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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

I keep a copy of Chromium around to test stuff I develop or for the occasional website that doesn't work in Firefox. Ungoogled chromium importance will increase with the continued decline of Firefox's absolute and relative market shares.

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Had to check because I thought if anything Firefox's market share had been increasing the past couple of years, but you're absolutely right. I wonder why Firefox isn't performing better in the browser market - it's arguably better than it's ever been.

I have two guesses:

1. Extensions - almost anyone have some kind of extension installed, and Chrome absolutely wins in that category. that prevents people from switching over to Firefox. Personally I know people that switched to Firefox only after I showed them the extensions they us or an alternative exists on Firefox.

2. Advertisement - Google have a lot more advertising resources than Mozilla. For example, every new Android phone with Google Play Services ships with Google products already installed including Chrome (sometimes as the only browser). It's not unfounded to think that most people will use the same browser they're using in their smartphone.

Google amplifies these security conferences where Chrome comes out as a more secure browser than the rest, this leads a lot of corporate IT to enforce Chrome as the default browser on work PC. Some people completely switched their home browser to Chrome just because they like to use one browser at home and work!

This is where Google will shoot itself in the foot trying to kill ad blockers and 3rd party extensions like paywall removers. Firefox is more than good enough, and if you take away uBlock and others that have a loyal following users are going to bail.

The fact that I can run extensions on Firefox for Android is a huge enough win that it's my default system browser.

Keeping in mind that different users have different priorities, I still don't understand why Firefox doesn't make market this as their number one distinguishing feature.

Remember that Mozilla gets their revenue from Google, an ad company. They'd undercut their main revenue source.

Another issue is he press. The press is usually very Firefox-positive and always covers it. They might turn on Firefox if it started blocking ads.

> Extensions - almost anyone have some kind of extension installed, and Chrome absolutely wins in that category

I have a bunch of extensions installed on Firefox and don’t use Chrome. What are the Chrome-only extensions I’m missing that means Chrome “absolutely wins”?

Plenty of corporate types target Chrome because of its market share (for the same reason, iOS apps are out for years before Android ones are)

One specific circumstance which impacts me is the Capital One virtual credit card extension (https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers ) which if one clicks on "Get It Now", from a copy of Firefox, one ends up on the webstore: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/eno%C2%AE-from-cap...

Even consulting the page source (view-source:https://www.capitalone.com/applications/eno/virtualnumbers/) shows some mentions of Firefox but certainly no mozilla.org URL or .xpi that would imply they're serious about that claim.

Chrome on Android does not support extensions at all.

People use whatever browser came bundled with their device. In 2020 that's Chrome.

Security is a big one.

No per site process isolation, Firefox on X11/Linux is baaaad, and that's just the beginning.

What does Firefox do w.r.t. X11 that’s less secure than other browsers?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492

X11 is an old display protocol predating modern concepts of application sandboxing. It gives gives windows lots of control, like allowing them to move the mouse, enter keystrokes, etc. Basically, anyone who has an X11 handle has the same level of access as the user. In Firefox, the process that's supposed to be sanboxed (the content process) has precisely such a handle.

In some scenarios, FF on Mac is much slower than Chrome and Safari: animating transforms, masks etc

The state of translation extensions in Firefox is catastrophic. The useful ones got deleted from the store. As far as I can tell the only reason was to flex some policy choices by the extension store(?) team.

So you pretty much have to have Chromium as a backup if you ever need to research non-Anglo content.

I can see people moving to Chromium because of this and other similar problems with extensions being broken (like the tridactyl thing).

You can use userscripts (e.g. with Violentmonkey [1]) for Google Translate, e.g. [2].

Since you mentioned Tridactyl you might be interested to know that I wrote my own command to inject Google Translate on demand [3].

The extensions you mentioned were removed because they execute remote code. Mozilla are trying to tighten these restrictions [4]. I think Chrome is moving in a similar direction. I don't think that will affect the user script work-around as they execute in the page context, but I could be wrong.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/violentmonkey...

[2]: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/9285-translate-google-tool...

[3]: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/c776f722944714ee...

[4]: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2019/12/12/test-the-new-csp-...

I've never heard of violentmonkey, how does it compare to grease/tampermonkey?

Violentmonkey is very actively developed [1]. Greasemonkey isn't [2]. Tampermonkey is closed source so I view it with some suspicion. Otherwise they're all pretty much the same, as far as I know (I don't use them extensively).

[1]: https://github.com/violentmonkey/violentmonkey/graphs/contri...

[2]: https://github.com/greasemonkey/greasemonkey/graphs/contribu...

You should use stock Chrome for user testing to get as close to user environments as possible. Little things like a missing http -> https redirect on a subdomain won't be caught in Ungoogled Chromium or Brave.

If I made my money from web development, I would. But it's not my main occupation and I mainly do smaller things as a hobby. There I think it's okay to do this basic kind of testing.

And you can use test tools like Browserstack (et al) to test on platforms/vroseers you don't have -

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