Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

Why are people on HN still using Chrome? (or Edge, or Opera…)

I don't, 99.9% of the time.

But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.

It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.

Edge user here. For one, chromium is faster than firefox, any given page will load about 20% faster, another reason is edge workspaces feature, I've grown to like it, which seems to be some sort of chromium feature that everyone bakes in weird ways if at all, and I'm still running ublock origin on edge without any funky bypasses.

Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something. And lastly chromium the most popular browser flavor and as a web dev it helps to see pages through "the same eyes" as my users/customers.

That's about it, the only reason I use firefox every day is their superior picture-in-picture player, chromium one is waaay inferior.

> Edge user here. For one, chromium is faster than firefox, any given page will load about 20% faster,

I'm skeptical; You're probably measuring Chromium + ads against FF + ads.

The only fair test is testing agains FF + uBlockOrigin. And there, FF wins hands down.

I'm hardcore FF, and it used to be a bit slower than Chrome, but nowadays the difference is barely noticeable. And on very large pages (e.g. big tables), Chrome is a lot slower than FF.

Give Vivaldi a try. I used edge on windows and android ever since it started used chromium, and switched to Vivaldi on Linux and android 8 months ago. Generally quite happy with it - not really missing any features from edge.

To access Edge Workspaces, you’ll need a desktop running Windows 10, Windows 11, or Mac OS, Microsoft Edge version 144 or later, and to be signed into Microsoft Edge with a Microsoft (MSA) account or Microsoft Entra ID / Azure Active Directory (AAD) account.[1]

> Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something.

This is rare in my experience. And most were fixed with an extension to change the user agent string. Or were for amusement and used a new Chrome feature. Or used a feature Mozilla rejected for security and there were alternatives.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/features/workspaces?for...

Yeah, I am still salty that Firefox removed the old Tab Groups feature. The new one they reintroduced in 2025 is pale in comparison.

Some pages do not work in Firefox, so I keep a copy of Chrome around.

It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.

Name and shame?

Netflix.

This is not true. I'm a Firefox user and it works perfectly fine in Firefox.

Windows or Linux?

You brought it up, you specify where it doesn't work.

Netflix doesn't serve maximum res for Linux and Firefox due to DRM related reasons. Chrome on Linux usually resolves or at least amends the issue.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/netflix-1080p...

Yes, but: "This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing."

Most of the extensions for Firefox say that. For some reason even 7TV has that badge.

for good reason. it's a serious security risk.

All arbitrary Javascript is a "serious security risk" if you're reductive enough.

Check the code with AI?

Mac

Apple. The school manager and business manager block Firefox users.

Me too. Many government or banking sites only work properly on Chrome. Anything with Docusign is Chrome-only.

I use Docusign on Firefox, no problem.

There are 2 reasons why I'm using chromium (with ublock origin lite) over Firefox:

1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.

2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.

Ctrl + shift + R would solve your second problem at all times.

And I don't think your first point is quantified correctly and I am sure there is no data to back it up. But I understand the appeal of trying to quantify your personal experience.

Yup, or open dev tools and enable "disable cache". This applies only while dev tools is open

I can back up their first point a tiny bit with regards to canvas. The primary product of our company is heavily canvas-based so I’ve always noticed that canvas on Firefox on macs is slower than on Chrome but it used to be in the 2-3x range and nowadays is more in the 1.5x range. They’ve made great improvements and I’ve never noted anything close to 5-10x slowdowns.

On Windows Firefox and Chrome canvas has performed equally well at least for the past ten years. Got no data for linux tho.

> It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?".

This is a non-issue, if the devtools is opened, checkbox for "disable cache" is is checked by default.

> When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.

How can you be developing front-ends and not have the devtools open while doing your quick edit-test cycle?

Is that a rhetorical question suggesting those people are wrong, or are you asking for, e.g., the technical reasons some software only works with Chrome in the mix?

I'm betting there are a lot of people here using Chrome as their "daily driver".

To people who like Chrome, or some of its features (I love their bookmarks), I say: try Helium. Or Iridium. Or even Brave.

Which one isnt going to get unmaintained first.

Brave, then, I imagine.

That's pretty irrelevant isn't it? Shouldn't all users demand privacy, especially from ads?

All users should demand privacy, but they don’t.

Take a look at Firefox’s market share, or Brave’s etc.

Won’t Brave follow Google’s lead on this?

Gecko, WebKit and—hopefully—Ladybird are the true alternatives. I used to think this was too extreme. But the ad vendor dragging ad blockers out of the engine flipped my view.

