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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Also everyone: Chrome is too dominant we need an alternative.

Ask them if they have tried this fantastic alternative called Firefox and you'll get silence.

Even if every single person that is aware of how problematic Chrome's dominance is would switch to Firefox right now, that wouldn't move the needle in any measurable way.

When it comes to quasi-monopolies like this, the "problem" are the passive consumers that will just use whatever comes pre-installed and pre-configure (and when it comes to browsers isn't associated to Microsoft). Coincidentally, that behavior is also what keeps Firefox/Mozilla alive by being able to charge for the default search engine configuration.

Or you'll hear that they've tried, and it's not fantastic

Not necessarily. I firmly think we need a non-Chrome based alternative, and through actual use, think that current Firefox ain’t it.

I only use Firefox and it's great. I actually use Librewolf and it very rarely has issues with sites. What do you think is wrong with it?

If you only use Firefox how do you know that it's great? My general impression is that Firefox is lagging far behind in many areas. It hasn't gotten worse, probably gotten better, but the other players have gotten MUCH better.

Oh I use Edge at work actually and Chrome when occassional things break (mostly Google services). I find them very much the same. What differences stand out to you?

I use Firefox for personal browsing on mobile and desktop.

Chrome for work.

I do not sense, in any way, any difference between the two in day-to-day and even during development.

However, FF on Android has extensions and my mobile browsing experience is more or less ad-free with not much extra effort from me.

I've had Chrome, Safari, and Firefox open pretty much all day every day for the past decade+ and find them to be overwhelmingly alike. What is Firefox missing?

This is a great question. A lot of it I can't quite put my finger on. It just felt off. Which makes it impossible for them to improve since it's not concrete.

I know for a fact one of the things I hated was that I was hoping to get vertical tabs working, but the vertical tab extension I tried at the time felt clunky and only duplicated the tabs in both horizontal and vertical. To disable the horizontal I'd have to edit a custom css file. This all felt very amateur hour. And I think I even went through the effort of doing so and it broke something else in the process (possibly my fault).

Admittedly I don't have a good solution for this even now in my daily driver (Ungoogled Chromium), so it's not a firm "They need to fix this." I think I was just turned off that a solution boiled down to "create a custom config file".

At least on Mac, the font rendering is different. Hard to exactly quanify, but I'd say Firefox seems less crisp and also less bold/lighter weight.

It's not night and day, but with your comment visible side by side in both they're clearly different _somehow_.

Perhaps something particular to your machine...out of curiosity I overlaid screenshots of HN on both on Mac and Linux and the text was nearly pixel identical, though Firefox seemingly has a taller default paragraph line height than Chrome. There were a handful tiny differences in individual character rendering and spacing, but so minor as to be basically impossible to identify without quickly flipping back and forth between the overlaid layers while zoomed in.

I don’t entirely trust screenshots for this sort of thing, S don’t funding is going on at the sub-pixel level.

I use a heavily modified version of this for vertical tabs, which works very well. https://github.com/refact0r/sidefox

I'm not sure if Chrome is as customizable, but I don't believe so.

Same, I use Firefox 90% of the time and I have no idea what all the complaining is about. My only real issue is that fullscreening videos on macOS sucks (ie, it takes forever).

I certainly don't personally care about declining market share, that's not my problem. Mozilla makes a good product. Chrome has become the default browser thanks to Google's muscle (and also making a good product), and I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that.

> I dunno what grand strategy is supposed to compete with that.

Agree 100%.

In its current state I find Firefox simply _better_ than Chrome - mostly due to how well integrated Multi-Account Containers are. Like you I am puzzled by exactly what is Firefox missing that it is a deal breaker for people. Is it just the occasional hiccup when using a Google/MS service? Some people mention 4K videos not playing properly - that sounds like an acceptable reason. But surely that still isn't a good reason for not being able to have Firefox as one's daily driver.

I have the same suspicion as you, Chrome's marketshare is simply because Google services are so popular and they direct you to Chrome, and that the most popular mobile OS (Android) runs Chrome by default.

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