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Comment by masfoobar | Hacker News Reader

I have been a happy Firefox user for 15 years... maybe more.

I have seen people use and complain Internet Explorer in my younger days, from version 6 to 7, etc. Even though I mention Firefox to them, they stay with IE. What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009.

It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it.

I see this a lot in my career as well (software engineer) - when some cool, flashy new toy comes backed by companies like Microsoft, Google, Sun/Oracle. etc.

Anyway.. I only recently found out there was a thing called hardened firefox. There is me thinking "Oh! This might be worth a look" - and it is basically firefox with private settings enabled, etc, in the config section.

(which is what I have been doing for years. lol)

I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy. However, even if you use something else, I would not be surprised in modern Windows listens in on your microphone "for advertising" purposes.

I might not be able to eliminate privacy issues, but if I can reduce the best I can, I will.

Back to browsers - I hear good things about Brave. Not used it, though. Happy with FF.

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> It amazes me how quick people jump to something especially when it has a big company behind advertising it.

Because it works. Advertising works. That's the bane of the conflict of interest between companies and users of Ad blockers. We (technical users) cannot complain that companies should not use and abuse Ads, because at the same time we (humanity as a collective) constantly show once and again that Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

Ads are a theft from word of mouth.

Advertising spend should be regulated.

Adverts are a theft of time and attention, they are manipulative brainwashing by companies with more resources than the majority of countries.

Ads are fine. I've discovered so many fantastic products through them (did my research before buying, of course.)

And they are also the only business model we have been able to think of that enables the free flow of information on the scale we see today. Unless governments step up to foot the bill for Maps, YouTube, Reddit, etc, ads are all we've got.

I've never seen an ad that "stole" my time and attention. They are easy to scroll past and/or ignore. If an ad is stealing someone's time and attention, perhaps they need to work on their concentration and discipline instead of blaming the ad.

Companies don't spend $1000 a year to advertise to you unless they get a decent rate of return.

Oh, ok. So next time I get one of those full page ads that darkens the entire page - I should just concentrate really hard at reading the barely visible content. Maybe it will go away if I scroll really really fast.

This is the fault of the web developer and designers, not advertisers. Let's be clear on who to blame.

Blame can lie on multiple parties.

> We (technical users) cannot complain that companies should not use and abuse Ads, because at the same time we (humanity as a collective) constantly show once and again that Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

Just because something works, doesn't mean you should do it. Using a gun or knife to threaten someone with death if they don't hand over their wallet works. Do you think people should complain/do something about it, or should they just let muggers get away with it "because it works"?

It was just a short phrase, but was meant to refer to conversations here in HN (or anywhere ads are discussed) where it's easy to see claims about how ads are a cancer and companies "should not" use them and find a different business model.

Which I agree, but as long as society doesn't consider it harmful enough to ban it on Law (like the other activities you mentioned are), there's no reason (save the moral one) for a company to change practices. The incentives are just not there.

I definitely agree we should keep complaining. But at the same time, until things have changed radically, it would be foolish to expect that these complaints will achieve anything at all. Votes and such, that works much better!

> Just because something works, doesn't mean you should do it.

That reminds me of that chinese restaurant that sold opium-laced noodles, to keep customers loyal: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-29312562

Humanity wants everything to work but we don't want to pay for it. I pay for my news but I wonder how soon news websites and related sites will start to block Firefox.

> Ads do work excellently for their intended purpose.

But this is the problem, because their intended purpose is not the user experience. A lot of people block the ads because they find them distracting, and actually part of the intended purpose of ads is to distract your attention to them.

There is no "users of Ad blockers" vs "technical users", using an ad blocker is not some sort of purpose of why I use a browser.

>I just don't understand why people would use Chrome.

Really? That seems hard to believe.

I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time. Not sure what the state of things is now.

This is HN, so another huge reason to use Chrome is for the devtools, which I've always had a very good experience with and know pretty well. I've always found other browser devtools miserable to work with in the past, though I admit I haven't invested serious time into learning them.

All that said, the adblocking fiasco may well get me to try out FF again as my daily browser. But personally I had very clear reasons for abandoning it originally, it wasn't just cargo cutting

"I stuck with FF until around 2016 or so before being compelled to switch. The performance was just very clearly worse..."

