Comment by meheleventyone
3 years ago
My theory is not just giving people a browser but giving them the best possible experience. Chrome has an enormous market share given every OS and device comes with a free web browser. Further the developer experience using Chrome is also superb!
I am a live long firefox user that also uses chrome. The difference between the two in term of performance is so small and differenciated between various areas, it doesn't even matter.
Usability is a very subjective topic, but for me there are things in firefox or it's addons that I cannot have in chrome.
And in the end I need to trust my browser for daily (non-developer) use. Trusting google is naive. I don't say Mozilla is deserving of unquestioned trust either, but out of the two it is the better choice.
Firefox runs at about half the performance of Chrome for our use case and other people doing similar stuff report similar results. I wish it wasn’t so clear cut.
All the developers tayloring their applications to chrome has its inpact for sure. But in daily use you will also find cases where Chrome is slow and clunky and Firefox fast and smooth.
In the end my (very subjuctive) judgement is that the performance difference in daily use doesn't outweigh the benefits of not using the browser of the monopolist that makes their money with data collection.
That doesn't mean I don't use the browser or it's engine in other ways tho.
Is this an ad ?
Hah, no, Chromes market share is an obvious fact but the developer experience bit is just my opinion and admittedly my use is probably different to the average webdev.
I also think this recent change sucks so it’s not all roses.