Comment by wildrhythms

6 days ago

Bookmarks, passwords, payment information, recent tabs, extensions... all synced with your Google account in Chrome. Firefox can't sync to your Google account. All that information is synced across the entire Google account system, to your Android phone, other Chrome browser instances and so on. Yes I know you could export your data from Google and pull it into Firefox's sync system, but that's a hurdle.

Why would you want all this stuff synced? The only thing I want out of that is passwords, but 1Password works just fine for that. In fact, I don't trust a browser to store my passwords securely.

  • Would any answer satisfy you? People want bookmarks synced because they use the same bookmarks on different devices. Many trust Google to transmit their passwords securely and store their email securely. Why not store their passwords securely?

It is a hurdle to switch, yes.

But everything you listed (apart from integrating with Google's servers) can be done with Firefox.

  • You can either use Mozilla accounts to do that for free and as easy as it is with Google accounts. Or if you are a power user and would like an adventure, you can selfhost sync and accounts servers yourself. Does chrome provide that ability?

  • Right, I was confused by this comment. I actually don't think it's that hard to switch, tools to import your stuff across browsers have existed for a long time. It might be that Firefox isn't particularly polished on this front but I don't think it's outside the realm of achievable and I don't think the difficulty of switching is by any means a deal breaker.

This would be a relevant list, except no one I know who compulsively uses Chrome...uses any of that stuff at all.

Google Meet is particularly Firefox hostile with camera/audio support, but I'm not sure how common it actually is.