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Comment by orpheline | Hacker News Reader

I'm apparently one of those rare people who never switched off Firefox - it's been my default browser on Mac and Linux for years. Open source, good plugin ecosystem, and does everything I need (not a web developer, so the dev tools were never a strong selling point for me).

I've used Chrome here and there through the years, but the more invasive Google became about data collection, the less inclined I've been to use their tools. The latest moves to block ad blockers, coupled with nearly every other browser using their engine, had only reinforced my decision to stay with Firefox.

Diversity makes for a healthier ecosystem.

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I'm the same way. I tried Chrome when it was new but at the time it didn't have a NoScript equivalent so I went back to FF.

Chrome has had NoScript equivalents for a while, you should try it again!

I suspect for most people who hadn't switched already, that ship has already sailed.

Chrome had something of an edge over Firefox for a while with a more responsive UI, but since Firefox Quantum it hasn't really had anything besides some creepy Google integrations.

Edit: Chromium is also easier to embed, but that doesn't really matter for the purposes of chosing a browser.

Its strange, for me. I remember getting super pumped about Chromium when it went live in '09. Then, somewhere along the line, I felt like a boiled frog.

Honestly, a big change for me was symbolically realized by The logo change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#/media/File:Chro...

It went from this space-age, nerdy little project to a cleaned up design that signified its shift to a position as a core Google product.

Does Chromium have the same privacy issues as Chrome does?

Some of them, see https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium for a patched version.

For me, Google's hold also manifested as complete absence of support for H.264 on Mac, because calling the Cisco's freely available openh264 is ‘too slow.’ In Linux, distro maintainers patch in the support for openh264.

"at the time"

Also, I see no benefit to "trying out Chrome". I use it often for a few broken webpages (blame the devs but there are really few) or on co-workers' computers and find no benefit whatsoever. Firefox has all of its features and much more. As far as I'm concerned: tree style tabs, containers, privacy and flawless ad-blocking.

I've been using Firefox as my default and only web browser on Windows and Linux since it was called Firebird and Phoenix before that (or was it the other way around?). When Chrome first came out, Google's aggressive attempts at shoving it down my throat on what seemed like every single page of every single Google service, made the contrarian in me really, really not want to try it, and I never did. Never felt like I was missing anything, either.

I didn't switch to Chrome at all either, and I am a web developer too.

I liked the Firebug for web development, and the built-in dev tools that came later was good for me too. Sometimes even better than Chrome's.

In a comparison today, Firefox dev tools still are better with a nice profiler, font tab, CSS layout helper, etc. The only few things I use Chrome's dev tools are for their CSS/JS code coverage tools and accessiblity tester.

Firebug has now been mostly integrated into the main dev tools.

I've been using Firefox for ages, probably 2003 or 2004? When Chrome came out I gave it a try and it was neat, but it didn't have several crucial extensions so I stuck with Firefox.

I never switched from Firefox either. I always felt the UI has been vastly superior (especially bookmarks) on this side of the browser ecosystem.

yup, i've been a user since v0.3, when it was called phoenix. chrome's been handy for dev/testing but not as a primary browser, as google's ambitions/intentions became evident with gmail's debut.

I use all 3, but prefer firefox for most of what I do.

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