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Comment by u801e | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious as to why people just stop using a browser? I currently use Firefox on both my laptop and my android device and unless a website just doesn't work on Firefox, I still use it.

Given this, what would cause someone to just stop using it and switch to Chrome?

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In that particular case I blame fake web apps such as MS Teams, Netflix and a few others.

I still use firefox and librewolf as my primary browsers but sometimes I use Edge or chrome for some particular use cases, mostly driven by professionnal duties. In my particular case I don't mind because I never mix pro and personnal usage on the same browser but for someone who don't do that kind of separation I could easily see them give up and use chrome and only chrome.

That is what most typical users usually do. If they encounter a single mishap with one app that is not the most popular one, they switch to it and never go back, even though that most popular one suck at other things. When everyone is stuck with an issue, most people just accept it. What they hate is feeling left behind if only themselves are facing that particular issue. And it is unrelated to the actual annoyance created by those respective issues.

- Aggressive marketing of platform defaults, such as Edge on Windows

- Aggressive misuse of incompatibilities, such as video calling for Chrome and Edge (e.g. Teams)

- Loss of websites optimizing for standards and instead optimizing for the monopolist (Chrome). Same as with IE.

Also: people buy a new computer, check out the browser shipping with it and find it acceptable.

I would guess many users whose niece/nephew/grandma installed Firefox for them on their old computer won’t even know they switched products.

you gotta admit the ads are catchy... "there's no place like Chrome"

I haven't seen this (though I'm not in an anglophone country) - it's def catchy, where have you seen/heard it?

on the side of a bus stop of all places in Philadelphia.

Ah cool thanks, you also read my mind and answered the question I meant to ask - whether it was a physical ad or just a digital one :D That's mad, you'd think Chrome is so ubiquitous, and Google ads themselves so popular, that they wouldn't need to shell out money on this kind of IRL ads.

Stupid as it sounds, I stopped using it when they switched to tabs that don't look like tabs. Might sound like a ridiculous reason but it was very much the straw that broke the camel's back.

Every new update made Firefox more chrome-like, what little money they make seems to be going everywhere except making the browser engine better, it keeps bleeding market share and getting more and more issues with website compatibility.

Why would I use Firefox when it is worse than Chrome in every way? To avoid Google? Google funds Mozilla, Firefox would be dead without Google money.

Designers need to get off their high horses and thinking they can do better than the perfect visual metaphor tabs have been taking advantage of for YEARS. The tab is connected to the browser chrome = it's the active tab. It's so simple and intuitive. But Apple and Mozilla both have made attempts to reinvent this and every time it's in obviously worse ways. Thankfully Apple, in a rare display of acknowledging their mistake, backtracked on their horrible tab redesign shortly after shipping it. Well, it's still there in the Safari settings but the default is the old design that actually makes sense.

A good article about why the redesigned Safari tabs are bad:

https://daringfireball.net/2021/10/the_tragedy_of_safari_15_...

100%. Feeling the need to change stuff for the sake of it used to be the preserve of the large rich companies who need to find ways to spend their money. Did anyone honestly think that the old tabs were broken compared to various other "won't fix" bugs or useful new features?

I guess the problem with the browser is that it is a market to everyone in the world. You either try and optimise for one market and accept losing the rest or you try and make it the best of all worlds. I think FF never quite knew where it belonged.

Yes, rule #1 in UI design should be: don't change the UI!

Of course for new users you can try new stuff but don't bother existing, happy users with your experimentation.

> Why would I use Firefox when it is worse than Chrome in every way? To avoid Google? Google funds Mozilla, Firefox would be dead without Google money.

Yep. I switched to chrome on mobile when Firefox gave me issues while developing for it. Just buggy and unintuitive behavior like cancelling drag events or not handling PWAs well.

I still use it on desktop though. I've never had issues with it there and the style changes don't bug me.

I also use it on mobile for YouTube, but it pisses me off that it won't play in the background anymore when it used to.

> Why would I use Firefox when it is worse than Chrome in every way? To avoid Google? Google funds Mozilla, Firefox would be dead without Google money.

Yes, to avoid Google. There is a huge difference between using Chrome and signing away all of your information to Google, and using Firefox which is insulated from Google even if it is funded by them.

Plus if you change your default search engine in Firefox, Google isn't exactly getting their money's worth.

To be honest, despite any issues with FF tab design, the Chrome ones are just horrible. When they contract to the 5 pixel size it's crazy.

I'm not sure about 'power' users, but I can see a few routes for non-techie people to switch browsers:

• Response to an OS-based prompt to 'try' or 'default to' their 'recommended' browser (Looking at you, Windows), intended, accidental or purely from a position of ignorance

• Response to a search-based prompt to use their 'suggested' browser (looking at you, Google), intended, accidental or purely from a position of ignorance

• Similar as above from Google, where some really basic feature of their suite is hampered (intentionally or otherwise) from '100% intended' compatibility (even if that just means entirely inconsequential aesthetic features)

• Family/friend/neghbour acting in an IT support role just swapping it out because that's what they use (as happened to my father's computer, I was irritated to see last time I was in that role...)