This is a fair point. Personally, I don't recall seeing a big difference between the two. Maybe there was. Perhaps it was not that bad so it wasn't as issue for me.

As for dev tools, I have been happy with Firefox - but then when I am doing web development I am testing on various browsers, anyway. So I use dev tools for all of them.

Performance-wise, Firefox was significantly worse up until v57 (AKA Quantum release), which was released in 2017. I've made the switch when that version hit Nighly and haven't looked back since.

Nowadays I don't think there's a big performance gap one way or the other.

The problem is that it took so much time for Firefox to improve performances and implement process per tab that by the time they finally did it, even the more hardcore geeks had switched to Chrome.

Devtools on FF are very good. Extremely rarely do I need Chrome, for tools like debugging svg animations. I suspect the overwhelming majority of devtool users don't have to debug svg.

I only switch to chrome when I need to fake response payload, I couldn't figure that out in ff. Otherwise pretty much the same functionality. They also look the same.

Firefox is still slower than Chrome (and uses more memory). For me at least.

There was a lot of talk about Firefox having poor performance, but I have never experienced any of it. For daily use Firefox has always been one of the more responsive applications on my PC.

If you experienced poor performance the common explanation at the time was that you either had a profile folder that had accumulated all sorts of stuff that somehow caused a slowdown, or had some unfortunate extensions installed.

I experienced poor perfonmance until what, maybe 2013? I really don’t understand if people really experience poor performance of if that’s just something people say about firefox.

I've used Firefox consistently since about 2006, and it is true. We use gmail and meet in work - both are snappier and break less in chrome than in Firefox. I probably spend 30% of my browser time on those two sites in work.

The fact that Google's gmail and Google Meet break more in Firefox than in Google's Chrome leads me to wonder what they are doing to make Firefox work as badly as it does.

Oh it's got to be intentional.

Firefox had a big upgrade around that time that massively improved performance (because indeed, it was clearly slower than Chrome.)

Built in translation is a big one that I rarely see mentioned.

I was long time fan of FF while living in Ireland and the UK, but when I moved to Sweden and later Germany I was effectively forced to switch to Chrome.

Being required to interact with websites in other languages regularly meant that FF (circa 2018) was just not an option. The chrome experience for translating webpages was vastly superior to any other browser, which I needed to use 3rd party translating apps to get anywhere. These were clunky, low performance black boxes that I tried to live with and failed.

I see now that other browsers are starting to properly do built-in translation, but Chrome was way ahead for a long time. So for non-English speakers I imagine Chrome was a must use tool for a long time.

I am in a similar situation I actually switched to Brave a few months ago and while the translate function is there, it is VERY slow for some reason and seems to work less often than Chrome.

I wonder if I am just imagining things or if they use a different service for translation or, if the same, if it is being throttled.

Same for another cross-EU migrant here.

Moving countries and languages means the translate function becomes a priceless necessity on a daily basis, and Chrome's and Edge's built-in translation features are second to none, so I switched away from FF when I moved country. Firefox third party translation addons exist but they always felt clunky and flaky being often slower and sometimes failing where Chrome and Edge would breeze through.

Better privacy is nice but convenience and saving time and frustration is nicer. Beret me all you want but it's not a hill I'm willing to die on.

> The performance was just very clearly worse than Chrome's at the time.

A lesson of how sometimes "ship it now and improve later" could make huge damage to the reputation of a product.

Lately I've been advocating change to Firefox more than ever. Do you want to guess what's been the reply I've heard back more? "But Firefox is clunky and much slower than Chrome!"

They had a bad experience due to slowness compared to Chrome at the time, and that impression still lives on today, putting an end to any slight possibility of migration. At least until a friend explains the situation as it is nowadays. Thankfully they mostly listened and some agreed to try it.

That was, what, 7 years ago? That's about 5 CPU generations ago. Any performance differences were solved a long time ago, although chrome seems to use a lot more memory last time I looked (I use both on a regular basis). It's worth revisiting tooling once in a while instead of getting stuck in time.

If chrome does it for you for dev tools, then use it for that. No need to use it for general browsing.

is it possible the devtools experience is one of those things that is largely dependent on where you initially learned it? firefox is my daily driver, and I can't stand chrome devtools anytime I'm forced to use them

I worked with both for years and one of the reason who made me switch from Chrome to Firefox between 2016-2018 was the devtools. I found the Firefox's ones were way better and Mozilla implemented new features way faster than Google for some reasons.

