They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.
Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.
For an average person, I think this argument is fine. But we're on HN where we can discuss something with a bit more nuance. There's two major things that I see that FF offers that Chrome doesn't, including chromium alternatives. 1) More privacy. Chrome tracks you substantially more than alternative browsers. In addition to that, is simply the chrome ecosystem, see next point. 2) Chrome's dominance defines the web. A decentralized service doesn't become centralized once one player takes 100% of the users. It happens long before because a big player can throw their weight around and force others to do what they want. Chrome already acts this way. We talk about this extensively several times a year here, so I'll let others state this argument better. But the short is that Google can define protocols, more tracking analytics, etc.
It really comes down to two things.
- Do you want to encourage more privacy across the web?
- Do you want the web to be more decentralized?
If you want more privacy and less centralization, you should use FF. I don't think it is just about the services that they offer. I think we can go deeper and talk about the future of the web in general and how our choices affect that.
Firefox promises all these things, but I think that by and large the problem is that it just doesn't deliver on them for the average person. And average person is how we get the market share and safety in numbers.
FF definitely offers more privacy for the average person when compared to Chrome. I'm not sure what you're talking about. That normal people don't care? Well that's why I said the conversation about "products" was fine for the average person but not here on HN where we're experts and there's more nuance.
Right, I've never walked by my computer at midnight to discover its awake and hammering the disk scanning everything that's installed on my machines like chrome does.
You're right, but neither can we wait for legislation to be passed. So attack this problem from multiple fronts. And even after legislation is passed that doesn't solve the second problem of centralization.
Multi Account Containers is the key reason I use Firefox. I have to juggle multiple accounts for the same services for work. Containers makes this trivial. The closest chrome has is profiles which require a separate window and are just generally far more painful to use.
Temporary Containers as well. An entire throwaway container by default. I can just accept all the cookies and closing the tab deletes them all. No management.
Nothing else comes close.
I'm glad this exists (although it appears there are extensions in other browsers that do the same thing) but I never have more than 10 tabs open, so it's not something that would make me switch.
I'm glad it exists too. If you ever have a need to juggle tabs this extension is a godsend. Believe me, I've tried finding similar functionality for Chrome/Edge and aside from Edge vertical tabs, the rest are a kludge at best.
Sidebery is great, but I had to switch back to Tree Style Tab because I hate animations, and while Sidebery is impressively configurable, not all animations can be disabled (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/517).
> They offer nothing I cannot get elsewhere and thus I have no reason to switch.
I'm not going to tell anybody else what their reasons are or should be, but for me voting against the browser monoculture was a reason to switch.
Most people won't care enough, of course, but to me it's not that different than voting for a candidate in an election who might not be the absolute best fit for my personal interests but who seems better for an overall political culture, or some other similar compromise.
On Desktop, I can agree. But uBlock Origin on Android is only possible on Firefox afaik (and one of the major ways Google uses Android for Ad revenue leverage)
When it first came out, Firefox was faster, lighter and offered way better function than the alternatives at the time. Since then, competition has been fierce in the browser market and they’ve done little to distinguish themselves in any major way from their competitive set.
Until they do something so vastly incomparable in the market, they gonna continue to falter.