Please switch to Firefox, it's better:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?redirect_source=f...
If your favorite feature works slightly worse in Firefox, consider that its interests align with yours, unlike Google's.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/?redirect_source=f...
If your favorite feature works slightly worse in Firefox, consider that its interests align with yours, unlike Google's.
However, I do not see that "many well-running" means "roughly equal market share". Browsers are software and thus easy to replicate. And due to the huge market (> 1B users), even 1% market penetration is meaningful -- that is provides enough users to stay alive and develop.
Linux, text editors, many email clients, etc. were originally hackers toys, not grandma's tools and as such had a small (but vocal and dedicated) user base that cared about functionality and not market penetration. But once certain functionality threshold has been reached a lot of people were willing to wrap the core in a grandma-style interface. It could work for new browsers, too -- the main threat is not low user base, but being eaten by a large corp once it is capable enough to be a potential threat. My 2c.
https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2004/12/mozilla-foundation-pl...
My 2 reasons to keep coming back to Chrome for Mac are the battery life and DevTools. Firefox is very power hungry in macOS, there are a few bugs reported about that (see [1] and related tickets). The best in terms of energy consumption is Safari, but the dev tools are terrible.
So each time that I switch my default browser to Firefox or Safari, I end switching back to Chrome a week after for one of those two reasons :(
- Console. Both Safari and Firefox put the input at the bottom so it's like a command line. Chrome puts it at the top, so it feels more like a code editor. It's a small difference, but that combined with auto-complete and the preview of results makes Chrome console better for me.
- Editing of CSS properties. Chrome and Firefox are similar in this area, but Safari is terrible (it improved in Safari 12, but it has some interaction annoyances when you edit rules). Since I work doing UX, I do dev mostly for prototyping. Tweaking CSS in the dev tools is something that I do often.
- Display of computed CSS properties, Chrome displays the "trail" of a property in the computed view. (Note: I just discovered that Safari added that as an experimental feature in the latest versions).
- Source Maps: My experience with source maps was much better in Chrome DevTools. For example, Chrome shows the files mapped by a bundle in the source tree, while Safari shows the bundle and only displays the source map when you hit a breakpoint (if there is a setting for that I couldn't find it).
- Accessibility tree is also a great feature of Chrome DevTools.
- For small (simple) projects, the ability to link a file system workspace is also great (although useless for projects that use a lot of JS tooling).
I'm on OSX. My primary browser is Safari, but I typically had Chrome running, too.
Something pushed me over the edge last year, and I switched to Firefox for exactly this reason. There was a time when FF was lagging badly, but that all seems to be over now.
Some nostalgia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Mozilla_...
Maybe it's the kind of websites I visit? I don't know...
I'm talking my entire system gets taken out for minutes by one pages' shitty javascript. Even then, I'm not even sure if it's the pages fault or a plugin, or firefox itself.
Surely I'm not the exception to an application that everyone else seems to have no issue with?
Try doing a full reset, delete all your configs and extensions. Then run plain Firefox with no extensions for a while, and see if that behaves well. If not, something serious is up and you should try reporting it to the Firefox bugzilla if you can repeat it.
If that works fine, something was up in your config, or extensions. Once I found someone had gone into the internal Firefox config settings and changes something years ago, forgotten it, and it was now causing serious performance problems.
Chrome is slightly better at utilizing every computing resource available, but that also means that it is more resource-intensive.
Now, every once in a while, I do experience Firefox being unresponsive. Restarting the browser always fixes that, even with the same browsing session. I haven't experienced Firefox locking up the entire system, except with really low resource computers (like Netbooks, or < 4GB of Ram).
Speaking of add-ons, I do miss FireBug. It was easy to find/define XPATHs by it (which is critical for web scraping). The new inspect element in FF just lacks that feature.
Just how GNU/Linux and macOS are traditionally more appealing to professionals and developers, FF should come to grips with targeting their own niche market. It's interesting how so many great ideas from these "niche" markets (e.g. Unix and Linux in the case of OSs) have surfaced in the more dominant, closed, commercial ones (i.e. Windows). If Mozilla want to really make the web a better place, they should know that by keeping their users happy (who are mostly developers), the ideas they put forth will sooner or later get spread in other browsers as well.
As another analogy, you might think about LISP and how the main ideas were later implemented in even the most imperative languages: although Lisp as we knew it is not dominant anymore, the ideas that made it different are still alive in Ruby, JS, etc.
On mobile I made the switch to avoid AMP pages.
The list of reasons keeps growing...