Performance? Yeah there was once a time that Chrome was a bit snappier than Firefox, but nothing significant. I think it's mostly the placebo effect of people just thinking they are using a faster/slower browser.

Development of devtools was indeed quite good early on in Chrome. But Firefox already had the Firebug extension, which was basically the first kind of browser devtools as far as I can remember. And then Firefox also eventually implemented the devtools natively, and Firebug eventually disappeared. And that did take some time while Chrome had the devtools already native. But still Firefox with their open plugin system allowed for Firebug to evolve, and Chrome's devtools (and also Firefox's) was for sure inspired by Firebug.

So why do people use Chrome really? Placebo, hype, lack of historical context, and ignorance of privacy, I would say.

> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released.

When Chrome originally released firefox was better than IE but chrome was head and shoulders above both of them.

Moving to Chrome from firefox at the time was a breath of fresh air. Nowadays there's very little difference, there was a short period of time I found Firefox faster but now I doubt most users would be able to tell the difference in performance

Same here plus you get used to whatever you use in terms of how the commands and extensions and the like work. I've got Chrome, FF, Safari and others and tend to go with Chrome as it's what I'm used to. Also with FF I'm not sure how to translate the text from foreign languages. I tried some extensions but nothing so far works quite like Chrome where you just right click anywhere and click translate.

> What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released. This was around 2009.

The power of endless money for advertising. Some users think it doesn't have that much impact, but being nudged on every other web page to make the switch is much more powerful than that nephew who talks to you about it once.

My guess is that i wasn't marketing. It was because FF was dog-slow back then and Chrome was (still is) blazingly fast

Most non-technical users don't give a crap about how fast or slow their browser was: if they did, they would've switched from IE to Firefox the first go 'round. To downplay the fact that google advertised Chrome on google.com is to rewrite history, in my opinion.

It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time, especially with lots of tabs open. It was only with the Quantum (?) engine that FF became a lot faster. Webpages loading that bit snappier really was a big deal back then, probably for a lot of developers especially. Google was still riding on the “Do No Evil” vibes till about 2012-2014 I would wager.

> Webpages loading that bit snappier really was a big deal back then

No, it wasn't.

Quick reminder, the issue with IE was webpages loading broken, or not loading at all.

People that used that crap didn't switch because "Chrome was a bit snappier than FF", they switched because all of a sudden every webpage, many sotfware install wizard, and even billboards on the street told them to switch to Chrome. Some "toolbars" installed it without asking. They probably never had heard of FF or Opera before.

Now I get where you are coming from, that is a good take. I think amongst developers/techies it was an issue though, I remember the convos around that.

Yeah look, we cared. I know I did, it’s why I switched at the time. Your average person didn’t though, but they still switched!

> It’s not rewriting history. Firefox really was a slow browser in that time,

It will be interesting to see what happens next year in that case, because FF+UBO will be much faster than Chrome with a nobbled ad blocker. If your right and speed is what everyone cares about there should be a mass migration back to Firefox.

But I doubt it, because we have already have a similar experiment. FF+UBO on Android is blazing fast compared to Chrome on Android. Chrome not supporting extensions on Android means the situation is nothing like desktop where Chrome and Firefox are roughly comparable (and always have been). On an ad laden site FF+UBO is going to load a page several times faster. More to the point to me, ads on desktop are often "out of the way" of the main content, but on mobile that consume roughly 1/3 of an already small screen. Like the ancestor poster, I'm stunned that nobody uses Firefox mobile (I'm defining 0.49% market share as nobody). Performance wise the difference is enormous - yet clearly no one cares.

Which also means, you and I and other nerds notwithstanding, it likely no one cared about Firefox's performance versus Chrome when they switched on the desktop. Marketing, bundling, breaking of Firefox on Google's home sites look to fit the facts much better.

Yeah I've been helping people fixing up old tablets, one user got me to fix an iPad 3rd generation (the first with retina) and besides having an ancient iOS version it was just so frustratingly slow doing anything. Obviously, it was only a dual-core or something and totally bogged down by the high resolution for its day.

However she thought it was totally fine as she was used to it :S

Agreed, Opera was my far the fastest browser back in the day, and I was the only person I knew who used it lol

Maybe - but we all forget how google was the one that "pushed" javascript heavily, even if indirectly. At least that's how I remember it so many years later.

