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Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely agree. I'm mystified that so many people abandoned the consistently excellent Firefox for the debatably equal but run by Google Chrome.

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When Chrome came out the fact that it was built by Google was a positive, not a negative.

This definitely applied to me. I picked up Chrome partly because I trusted Google, and I moved away from it mostly because I no longer do.

I remember stating that I wished Google would make a bank (because the web experience with my current bank was so bad). That sentiment feels so distant now that I am almost not sure if it was real or not.

When I switched Firefox liked to make my Macbook run hot and to trigger frequent system-wide beachballs when it wasn't foregrounded, with just a few tabs loaded. And just having it open killed my battery. This was, like, 2011 I think. Chrome didn't do these things, even with way more tabs. I'd used FF almost exclusively since it was called Phoenix, before that, though I hadn't loved and evangelized it since some time in the 2.x series.

Of course I moved to Safari after that when I realized I could gain like another 1.5-2hrs of battery life over even Chrome, and Firefox has largely replaced Chrome as the thing I use if I need something non-Safari, now.

The native browser advantage that Safari and Edge hold is real. Firefox was built in the era of desktops being dominant. I think their next priority needs to be power usage.

I'm a Phoenix adopter as well, but never left for the almost 2 decades that have passed. I do it the opposite way, Firefox is my main, but the native browser is my goto if I need something non-Firefox.

I'd like to do it your way, but there's many Firefox-only usability features that losing simply ruins the web for me.

Things Chrome had around the time when it debuted that made it stand out: A unified search and website address bar Separate processes for tabs so that if one crashed, it didn't take the whole browser down with it Flash built in

Don't underestimate the power of the exclusive Ad spot on the world's most visited web page.

Iirc Google didn't quite have today's reputation in 2008 or whenever it first came out. My peers genuinely believed that their don't be evil slogan was genuine

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