The most bizarre part of this is coworkers ridiculing someone for using a completely modern browser that's just as up-to-date as Chrome, and possibly with better privacy. Completely bizarre to me. I'm glad I don't work there.
I think it would be bizarre to work in an environment where people did not joke about each other's "questionable" technology choices. The vim guy catches flak in the emacs shop. The debian guy (me) catches flak from his OSX friends asking if I recompiled my kernel for the 10th time in order to get my "flaky" free video driver to work. When I do habitat for humanity work I hear guys teasing someone for still using a miter box or for using the kickback guard on a table saw. I think a certain amount of teasing is healthy and natural among friendly coworkers.
Sidenote: I've been a FF user since it was firebird and I don't expect that to change.
I agree Chrome has never made lots of tabs easy. Since I'm usually signing into multiple accounts, I have several windows open anyway, so don't feel the pain as much as I used to.
I find this point and the XHR annoyance not enough to sway me though. Devtools keeps getting insanely more powerful to the point where front-ends will probably be using it as a proper IDE in a couple of years.
If you don't use the "norm" you are an outsider :) and frankly Chrome is the "norm" atm.
Can you elaborate?
It could also just be overall common sense: a nonprofit vs a company built on data. Who would you expect to care more about keeping your data yours?
The fully open-source build of Chrome (called Chromium) avoids that problem but is more difficult to install on some platforms.
To be frank I'm not sure how Google uses this information, but it does make me laugh when the whole Ubuntu Dash searches Amazon thing blew up. It's the same thing, really, yet nobody talks about Chrome at all.
"""Whenever you pause while typing in the address bar,
the text you've typed is sent to Google so predictions
can be retrieved. Google logs a random two percent of
these requests in order to help improve the service.
This information is anonymized within 24 hours.
"""allowing these plugins is a decision that also has drawbacks. the browser will need to support synchronous callbacks (i.e. to possibly block http requests). these can block the browser, something chromium plugins cannot do (at least so easily).