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Comment by slowwriter | Hacker News Reader

I feel like anyone who has the slightest interest in the web, or even tech in general, should use Firefox. I don't even think whether Chrome or Firefox is the superior browser is relevant in this context.

Firefox has become the only real cross-platform and non-Google-controlled alternative to Chrome/Chromium. It needs as much marketshare as possible in order to stay relevant and prevent Google from completely dominating the web.

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After seeing how google treat's users of other browsers as second class (YouTube, search, to name a few), I decided to switch to Firefox before Google gain's complete control over the open web

Google might be #1 but they're there because people chose them and people can just as easily choose something else. The only company that actually has control of the web is Apple because the 1.5 billion iOS/iPadOS users have no choice in browser engines and so Apple can basically prevent any standard from progressing by refusing to ship it in Safari iOS. On Mac if they don't ship people can choose Firefox or Chrome or whatever else. No other company has that kind of power over the web, certainly not Google since at any time people can switch away from Chrome.

> No other company has that kind of power over the web, certainly not Google since at any time people can switch away from Chrome.

it seems the android situation is not much different. Yes, you can install something else, but people won't.

It's Windows+IE all over again.

I disagree. While I agree with you that it is highly problematic that iOS/iPadOS users have no alternatives to WebKit in terms of what rendering engine their browser uses, I disagree with the sentiment that Apple has a level of control over the web that is remotely comparable to Google’s.

Why? For one, Chrome has much higher marketshare than Safari on mobile. While Apple has a huge marketshare in terms of revenue, Android devices are much more popular than iOS/iPadOS devices in terms of sheer numbers, and these devices predominantly run Chrome.

As such, Chrome dominates both the mobile and desktop browser market, and the only way for the consumer to work against that is, simply put, to run Firefox/Gecko on his computer and his (Android) phone, or if you’re basically anti-Google like me, WebKit on your iPhone.

No, people don't choose them because they like Chrome, people choose them because Google makes sure that their services don't work well in other browsers!

Just to point out one of the many such complaints https://youtu.be/ELCq63652ig

It's the only browser that gives me complete control over my session logins in containers, and it respects the cardinality of the URL - never meddles with it, conceals part of it, autocompletes it... I use Chrome only when forced to by lack of Firefox support.

> conceals part of it

Since a couple of versions ago, the history dropdown in the URL bar (but not the URL bar itself) has been hiding the "https://", at least for me. Which is incredibly annoying when you're used to "not having a https:// prefix" implying "use http:// as the prefix", since it makes it look like every site in the history dropdown is insecure. And it's inconsistent with the URL bar itself: type "example.org" on the URL bar, and not only will it go to http://example.org, but also it will hide the http://.

* about:config * search: browser.urlbar.trimURLs * Double click to toggle to false.. and non-https protocol is now displayed

Source: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/881261

Agreed. As a bonus, it really is a very good browser! It's not a charity-case at all.

People aren't going to do that, though. There's not enough people that understand the issue and are willing to work through the problems to use Firefox.

This is a classic case of chasing after the ideal solution and ending up nowhere instead of making a compromise and actually improving things. It would be far better for everyone if Mozilla used the Chromium engine and built features on top of that like Microsoft is doing. Instead they are putting massive amounts of effort into a rendering/js engine that will always be "broken" because it's not exactly the same as Chrome.

You had me until

> It would be far better for everyone if Mozilla used the Chromium engine

No. Please no. That puts web standards in even more danger then they are now.

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