2 can be explained by a feeling of betrayal. Mozilla's target user isn't me anymore, and quite frankly isn't most of the HN readership either. At least Chrome is the devil I know. Chrome's privacy "issues" are well known and documented, and are fairly trivially worked around. I'm not too worried about them claiming to be for privacy and then one day silently installing an addon that invades it. And that's not even getting into the addon mess. Or the other addon mess, where their nannying resulted in the worldwide breakage of all addons for all Firefox users.
3 can be explained for similar reasons as 2. I know where I stand with Chrome, and I already got more-or-less forcibly kicked out of the Firefox camp. There's a level of certainty here that doesn't exist with FF or whatever the new upstart browser is - I don't have this nagging fear that Google is going to do something with Chrome to make it more annoying or less useful. That is a very real fear I have with Firefox, and it's one that's been borne out repeatedly ever since addongate. If there's a choice between an option which gives the user more control and and option which gives the user less or takes some away, Mozilla usually picks the latter.
2 can be explained by a feeling of betrayal. Mozilla's target user isn't me anymore, and quite frankly isn't most of the HN readership either. At least Chrome is the devil I know. Chrome's privacy "issues" are well known and documented, and are fairly trivially worked around. I'm not too worried about them claiming to be for privacy and then one day silently installing an addon that invades it. And that's not even getting into the addon mess. Or the other addon mess, where their nannying resulted in the worldwide breakage of all addons for all Firefox users.
3 can be explained for similar reasons as 2. I know where I stand with Chrome, and I already got more-or-less forcibly kicked out of the Firefox camp. There's a level of certainty here that doesn't exist with FF or whatever the new upstart browser is - I don't have this nagging fear that Google is going to do something with Chrome to make it more annoying or less useful. That is a very real fear I have with Firefox, and it's one that's been borne out repeatedly ever since addongate. If there's a choice between an option which gives the user more control and and option which gives the user less or takes some away, Mozilla usually picks the latter.