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Comment by ggjkvcxddd | Hacker News Reader

>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

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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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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