So, convenient that they pushed something that half the web and browsers didn't pay much attention to, but they did because they wanted interactive apps and things inside a browser. And hey, this was at the time fancy UIs and frameworks were popping up. Were they prescient or just riding the wave? Or were they perhaps doing that plus also pushing the wave in the direction that best suited what they were good at and also made them lots of money in advertising.

So when we say marketing, we have to include all that advertising now just for a browser, but also for everything that google was pushing in synergy with it.

Chrome was being pushed hard via installers of other software, that's how it got onto computers of regular users.

This!

Adobe used to bundle Chrome by default with Acrobat Reader for instance. - this was how a LOT of people got Chrome the first time.

Your guess would be wrong. Chrome mostly replaced old IE installs at first. And firefox was also miles ahead of old IE. The reason FF took many years to gain market share when Chrome took the same market share in months is advertising budget.

All the people coming up with revisionist bs about firefox being bad just don't realize that 1) there wasn't only Firefox, Opera was also present (chrome was basically a ripoff of Opera's ux) and that 2) the incumbent back then was IE. The gap between IE and firefox/opera was way larger than whatever people claim the difference was between firefox/opera and Chrome.

There is even more powerful marketing tool - preinstalling software. If you can pay to PC or phone makers to have your software preinstalled, then it is difficult to compete with you. It is the most reliable method of marketing.

Not even preinstalled. In the early days of Chrome, Google paid to have Chrome automatically installed--and not merely automatically installed, but automatically set as your default browser without your consent--alongside the updaters for popular software like Flash and the Java runtime. This is how Chrome infected my machine for the first time. Endlessly scummy, and I resolved then and there to never use Chrome.

> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome

Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome. I use Firefox as my main browser, but there are times when I'm forced to open Chrome to do something (e.g. buy visitor parking permits from my local council) even with uBlock Origin disabled. As a non-technical user, if that happens to you even once, what motivation would there be for you to go back? As far as those users are concerned "Chrome works, but Firefox doesn't".

Another way to phrase it: "Because chrome is the new IE, it's prevalence broke the web standards so you have no choice"

It's an argument, but not a good one. Don't be evil they said...

this has gotten much better due to the existence of Safari, if a website supports Safari AND Chrome it most likely works fine in Firefox as well

It is very uncommon these days for actively maintained websites to not support Safari/iOS users

"Because lots of people who build websites only test them in Chrome.."

Well I am not one of those people. Back in the late '00s I was testing in IE6, 7 and maybe 8 as well as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

I remember, back then, my boss telling me to "only worry about IE" when writing a demo web application. One day I came in and my boss slaps a peice of paper down at my desk, wondering why a customer saw this on their screen. At first I was like "WTF" as it was a bunch of rectangles scattered around. The penny dropped and tried it in firefox.. same result. It was at this point I started to care about ALL main browers regardless of what anyone told me.

It is not as bad today, but my mind set is no different.

Should not be testing on just one browser.

I'm using Safari for day-to-day browsing (because I like its UI and iPhone sync) and I use Chrome for development. Firefox developer tools are not as convenient to me and Firefox does not support WebUSB which I need for some tasks. Also I always found Firefox filled with little irritating bugs when I tried to switch to it.

That said, I'm not convinced by this flashmob against Chrome. I like Google direction and Google philosophy behind Chrome, including its position on adblockers. So I hardly have any reason to switch to Firefox. Chromium is open source, Firefox is financed by Google, so it's hard for me to be convinced that Chrome somehow is bad. Especially when Firefox makes one bad move after another bad move (integrating weird third-party services within Browser, like Pocket or VPN or whatever).

And, yeah, I don't care about my privacy that much, especially not on the level to actively fight for it. I care about security, and that's about it.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion.

Most people don't need features like WebUSB support.

But I do believe people want uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome.

I have used Firefox forever, I never switched to Chrome as it knew it never was fully open-source. The point of open source is that you're able to build the thing from sources with the exact functionality as in binary file they release.

The web is extremly important for everyone, and it is important that we still build an open web for everyone. When people use projects like Chrome, they let Google decide the direction of the web, just like Microsoft did with IE.

