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Comment by elagost | Hacker News Reader

At that point, IE was so technically far behind that you could easily point to reasons why Firefox was better: Add-ons, usable tabbed browsing, incredible speed increases, more customization, and websites actually working.

Nowadays, we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser that's not as technically advanced in some ways, with no clear merits and a lot of changes to workflow. The choice today is between freedom and convenience. The reason people flocked to Firefox in the first place was that it was both freedom and convenience.

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The are definitely merits: fingerprinting protection, containers, less memory usage, soon a state-of-the-art parallel rendering engine (Webrender), soon-to-be better adblockers, etc. More novel things will trickle down from Servo in the future.

It's unclear to me Chromium is still significantly faster in any meaningful way. They certainly feel roughly the same.

If I asked my dad what the technical merits of Chrome or Firefox were or why he used what he used, he wouldn't have an answer for me. He'd say "I use Chrome because you told me a few years ago to use it and it still works."

The reason we switched from IE was because IE just straight up did not work. Sites were broken. Now it doesn't really matter but for these invisible things that normal people don't see or care about. Most people are like my dad.

Well, simply correct your mistake and tell him to switch. Or even better, configure it for him. I've done so for all of my "like your dad" people.

Perhaps sites aren't as broken in Chrome now as they were with IE, but you can bet the web itself will change in ways you and I would consider broken if Google is left to become the sole, unchecked steward and helmsman of the web.

I never migrated from Firefox to Chrome, but Firefox has been in a constant state of "soon we will be faster/better than Chrome" for almost 10 years.

This was definitely the case in the first few years after Chrome was first released and, to some degree, even after, up to the Firefox Quantum release. I don't think this is true anymore even in an objective, measured sense, though I haven't checked recently. However, Chrome is definitely not (to me) perceptibly faster anymore, though.

In what way do you still feel Chrome is better/faster?

Going from IE 6 to Phoenix was a profound increase in speed. It was one of those moments where it felt like web browsing could suddenly be fun again.

I was actively using chrome, chromium, and Firefox for a long time. This was probably more because of what I do for work than a personal preference. More recently it’s been 98% Firefox since Chrome has just added too many weird things.

> we're asking people to choose, for all appearances, a slower browser

Is this still true with modern Firefox?

Personally I don't see a noticeable performance difference between Firefox and Chrome.

Netflix on (pre-Chromium) Edge, really is insufferably slow. General browsing in Firefox though seems perfectly fine; it's not purely an ideological charity-case.

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