The most bizarre part of this is coworkers ridiculing someone for using a completely modern browser that's just as up-to-date as Chrome, and possibly with better privacy. Completely bizarre to me. I'm glad I don't work there.
I think ridicule may have been a little bit of hyperbole. If he genuinely felt ridiculed and uncomfortable I doubt he would be writing about it on his blog.
I think it would be bizarre to work in an environment where people did not joke about each other's "questionable" technology choices. The vim guy catches flak in the emacs shop. The debian guy (me) catches flak from his OSX friends asking if I recompiled my kernel for the 10th time in order to get my "flaky" free video driver to work. When I do habitat for humanity work I hear guys teasing someone for still using a miter box or for using the kickback guard on a table saw. I think a certain amount of teasing is healthy and natural among friendly coworkers.
Sidenote: I've been a FF user since it was firebird and I don't expect that to change.
They're not ridiculing him. It's natural and desirable for developers to be curious about other developers' setup.
I agree Chrome has never made lots of tabs easy. Since I'm usually signing into multiple accounts, I have several windows open anyway, so don't feel the pain as much as I used to.
I find this point and the XHR annoyance not enough to sway me though. Devtools keeps getting insanely more powerful to the point where front-ends will probably be using it as a proper IDE in a couple of years.
Yeah. Good grief. What kind of person ridicules a co-worker repeatedly for their browser choice? Even IE, maybe joke about it once and then move to something important like text editors.
Ok, fair enough. It's easy to imagine something different from an article than how it is in real life. I'm personally invested in Firefox too so it's easy to react against Chrome fanboys and the FUD they can spread.
I would have described my work the same way, even if that's taking a bit of poetic license. I started developing in Aurora about six months ago to try out some of the new dev tools. The question of why is a surprisingly regular conversation with anyone who notices, starting anywhere from "Why don't you use Chrome" to "What the hell are you using this for?"
Chrome comes bundled with Flash and a proprietary PDF renderer; proprietary plugins, especially Flash, have historically been a rich source of privacy and security problems.
The fully open-source build of Chrome (called Chromium) avoids that problem but is more difficult to install on some platforms.
In theory, Chrome sends your entire browsing history over to Google, since its unified omnibar doesn't distinguish between searching and typing in location. Firefox (and any browser that separates the location and search bar) doesn't have this problem.
To be frank I'm not sure how Google uses this information, but it does make me laugh when the whole Ubuntu Dash searches Amazon thing blew up. It's the same thing, really, yet nobody talks about Chrome at all.
"""Whenever you pause while typing in the address bar,
the text you've typed is sent to Google so predictions
can be retrieved. Google logs a random two percent of
these requests in order to help improve the service.
This information is anonymized within 24 hours.
"""
there is conceptionally no support for functionality akin to noscript (as in the firefox addon, not the chromium plugin with less functionality), request policy, etc. even adblock works better in firefox.
allowing these plugins is a decision that also has drawbacks. the browser will need to support synchronous callbacks (i.e. to possibly block http requests). these can block the browser, something chromium plugins cannot do (at least so easily).
