWAs).

In my industry, it is a very secure solution (despite the vulnerability disclosed here), so it gets chosen for that reason.

I personally prefer Vivaldi (which uses Chromium), but I do choose Chrome over Firefox. I'm not sure if it's the UI or what, but it has never really stuck for me. The thing that would get me to move away from Chrome is if they broke the API for ad blockers.

I think they already did or its coming in an update, I think. Also, Good luck trying to block auto-play videos in Chrome.

I have made several attempts to switch to Firefox. But for me at least Firefox seems to crash about once a day. I don't think Chrome has ever crashed on me in about a decade of using it, and crashed tabs are extremely rare.

I've been using Firefox exclusively ever since it was Firebird 0.7, every day, on scores of computers using Linux and BSD and Windows from 95 to 10, and I just don't remember it ever really crashing. I'm sure it's happened at some point, but it's rare enough that I can't recall a single instance.

But I've never used it on macOS, so I'm guessing that's what you're doing. I hear the Mac port is worse than the others in terms of stability and performance. If true, that's a pity, but Firefox really is rock solid on other platforms.

I run Firefox on Arch Linux and OpenBSD with zero crashes. Hundreds of tabs open at once.

Consider that it's possibly the fault of who packaged Firefox and not Firefox itself.

I use it because my clients use it, and their customers use it, which means my client's website has to look and work perfectly in it. I also use Firefox on my second monitor, because it's my preferred browser.

It's simple, familiar, and works on all their devices?

Because Google (even just search and mail) is extremely popular, and they ran a relentless advertising campaign, persistently telling everyone to install Chrome, right on the front page among other places.

I used it because it was fast, now I use Brave and it is fast and private.

Brave is based on Chromium and has a recent update.

These faster release cycles haven’t been around since sandboxing was implemented but it feels strange when browsers are allowing known security holes to be around. It doesn’t seem like they are trying to patch many other bugs.

And still vulnerable to this?

How do you know if someone uses Brave?

...

They'll tell you!

Actually, you can tell because of the referrer http headers brave injects for websites that pay brave

What do you mean by websites that pay Brave? Isn't that supposed to be the other way around? -- That's a serious question btw.

The Firefox Quantum update didn't work on my work machine; I had the choice of either using the LTS version or switch to Chrome, and I ended up switching to Chrome.

I’d like to use Firefox, but their lack of AppleScript supports makes that unfeasible. I could get past its atrocious performance, but not past a missing feature I require multiple times a day.

I don’t use Safari because it lacks other features. I can’t disable JavaScript on a per-site basis, and the content blockers are a joke compared to uBlock Origin.

Most other browsers are Chromium based, so might as well use Chrome.

What do you do that requires AppleScript support?

I need the title and URL of the frontmost tab, as well as to send JavaScript to the page.

Amongst other things, these are invaluable in dealing with the barrage of daily issues and PRs on Github.

i've tried firefox, and chrome is simply faster in what i've experienced. I've tried the newer firefox too.

Having my privacy stolen? The moment they do something malicious with the data they have, they are dead. I trust them with my data because I know how the world works. Facebook is so much more dangerous as far as privacy is concerned

It has a better security track record than its competitors, and its faster too.

At work, too many websites for professional use are only working on Chrome, so I need to have it.

Curiously enough, at home I have no problems with firefox, so I guess B2C devs are more conscious than B2B ones !

Chrome DevTools is so good.

I'd like to switch to Firefox but font rendering, especially in PDFs, is so much nicer on Chrome/chromium in my opinion.

Since its inception I am aware of a single (this situation) case of an ITW exploit. So, that's why.

I gave Firefox an honest go, but some web apps just don't work 100% in it. Chrome does not have this issue.

Most of us drive cars filled with fuel from evil oil companies, why do we all drive cars?

That compatibility with different browsers is a big enough issue in 2019 to stop you from using Firefox is just a sad reminder of how far we’ve fallen. Used to be that we actually cared about stuff being usable across browsers, after what we experienced during IE’s dominance.

It’s also a testament to Chrome’s dominance -now-.

>I gave Firefox an honest go, but some web apps just don't work 100% in it. Chrome does not have this issue.

Used to be the same problem with Firefox vs IE6. And that was exactly when people got serious about the need to defeat the monopoly of IE.

Is the stuff not working in Firefox due to lazy devs too young to remember IE6?

It's partly that, but it's also partly that the pace at which new standards of useful things get implemented (pre-ratification and post ratification) entails patchy support plus differing implementation decisions from under-specified standards. My favorite example area right now is all the fun that is CSP. Firefox supports the SecurityPolicyViolation Event, which is useful so that you can let non-power users know about CSP issues without having to open the console, except it's gated by a setting in about:config that is off by default. Additionally for CSP's report-uri endpoint, Firefox won't send up any cookies with a request to that endpoint (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1506992) which sucks if the endpoint relied on authentication that way. Chrome just works, meanwhile, on both of these issues. (Of course personally, if something doesn't work in Firefox, then I just don't use that something, or if I really need to (e.g. test business feature), I use chromium for just that one thing.)

Because for most people there is no reasonable alternative to cars.

Chrome does have reasonable alternatives.

> why do we all drive cars?

...we don't?

>90% of us do, or at least that's what I'd reasonably guess.

Which apps don't work in Firefox? I've never encountered one.

I noticed Google Voice was broken in Firefox yesterday. (Shocking, I know.)

extensions. also it was faster a while back, now it's about the same.

Easily embeddable.

I am switching to Brave when sync between devices rolls out

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