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Comment by Heikete | Hacker News Reader

The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind. Here in Poland most of the tech people use Firefox as that was the alternative when IE was a bad guy and Firefox continues to be a good browser. What was the advantage of Chrome which made people exchange one monopoly for another? PNG had also hard times in IE at first, as far as I remember. So instead of fighting for good chrome, shouldn't we just fight for more diversity in browserland?

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> The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind

Reasons why I, a former Firefox promoter switched to Chrome:

1. Speed. Chrome was blazing fast compared to other browser

2. Stability: Chrome could have a tab crash without bringing down your entire browser.

3. Really good developer tools that were superior to Firebug. As a matter of fact, Chrome Dev tools were my gateway drug as I'd use Chrome for work and Firefox for personal browsing, and the gradually shifted entirely to Chrome.

Situation has changed dramatically wrt points 1 and 2 since years, however. As for 3, I'm no web developer so can't comment on this.

The dev tools are really good in Firefox and its browser forks.

One or two devtool features are better in firefox, but when I gave it a good try a year or so back I had the devtools get stuck / crash / fail to find an element that's onscreen moderately often - enough that I'm not keen to use it for work by default.

Chrome is still significantly faster for me on multiple computers. Even now, Firefox can't smoothly scroll though this very page [1] without obvious jitter; no browser should have trouble with that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33442281

For a while Firefox was slower, and Chrome was quicker. That really was important plus Android/Chrome was a combination as well with the proliferation of the cheap smartphone. A sizeable portions of devs came unto the market with that background, and chrome dev tools had a bit of an edge with a few functionalities.

Firefox never had a monopoly, unless you still count Netscape Navigator in that. IE was big until 2006-08, started dropping off quickly after that, Firefox won a big share in that time, but at some point Chrome just chipped away marketshare for reasons stated above.

I think bundling was a big deal by Google, something Microsoft got punished for, but Google never.

How is this relevant to this article given that Firefox has never shipped JPEG XL support in a public build? Not even behind an experimental flag like Chrome did.

They did. image.jxl.enabled in about:flags

Warning: this only works in nightly builds of firefox. In stable and beta they have the flag but they're not compiling the code, so it just doesn't work.

It's relevant because there is no doubt that Firefox would not have axed a promising open format despite users asking for it.

It is possible that FF won't continue the work of implementing it if they see no future without the oligarch in the field, but we'll see

Mozilla did not want to ship WebP at all, despite users asking for it, and only added it after too many Chrome-only sites forced them to.

All browser vendors are pretty reluctant to add new codecs, because there's always going to be yet another promising codec to add, but they're left maintaining all of them forever, even after they're not cool and new any more.

I don't think there was ever a good case for WebP, but JPEG XL sounds promising. The problem of course, is the monopoly browser developer made WebP, and the monopoly browser developer sees JPEG XL as a competitor to their in-house format.

That's a bizarre and unfounded accusation. Author of WebP worked on JPEG XL, and Google has shipped AVIF which includes tech from Mozilla, Nokia, and many others.

I consider that WebP lossy was fixed to usable quality level around 2015, five years after the launch. For the first five years it had a tendency to make 4x4 pixel lego-block representations of smooth gradients and lose highly saturated colors.

8-bits per channel and YUV420 only were caused by hurrying it.

With JPEG XL we have the opposing mistake. We had a great format already in 2017, and spent 5 years more for improving it further.

For me, the competition there is pretty simple. The browser shouldn't crash.

Until now I used firefox on my home ubuntu box (intel nuc). Yesterday it started crashing, and crashed about 15 times. I downloaded chromium and it didn't yet crash.

Now, I'll probably move to it for home computer browsing, too. Even when I don't agree with their decision on not enabling JPEG XL by default. If there is a browser that has it on by default, then I naturally switch to that instead :-) -- but I'm not aware of such. Perhaps Brave?

>intel nuc

Gemini Lake chip?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/106.0.5/releasenotes/

Firefox was slow as hell and resource hungry

Also, the ui doesn’t feel naive at all

No UIs feel native these days, everybody invents their own UI kits.

Somewhat true. Just tried it, yet again. It looks like it improved. I might use it as my social media browser, so it's easier to focus / disable social media and HN on my main browser.

Right click on text, there's no dictionary lookup menu item

The border around input fields look weird

> The thing that I don't understand is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind

I didn't switch to Chrome. I switched to orher browsers. For me the turning point was when Firefox started deprecating its old GUI and copying more and more the Chrome GUI: no menu, hidden preferencies, messing with the window's titlebar and implementing its own (very small) scrollbars, messing with DNS, etc.

Advertising and branding. Google is a search monopoly, and has (or used to have) the reputation of "we are making high-quality software". We have a web search monopoly, because our search engine is the best, so why not trust us for making the best browser too?

Firefox has no search engine monopoly to advertise and build its brand upon.

> is why the world has switched over to Chrome leaving Firefox behind

Not all of us have left Firefox behind of course, but we are certainly not what we used to be.

> shouldn't we just fight for more diversity in browserland?

We should; and especially in browser-engine-land. WebKit/Blink are becoming a monopoly..

Maybe it's because Chrome does not have a huge memory leak that brings down your system after a few days of uptime.

I use Firefox because Chrome's updater kept trying to sneak past my firewall and one day it succeeded. As soon as it did, I switched. **No.**

I don't like Firefox because of all its issues (including the memory leak), but at least it supports trackpad gestures and overscroll and all that good stuff that Chrome doesn't. And it doesn't keep trying to backdoor my computer using a stupid hard-to-disable updater. One single JSON file and it obeys for good.

I started using Firefox as my daily browser when the Firefox Photon redesign launched and reluctantly switched to Brave when they removed it. RIP to the best looking default browser skin of all time.

I switched to Vivaldi (based on Chrome) from Firefox a few months back and am reasonably happy with it. I get far more control over my browsing experience than with Firefox, which keeps removing features that I actually liked and used.

I used Firefox for a long time, starting way back when it was brand-new and IE was the leading browser. I continued using it because they were innovating heavily in the browser space. After they stopped innovating, I kept using it because although Chrome was impressive and fast, they kept nagging you about logging into Google. Now, based on the fact that Mozilla basically seems to just do whatever Chrome does these days, combined with the unnecessary and infuriating UX redesigns, Firefox has no obvious advantages and quite a few drawbacks.

I don't love the fact that Vivaldi is closed-source and based on Chromium but at least I feel like I'm in the driver's seat while I'm using it.

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