Basically, I don't think many in our domain have a strong reason to change FROM Firefox, although I'd like to believe they should have good reasons to change FROM Chrome... .

As someone who has repeatedly switched browsers in 20 years... for some reason, sometimes Firefox has performance issues on some platform, or maybe just how it's packaged. I've heard people describe Firefox on Windows as slow (I never had that, but on one Windows 7 installation I had Chrome be annoying and reinstalling/nuking profile didnt work), but I did have problems on Debian, 2 companies ago, so that's why I switched that machine to Chromium. Sometimes resetting the profile works, sometimes not. Sometimes you find yourself using Chrome features so often that you switch your main browser and don't look back for a few years. (FWIW, I use both on my work laptop, exclusively Firefox on home Windows machine + laptop, and again both on my older travel laptop). Also interestingly I semi often read about people ranting about Thunderbird being slow on Windows, something I've never experienced except when moving hundreds of mails manually - but I did have performance problems on Linux in the past..

It's more than likely that these are people who simply formatted their PCs, bought a new one, upgraded to Win11 (which btw made it a nightmare to set a new browser as default for non-tech people)... And they just install Chrome because Chrome has been heavily pushed for years and years, especially now on Android, and it's what non-techie people know and are used to on their phones.

Firefox has only gotten better in recent years, but it also has no advertising, while Chrome just dominates by being a Google product heavily pushed everywhere (I still remember when software bundled Chrome in).

It's still baffling to me how bad the Google add-ons page is comparatively to the Firefox ones. Firefox organizes all their add-ons so neatly.

1. Chrome is now tightly integrated with the Google ecosystem, and it works quite well. For instance, signing in to Chrome signs you into all google properties.

2. Firefox isn't doing that well on mobile devices (sadly), and people want passwords, bookmarks, Google logins etc to be shared between mobile and desktop browsers. Even for ex-Firefox desktop users (especially non-technical users), Chrome's it-just-works sync is quite compelling.

If you're on Android, please try Firefox mobile. You'll get extensions as well (such as adblock).

It only takes one bad experience to cross the hurdle of installing another browser. I had to download chrome because Teams didn’t want to work in FF and I’ve found myself using it more since.

Well I want all extensions to work on my Android phone so I use Kiwi Browser. Same for pull down to refresh. Same with having fast browser. Firefox offers none of these.

As for desktop I went from Firefox to Edge, then got tired being scared of every update MS making UI more and more hostile with each update and switched to customizable Vivaldi. Firefox was always slower and more memory hungry than Chromium and years of optimizations didn't change that.

Btw. what happened with Latest version chart in bottom of page?

I switched back because of some issue with profile management I don't remember anymore and because I wanted to use WebAuthn with Touch ID. The bug is 4 years old and doesn't appear to be moving. Once it's done I expect it'll take a few more to get support for passkeys.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1536482

Firefox Sync doesn't work consistently. Sent tabs regularly vanish.

Edge sync works. That was my last straw, since I'm sending tabs to another device all the time.

To add another data point, it has been working like charm most of the time for me across five devices (Linux flavours + Android) (granted, sometimes I have experienced glitches, but no deal breakers).

I stopped using the iOS version for 2 reasons. It had started to be very slow, hitting the address bar to enter a url would result in a multi-second freeze. Also it doesn't support the screen-time limits on iOS, so I was using it to browse HN when I shouldn't have been. I would like to return to it though, maybe if Apple open up their browser engine policy it would improve.

My partner used it, until it stopped working for all live streaming, on all most frequent watched sites: starts watching some live stream, and some minutes later the stream is "stuck".

Switched to Edge, it works. Tried for some weeks, every time still stuck.

Now not trying anymore, starts Edge and watches.

Using much more powerful computer, much faster internet connection and a 64-bit OS (but older) the same content still "works" on Firefox too.

But I also observed that in some occasions when some videos are to be changed (one played, then another to appear) even in that different setup Firefox becomes completely non responsive.

The issues started abruptly to appear, so I'm quite sure it's some update with some (I hope) unintended consequences.

If the other users had similar experiences lately, then it was not their decision to abandon Firefox, it's Firefox directly "disqualifying itself".

The title at the moment is "editorialized" so for the case it becomes more neutral I'm preserving it for the context here:

"Firefox lost ~16M users since last year"

>Given this, what would cause someone to just stop using it and switch to Chrome?

They

break muscle memory every few releases: order of entries in the right-click context menu, change design of frequently used functionality, remove keyboard shourtcuts or replace their action on already pre-existing installations

promised unforking Tor

promised adding chromecast casting on mobile

promote "unplatforming" people globally for views they don't agree with

I'd rather not use a browser from an organization that explicitly promotes censorship.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...

What is a better alternative? Safari is one platform. Google and Microsoft both have a very dubious track record with China.

Brave is just better overall and far more snappy.

Significantly less trustworthy though. Why not just use Chrome at that point?

brave doesnt force me to install pocket

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