In theory you are not incorrect, but Google bribes Firefox and Google makes most money via ads. Mozilla gave up on firefox a long time ago.

> It continually amazes me how people use a Google product on their desktop, as if they don't send enough data to an ad company.

I'd love to have alternatives, but which ones are there? Firefox is not an alternative; audio does not work for me as I am pulseaudio free here. On chrome-based browsers audio works fine, out of the box, so it is not my system that is at fault; it is mozilla that is at fault. I also reported this, the lazy firefox dev said all Linux users use pulseuaudio these days. Well ...

I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...:

https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/xsoft/firefox...

I am not going to use a build system that is +20 years old and only exists because Mozilla is too lazy to switch to cmake or meson/ninja as primary build tool.

> Actually, I'm not sure why I type this, any rational arguments are definitely not winning them over.

Well I gave one rational argument: can't play audio on my linux box if I use firefox (by default that is). I can give many more reasons too. You seem to make the point that Google is worse, so we should also use a bad product (firefox). I think we really need better browsers in general. Firefox simply isn't one and that is Mozilla's fault. There is a reason why it went into decline. Mozilla gave up the fight - the ad-money made it weak.

> Firefox is not an alternative; audio does not work for me. I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...

Obviously I don't have any data backing me up here, but I'm going to guess that that isn't the main reason why so many people choose Chrome over Firefox.

Firefox has been my main browser lately, and in my experience it covers pretty much every latest spec: no issues with Web Audio, WebGL (as well as WebGPU, I think), CSS features, etc. There are some select cases where Chrome has deployed something and Firefox is lagging (Background Fetch, for example) but that affects me more as a developer than a user. I cannot remember a single time when I opened something and it didn’t work in Firefox.

> I could recompile it but compiling firefox is a pain in the ...

Would second this. Mach uses Python, and the dependencies they use are a pain whenever no pre-built wheels are available. Especially so when you see that an "optional" Mach dependency for build system telemetry is what busting the configuration (not build) stage...

Do you mean you disable pipewire-pulse? Why? Or does audio not work for you with pipewire-pulse? I've never had issues with firefox and pipewire-pulse on my system.

You made the decision to "pulseaudio free" your system, why do you expect others to fix issues arising from that decision of yours for you?