Brave, like Vivaldi, I think, have developed their own ad blocker.

No idea if they will fight to keep UBlock Origin accessible or not.

I think and certainly hope that Helium will fight the good fight.

> Won’t Brave follow Google’s lead on this?

They said they could offer limited MV2 support even after it’s fully removed from the upstream Chromium codebase.[1]

[1] https://brave.com/blog/brave-shields-manifest-v3/

Brave has its own ad blocker engine built-in rather than as an extension, and it can reuse uBlock's lists

https://github.com/brave/adblock-rust

I use brave on my phone and I can't really tell the difference from desktop browser+UO, so I guess it works well enough.

I use Firefox for everything on Windows, macOS, and Android.

I do have to keep Chrome around on desktop due to VirusTotal + reCaptcha setup to be purposely onerous for non-Chrome users. I'll get caught in loops trying to scan files after only scanning a few where I'll get like 5 absurdly vague captchas in a row. You must solve all of them in a row or it starts over from the beginning. It does this even if I'm logged into Google, logged into VirusTotal, and have uBlock Origin disabled on VirusTotal.com. It appears to be by design. So, to ensure I get to scan all my PortableApps.com releases, I have to use Chrome.

Locked down computers that still let you install extension.

I switched over to Edge from Firefox because it was simply much better at managing its memory on my laptop. With Firefox I had to be far more cautious about having too many things running at once. WSL2 would often be killed to free up memory.

Recently I found they added the ability to auto-sort and group tabs via Copilot, probably the only thing I've found the non-GitHub copilot to be genuinely useful for.

For me the two reasons I can't live without are

1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents

2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them

If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat

Firefox has added highlighting of search terms in the page's scroll bar quite a few versions ago, if you want to give it another spin for that.

Weird, it still only highlights a single occurrence for me if I ctrl-f something, is there a setting for this or something?

You need to click "highlight all" to highlight all occurrences. It's the checkbox to the right of the search box. If you enable it for the first time, you may need to hit enter in the search bar again for it to show up (it remembers the setting and works instantly the next search)

Apparently I'm just a moron and have never seen it has settings in 10+ years. Thanks!

> 2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them

I normally have 5-50 tabs open (so perhaps on the lower end), but I can't recall the last time I crashed a tab in the last 3 years. I also use persistent/pinned tabs and never noticed issues.

Its not the tabs themselves crashing, its when firefox (or my pc as a whole - I'm a developer and its a frequent occurance) crashes, firefox isn't as good as chrome at remembering what tabs were previously open

Do these Firefox extensions help?

I haven't used this, as I didn't know it was a feature I needed until you mentioned it.

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/find-in-page-...

Tab Session Manager allows you to dump tabs to groups for restoration later, with auto-save at regular intervals. Works quite well!

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

Thanks for this, I'll go have a look

There's also Simple tab groups which allows creation of file backups at regular intervals https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs (since Firefox 3);

but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;

For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.

How many extensions do you use on laggy FF?

Not using many extensions on my case, but Google meet remains unusable for a long time, sound is horrible during meetings. Chrome on the other hand works fine

So use Chrome for Google services and Firefox for everything else?

Or... Don't use Google services.

Same here, but when a site completely fails in Firefox I either A) use my phone because mobile Firefox occasionally works or B) use Ungoogled Chromium.

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Really hoping the uBlock will continue to work on that project...

Are you really sure it’s not because of an add-on? If I remember correctly, Mozilla has said that about 95% of all pages that don’t work aren’t due to Firefox, but to an add-on. I use Firefox exclusively and don’t usually notice that pages don’t work. When that happens, as I said, it’s almost always an add-on that’s to blame. And I dont notice its buggy or laggy. So could be good check your addons next time.

Here are some cases where Firefox really sucks: some of them are specific CSS styles, some are downgraded features, and some of them I just don't know why. As I mentioned here, the ChatGPT web and Gemini web used to be very laggy for no reason—or maybe it was just a bug for me?

I don't think any of this is caused by add-ons, though.

But it's getting better, and most of those problems are just gone;

Still, I keep Chrome around just in case.

only site that was slow on firefox was google meet, but then it turned out someone documented how google had code to explicitly do that. ouch.

[delayed]

It's fast. All websites work. I like how it handles tabs and tab groups. uBO Lite is good enough for me.

Since it underpins so much of the modern browser ecosystem it becomes a primary target for webapps to work.

As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.

Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.

Self-fulfilling cycle.

