Just Don't Get It

I’m a long term ff user, never made the switch to chrome because Google is evil.

Google runs a TON of websites, and there are a ton of web dev frameworks that just don’t prioritize FF support the way they should.

So what happens? My Gmail once every few months will suck for a month because chrome brought out some new fancy feature and FF doesn’t support it.

Now I personally believe that’s intentional and that Google is pulling Microsoft’s EEE

The average person isn’t going to trade misbehaving websites for idealism

I used to switch browsers a lot back in the day (although I primarily used Opera [Presto], after Opera dropped Presto, I mainly use Firefox), and I personally witnessed the impressive growth of Google Chrome.

I have to admit, Chrome is generally faster in various aspects - from startup time to loading pages, it excels. Even in 2008, people were amazed at how snappy Chrome was. The only downside back then was the lack of extension support but I did find some people sticking with it because it was honestly fast.

When the extensions were introduced around 2011, Chrome's userbase skyrocketed from there. Slowly bleeding Firefox's userbase dry also in the process because Firefox may have addons, and during the time of release, Firefox had superior addons too. Main problem is it was slow and clunky.

Now to think about it, despite Chrome's overall speed advantage, there were notable periods where Microsoft had a chance to capture the userbase and impede Google's growth. Notably, Internet Explorer 9 introduced GPU acceleration, which made browser rendering remarkably fast (Chrome and Firefox took a while to catch up on this).

Then there was Edge (EdgeHTML), which proved to be twice as responsive and generally snappier than Chrome.

So why did people not switch to Edge and instead opt for Chrome, even though Edge is faster? Well, it all came down to the user experience. Edge encountered issues right from the start, getting blocked by Google (Oops, this browser is not supported).

Obtaining the latest version of Edge was troublesome, relying on Windows updates, which are notorious for their slowness (sometimes you don't get the update right away, even if you check for updates). If a site issue required a fix available only in the latest update and it is not yet available,tough luck!

Additionally, Google aggressively marketing Chrome whenever it gets the chance. From its website, to bundling it on installers just so it gets installed along with the software you are actually installing.

By the time Firefox released Quantum in November 2017, it was already lagging behind in terms of user count.

So, basically, the tl;dr is that Google devised a brilliant strategy to become the top dog of the web.

Users preferred Chrome because it's fast and consistently less troublesome than other browsers (it certainly helps when the two most popular websites in the world are affiliated with Chrome's parent company).

The updates also are effortless (even a bit aggressive, in my opinion) to the point that users may not even realize Chrome has already updated, which adds a lot with being consistent and there. You cemented as being the best browser for the majority of the people.

There is a shockingly large number of people who go through life in general reacting to things around them and not thinking critically in any meaningful way. Chrome is "normal" to them, it's the default, the status quo. On top of this, our monkey brains tend to rebel when asked to consider making even the slightest change. I'm a bit guilty of this as well. For example, I stayed on reddit for years, even though it wasn't something that was an essential part of my life and was clearly harmful.

The reason people are more critical of Firefox is that it is different, an outlier to them. Maybe they think it's too confusing to switch, or they try but they never get past that initial feeling of discomfort from even the slightest of changes, never give themselves a chance to acclimate, never learn how to make it a far superior browsing experience to Chrome.

Then because it is new and different, such people will start to perceive everything as dangerous and bad. That's why people are still saying Firefox Mobile is slow and buggy as an excuse to stay on Chrome, in spite of the fact that all metrics say otherwise.

(Note: This doesn't include iOS and Mac users, for whom Firefox is basically a worse Safari, but that's thanks to Apple, not Mozilla.)