It's not "as good." I've tried every release of Firefox for the past decade. On Linux and Mac the video performance is noticeably worse than Chrome with significant frame drops, lag, and tearing. Yes, I've tried enabling/disabling hardware acceleration, flash, and all sorts of other flags and options, but the two are still incomparable. Furthermore, even with the quantum update Firefox is still slower for general web browsing and usage than Chrome. I've measured both dropped frames and load times to confirm this.
Yup, let's not sugar coat it. Most HN says "switched to Firefox and haven't looked back" but Chrome does a lot of magic that makes everything faster (or at least seem faster - doesn't matter to me as a user). Firefox also still occasionally freezes even for a few seconds with some busy javascript, haven't had that experience on Chrome in a long time. I'm using FF for ideological reasons but currently Chrome is simply better in terms of user experience.
And sadly web became so dominated by Chrome that some pages simply don't work correctly under Firefox. I'm not going to switch bank or my mobile operator just because they suck at properly designing websites.
Seriously, when is the tipping point? Mine was a couple years ago. Recently with Chrome, there is forced login to the browser when you sign into your google account. Also, when you clear all cookies- it keeps the google cookies. Now it’s crippling ad blockers. Chrome is no longer a user agent, it’s spyware. But I guess as long as that crappy page overloaded with ads and trackers doesn’t freeze for 2 seconds, then it’s still the best.
I only use chrome on my work computer now, and even there I use firefox for logging in to my personal gmail.
My son just got his first computer -- a windows pc. He has edge and firefox installed, but no chrome. I told him he cannot trust google :( and should avoid their software as much a possible.
Uh, that's not my experience at all...I use FF normally, and Chrome not uncommonly (sometimes it's handy to have an entirely separate browser, plus compatibility testing), and I find no noticeable difference.
I agree in windows, but in Linux and android FF has some issues. I still use it but sometimes if a page is being super slow I'll open it in chrome instead.
Hmmmm...not denying your experience, but I haven't used Windows routinely in years; my last several laptops have been Linux. Maybe I just use different websites?
