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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

What would you think the problem with Firefox' UX that keeps so many people from switching is? I think it's not UX, but pure marketing.

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People have all kinds of weird excuses for not using Firefox.

Sometimes it feels like "Sure, Chrome sold my kids data to human traffickers. But I can't switch to Firefox because I really _need_ MIDI-2 over websocket support"

Sure, FF is not perfect but a lot of issues is due to sites being optimised for webkit and that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.

> that will not change as long as Chrome has 80% marketshare. You need to sacrifice a little for freedom.

And herein lies the rub. 20% of people, at best, will sacrifice convenience for freedom.

Firefox and Chrome overtook IE because they were move convenient to use (Firefox had tabs and extensions, Chrome had a more reliable multi-process architecture and more CSS/JS/... features faster).

IE didn't die until YouTube publicly dropped support for it.

Chrome is a lot more robust and secure against exploitation than Firefox is. This is a very unpopular fact, and every time I point it out the rabid Mozilla people get upset, despite it being the truth.

I use Ungoogled Chromium.

There’s no such thing. You use a Chromium that doesn’t report data back to Google, but the entire project is a Google project that pushes Google’s aims on the web.

I solved the security problem by using Firefox in VMs on Qubes OS. Works great.

Could you provide some sources for the true facts you're asserting?

Mmmm is there any source or a deep analysis from you for such a statement?

Once upon a time that may have been a very hard to dispute thing, but I'm not so sure anymore.

For starters, recent Firefox versions do proper process isolation per domain, similar to Chrome, which has long been claimed to be the primary security benefit of Chrome-based browsers.

In addition, the Firefox codebase is partially rewritten in Rust. This effort is incomplete and likely always will be, but it's still significant. Keep in mind that according to Google, 70% of security vulnerabilities in Chrome are related to memory unsafety!

I wouldn't say "a lot". Though the multi-process model Chrome uses and the V8 sandbox do provide a lot of security isolation (more than just running the browser in a VM). Though a lot of these protections are disabled on low-end mobile devices because of the associated overhead. Firefox has been making good progress implementing some of the same isolation mechanisms and is farther along rewriting components in Rust to avoid memory safety issues.

I have used the internet since, well, since back when a 56k modem was a dream. I have had zero security incidents via a browser. On the other hand Google collect data on me 100% of the time I start a Chrome browser. "What if" versus "this actually happens" is the typical argument.

I'm a Firefox user but there have been plenty for me over the years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18117216

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442618

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33014968

These days the big ones for me are profile switching and the things leaked between containers.

For a while FF on Mac was using a huge amount of CPU. For me it's fixed but YMMV.

Safari is lighter on the battery, but after trying it out with some extensions, it also uses more RAM than FF, so I don't know which is better in the end.

There's a risk of them shutting down

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