Comment by linuxhansl

It is mostly better advertising compared to what Mozilla was pulling of, the initial edge in performance (at least that’s what people said), integration with google for the android users (Firefox was late to this) as well as some issues if garbage websites didn’t test on Firefox.

Regarding features, things I’d miss include PWA, some APIs like WebUSB that let me flash microcontrollers in the browser and I think WebGPU is still only in Firefox nightly.

Most of those things are very specific to what I do. Most people don’t need PWAs. Most people have no need for WebUSB and most applications run on WebGL so that’s mostly an issue for developers.

It’s not like Firefox is bad but I think Google just managed to capture the market and now the userbase doesn’t have a good reason to switch to Firefox (most people don’t think about privacy if it’s not in their face. Very few people will have no passcode on their phone. But even less people will think twice before uploading the images of stranger’s kids to Google Drive because they happened to be in the background when you made a photo of your own kids even though google has no reason to respect your privacy).

To the average person, all the browsers are exactly the same. I use Chrome, Edge, and Firefox at work at its all the same to me as well.

Maybe force of habit from years ago when Mozilla was the dominant non-default browser and chrome rolled in and ate their lunch by feeling so much faster.

Netflix was tipping point for me, at the time Chrome was only browser on Linux that let me watch Netflix.

There are a lot of pages that work better in Chrome than Firefox. I say that as someone who always defaults to Firefox.