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Comment by hosteur | Hacker News Reader

Why do tech savvy people still use a browser from an ad company?

Better development tools than Firefox. In terms of usability and performance.

voluntary subjugation

This isnt really true anymore. Firefox has caught up in devtools, and has superior tools when it comes to animation debugging. Performance also isn't worse than chrome, in fact I've found that FF uses a lot less memory than chrome does.

The only time I open chrome is to use an occasional WebApp that needs the Bluetooth API or something like that.

Better how?

Used to run chrome for it too. Never understood why it should impact which browser you use for everything else ...

I don't think that is true today. At first Firefox had better tools but developers didn't do the smart thing and developed for Chrome.

At the time it was indeed faster, not really an issue today either. Also the writing was on the wall for quite some time.

On my 2017 Ultrabook with only 4gb of ram, Firefox stalls repeatedly & has long stretches of being entirely unresponsive after half a dozen tabs, and gets worse from there.

I have some delay where a navigation might be delayed some, but Chrome doesn't ever lose input and generally manages to keep going.

Even on a desktop with 64GB ram, Firefox gets slow over time & needs to be restarted when I have a significant number of tabs open. Tab auto-suspend extensions generally "fix" the problem, but it's been frustrating that whatever the on-page performance is in Firefox, the app itself feels so prone to bouts of unresponsiveness.

Please be more precise about what you mean by "significant number of tabs", is it 50, 200, 500, more ? Because on a 16 Gb laptop, I don't have any problem with 50 tabs open with Firefox.

If Firefox market share would drop to sub 1%, Google would face some difficult to dissuade monopoly allegations. I believe it's one of the reasons Mozilla gets founded by Google, they get to point to an alternative. Then again without Mozilla we might now live in a WEI world, which I certainly would prefer not to.

WEI world?

Web Environment Integrity aka. WEI. I recommend this article that gives a holistic explanation on the context that proposal sits in: https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-de...

Same as non-tech saavy. They may try to get around it, but convinience still trumps customizability and control for many. That's why there's still a signifigant IOS/Mac OS even among techies.

Chrome isn’t installed by default, what convenience are you talking about?

And iOS/Mac analogy isn’t holding here, because Firefox is a drop in replacement for Chrome. Not in a sense select either customization or convenience, but select both.

Maybe it changed recently, but using Google on non-chrome will pester you about being chrome. So it's not exactly hidden either.

>what convenience are you talking about?

Largest extension support, built in integrations for stuff like casting, translation, image search, etc. It also just seems to have less quirks than Firefox. Not anything game breaking, but fiddling with video calls or tab groups or a half dozen more small features is a lot more intuitive on chrome than Firefox. Even if some of it is just outright incompetence (or malice), like abusing user agents.

It's no single thing, but they all add up.

>And iOS/Mac analogy isn’t holding here, because Firefox is a drop in replacement for Chrome.

In the superficial sense, sure. If you just need to go to 10 websites and need maybe 3 key extentions you'll be fine. Power users will see many subtle differences overtime. You can technically use both, but typically you will spend most time on a selected browser of choice.

How is Chrome more convenient than Firefox?

It works well. I've got at least four browsers installed on the macbook and use the one that works best and don't really give any consideration to stuff like whether the company does ads.

I've got chrome and firefox with ublock installed. If chrome gets ad plastered I'll probably go firefox more. I presently get forced back to chrome if there's a foreign language comment on X/itter. I haven't figured how to translate those on ff.

Obviously because there is no immediate punishment from it. Eventually your NSA clone will replicate your behaviour exactly, but before that you don't get punished and make the mistake of continuing the behaviour.

Some web apps are optimized for Chrome or even require Chrome. Though most of the apps I use don't have ads. I use Firefox for general browsing, and occasionally Chrome for development or for using trusted apps.

Because the other browsers are all still Chrome or mandated by The One Apple Way(tm).

Except for that one browser which isn't, we don't use that because they go out of their way to tell tech savvy people to screw off.

I'm absolutly disappointed in Mozilla leadership.

But I just don't understand how it could even compare to Google ...

This. It was basically us killing internet explorer by giving first firefox and later chrome to friends and family. We made sure 'our' sites were compatible.

A zillion insects can swallow an elephant.

Because our PMs use it, and that's the browser that they see our work in, so it's just less effort on our part if we're building in that browser too.

Quite logical to use chrome for testing and probably without an ad blocker. But why are you using the same for browsing ?

Are you suggesting Firefox? If so, that sounds strange given Mozilla acquired ads business in the beginning of this year.

You can't both-sides this.

Any ad business Mozilla can "acquire" is a percentage of a fraction of the global juggernaut that is Google.

On one side you have Mozilla with it's experiments that can be disabled on the other Google. Yeah sure it's the same ...

Call me when Firefox stops supporting manifest v2 and thus crippling ad blockers. Until then I use Firefox and will be very content doing so, recommending it to everyone who asks as well.

YouTube on Firefox is completely bricked, so it forces Chrome usage.

maybe there is problem with your setup? because i do use youtube on firefox without a problem (+ublock and +vpn) and i don't see advertisement. though, of course my main gate to youtube is FreeTube.

Probably some form of A/B testing. I used to say the same thing, but specific channels and specific live-streams will now die every 30 seconds using FF+uBlock. I found they appear to do testing on channels they do not like such as those that complain about YT's policy and other channels for reasons I shall not speak of here.

I also use ublock + vpn. Do a quick Google search for "reddit + firefox + youtube not working", you'll see that strings are getting posted much more frequently over the past six months.

youtube on firefox works just fine for me. can you describe this means it’s bricked?

Videos play for 10 seconds then stop loading, forced reduced quality, and just generally buggy in several different ways. Many Reddit strings with tons of other people having similar issues.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1dgodfn/youtube_on... - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1cjbsmj/youtube_on... - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bsc0i4/youtube_no...

I use youtube over 30 times a day in firefox the passed year without issue.

I'm a constant firefox youtube user, hours a day at least, for years, I've had no problems at all. Is this actual FUD?

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