This isn't the 90's anymore where browsers behave wildly differently for the same page content. If you're not using absolute, bleeding age web APIs, Firefox and Chrome work identically. In my experience, there are exactly 3 types of websites that work differently between Firefox and Chrome: The Toy Hobby Experiments (who are just demoing some bleeding-edge API feature), The Monopoly-Bootlicking Liars (who reject my request based on UserAgent string alone, and when I spoof a Chrome UA the site works perfectly), and the Evil Monopolist Themselves (a few of Google's own sites run notably slower on Firefox, most notably Google Cloud Console).

Weird how vmware console and my bank don’t support firefox.

Oh, and Microsoft Teams for a super long time (haven’t checked in a little while).

Theres dozens of examples tbh.

Teams has worked on Firefox (on Windows at least, haven't tried on Linux) since at least the beginning of the pandemic.

Can't speak to the other two. What does the console start screaming about when you try?

Because it works and I don't have any compelling issues that would cause me to switch. I switched to Brave a while back (cause built in ad blocking) and have been quite content with it.

On mobile, Opera is the only usable browser. It supports text reflow on zoom, and also I can choose the download folder for each file. Allows me to keep porn and non-porn downloads separate.

Don't know, but I have uninstalled it a few minutes ago.

Work forces me to on the work laptop. But Ublock Origin Lite is good enough for that use-case. I use firefox everywhere else.

Find me a browser that doesn't have ai shoved into it... and no I don't mean 10 year old versions of iceweasel.

Firefox has a single switch to turn off all AI functionality. Does Chrome have it?

I'd rather the code not be there at all, if they leave a toggle for it, they're likely to turn it on without my permission. Mozilla has little trust in my book after mr robot and their other nonsense.

So you trust Google who is killing any protection from tracking but do not trust Mozilla that supports a strong protection?

I never said that I was a Chrome user, I said that I equally don't trust Mozilla.

> equally

Here comes the problem. I don't see how this is justified.

Actually, I opted in for tracking. Knowing my interests, Google suggests good articles on their Android app feed.

Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.

On lower end cpus (N100) chromium/brave benchmarks 10-20% faster than Firefox.

Even if you factor in all the ad bloat that uBlock lite can’t block?

Brave has built-in blocking, it's literally one of their main selling points.

I keep chromium installed mostly to run virtual tabletop software (specifically Foundry VTT), because webgl performance in firefox is not great (though it has improved somewhat in the last couple of years). There are also a few sites (mostly restaurants for some reason) that just refuse to work properly in firefox, so I sometimes fall back to chromium. I wish I could drop it like a bad habit, because frankly Google's shenanigans piss me off on a semi-regular basis.

only reason I can think of is synchronization among devices since you can't find same decent browser you could use on Android phone and desktop, Firefox ain't decent browser on neither of those, on desktop Vivaldi with customization and stability is superior, on Android Firefox actually ain't THAT bad since good browsers with extensions support are not that common, I would recommend Cromite, though there is also Helium and Ultimatum

Because they don't bother to learn the history, worse, they are also worshipping Electron crap, which is basically Chrome.

uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly, so I have no complaints?

It doesn't protect from important tracking cases and will eventually allow ads, as the advertisers adjust: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...

Ex-bosses used it so had to test shit on them.

Ok but if you use it only for testing, and not for your ‘real’ browsing, then probably the fact that they track what you are doing is not that important, even if it’s still a nuisance. Or not?

Because Chrome is the better browser, lelz.

I'll bite: why is it better? Did you try Safari or Firefox or Brave, and find deficiencies you can't live with?

The UI is just better overall. Ever since Chrome came out with the "unified search bar" imho Firefox was behind in usability. Firefox just follows. Like recently didn't they add tab groups after Chrome implemented them?

Isn't Brave based on Chrome?

Personally I think it is really stupid to choose a browser based on privacy. I choose a browser based on usability. Whats the selling point of Brave? That it hides ads?

Safari's OK if you're on Mac. I'm on Windows 11. Chrome looks tight, the tabs look great, my bookmarks bar looks great and I can fit a ton of bookmark folders on there. Firefox looks worse in almost every way.

> Personally I think it is really stupid to choose a browser based on privacy. I choose a browser based on usability.

As in: you don't care about your privacy?

I switched from Firefox to Chrome a couple of years back because Firefox always dragged its feet when it came to implementing important developer features. Like, DataView was excruciatingly slow in Firefox; WebGPU support didnt go anywhere; and they initially refused to implement import maps. I consider the latter to be an essential tool as it allows me to work without the need for build systems. Also, chrome dev tools worked far better.

Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com