That Firefox was sometimes slower than Chrome and sometimes lacked features has never been a big productivy hit for me. Neither has web pages that didn't work in Firefox. In the worst cases I just need to start Chromium. I lose max 1 minute. That is nothing to sacrifice for keeping the web open.

> uBlock to intercept http requests before rendering the web page. And from my understanding this has always been supported in Firefox, but never in Chrome.

The webRequest API does allow to intercept and cancel HTTP requests, it has been part of Chrome extensions API since 2011.

Yeah,I were wrong, however uBlock do work better on Firefox. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

I've been a melancholic Firefox user since it was called Netscape...

Tried Brave on my phone, but it managed to generate 90mb of network traffic in 10min where another browser takes 5mb. No idea what it did, I instantly lost trust.

Started using Firefox when it was called Phoenix, then it was renamed Firebird, then again to Firefox. It does exactly what I want from a browser, not more not less.

Chrome I only use for debugger.

Also FF long time user. Ime FF is pretty much fine nowadays. It used to have problems, but it got a huge leap in performance around 2017 when they improved multithreading support. Since then it is pretty much fine, aside from the occasional awkward unsupporting webpage.

What I do not understand is not why people do not use FF, it is why people use Chrome instead of Chromium, Brave or some other chromium-based browser that is not google or MS. Surely it is not that much more effort to install one of these than chrome.

A decade or so ago when Chrome was first released there were good reasons to switch to it. It was better than Firefox in almost every way, especially speed.

Today that's no longer the case, but there also isn't a huge reason to switch to Firefox. They're all kind of the same, especially to the average user who doesn't strongly care about privacy.

>What amazes me is how quick they transitioned to Google Chrome when it released

I'm not sure how old you were at the time but do you really remember that history well and did you compare the two browsers yourself at the time? I was a die hard Firefox user from the beginning until Chrome came out. I remember trying Chrome for the first time and being amazed at how much faster it was. Not just a little faster, way faster and how it could handle more tabs without slowing down. It was so far superior performance wise and that is what got me and many others to switch.

> I just don't understand why people would use Chrome. Most people, I guess, just dont care about their privacy.

I can't think of a single way using Chrome and therefore having "less privacy" has affected me negatively.

In fact, having an internet that just works has allowed me to be more productive.

I'd love for someone to articulate how cookies or tracking has actually harmed them in any way.

I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox. It also didn't have the bug of occasionally losing things I told it to grab into the clipboard.

Poor performance is also what drove me back to Firefox. It still has the clipboard bug, however.

"I moved to Chrome on first release not because of blind, trend-following foolishness, but because it performed significantly better than Firefox..."

This is fine. My comment is not aimed at everyone who switched -- though I am likely still referring to the majority of people.

I do remember the ACID test being the main selling point of Chrome over the other browers. Yes, from memory, I do believe Chrome was faster. My attitude to this, however, was that it was new and eventually, would be adding new features, etc.

I understand that there are people out there who switched for other reasons.

Some things (e.g. Slack calls) will not work in Firefox. It’s pretty annoying. Personally I still use Firefox.

But if Slack developers would use Firefox, they could support it? Chicken/egg problem?

If we are talking about a paid service (like slack), not supporting firefox imo means it is a bad product. A service for which one pays for should not force them use a specific browser. This is essentially an argument of not using slack, not firefox.

I'll tell my employer that I refuse to take video calls because my preferred browser doesn't support it?

I'm one of those who used Internet Explorer 5.0 and was there to complain about Internet Explorer in general. I'm not sure why you are amazed with Chrome transition, but let me give insights from experience.

We had Firefox 0.3 which was very, very slow browser but still much better than Internet Explorer. There was a lot of mental gymnastics involved to get pages display at least similar for both browsers.

When Chrome 1 was released, it was absolutely awesome. Minimal interface. Focused on browsing. Incredibly fast, it just executed JS stupidly quick and we could create web app interfaces that didn't lag

You can still download Chrome 1 and see what it's about. It was basically what users wanted: supports more CSS features than other browsers, starts fast, executes JS fast, provides adequate developer console, renders pages correctly.

It took all of us by storm because it was genuinely good software. That era was the era of good software, not spam advertising.

Today, in 2023. this is not true any more and you are entirely correct when asking why people would use Chrome. Answer is: laziness, lack of info, apathy, lack of knowledge.

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