Why are people on HN still using Chrome? (or Edge, or Opera…)

I don't, 99.9% of the time.

But when your browser has a 2% market share worldwide, some developers won't bother to test on it. And if your setup is even more obscure (I use Firefox on Linux with an adblocker and third-party cookies blocked and DRM disabled and autoplaying video disabled and so on) making you rare even among that 2%, sometimes sites won't have tested with your specific configuration.

It's useful to have a second browser around, as a fallback when a site is broken. Uploading images when creating a listing on ebay is broken, but I don't have to figure out which element of my setup is breaking it, I can just switch to the other browser.

Some pages do not work in Firefox, so I keep a copy of Chrome around.

It’s a bit like with Internet Explorer which back in its day was also needed for some stubborn sites.

There are 2 reasons why I'm using chromium (with ublock origin lite) over Firefox:

1. Chromium is significantly faster (maybe 5 to 10x faster on certain tasks mostly around canvas but anything that requires fast ui really). Every time I use Firefox it feels like it has some kind of serious problem. If chrome was this slow I would stop working and start investigating what part of my computer is broken. This experience hasn't changed over span of 10 years, 3 OSes and several computers.

2. Neverending caching issues on Firefox. It just caches too aggressively which makes development really annoying to a point where anytime I encounter issue on Firefox my first thought is "Is this Firefox caching issue?". On chrome when I change button color and I don't see it, I know I made a mistake. If I change button color on Firefox, my first thought is, is this Firefox caching issue? When I develop web I have very quick update loop and I really can't be questioning browser. I cannot work like this. Firefox is unusable for me.

Edge user here. For one, chromium is faster than firefox, any given page will load about 20% faster, another reason is edge workspaces feature, I've grown to like it, which seems to be some sort of chromium feature that everyone bakes in weird ways if at all, and I'm still running ublock origin on edge without any funky bypasses.

Then there's a fact that a bunch of sites/webapps straight up refuse to work on firefox and they ask you to install chrome or something. And lastly chromium the most popular browser flavor and as a web dev it helps to see pages through "the same eyes" as my users/customers.

That's about it, the only reason I use firefox every day is their superior picture-in-picture player, chromium one is waaay inferior.

Because they don't bother to learn the history, worse, they are also worshipping Electron crap, which is basically Chrome.

For me the two reasons I can't live without are

1. Firefox's ctrl-f search doesn't highlight all instances of a found item on the right hand side. It sounds petty, but its a gigantic timesaver for looking through research documents

2. Firefox's tab crash recovery isn't as solid. I use chrome with fully persistent tabs, and its a gigantic pain if I can't re-open them

If I could find a way to fix these I'd swap in a heartbeat

Is that a rhetorical question suggesting those people are wrong, or are you asking for, e.g., the technical reasons some software only works with Chrome in the mix?

Actually, I opted in for tracking. Knowing my interests, Google suggests good articles on their Android app feed.

Also, there are a few parts of Firefox that still look ancient, like the bookmarks and history managers, as well as the PDF viewer, where the buttons are too small to click easily. Unfortunately, those are unusable for a Gen Zer.

Locked down computers that still let you install extension.

Find me a browser that doesn't have ai shoved into it... and no I don't mean 10 year old versions of iceweasel.

Since it underpins so much of the modern browser ecosystem it becomes a primary target for webapps to work.

As such, if you want to be sure a website will work you use chrome.

Since chrome has such a market share, developers feel justified testing primarily for chrome.

Self-fulfilling cycle.

Don't know, but I have uninstalled it a few minutes ago.

I keep chromium installed mostly to run virtual tabletop software (specifically Foundry VTT), because webgl performance in firefox is not great (though it has improved somewhat in the last couple of years). There are also a few sites (mostly restaurants for some reason) that just refuse to work properly in firefox, so I sometimes fall back to chromium. I wish I could drop it like a bad habit, because frankly Google's shenanigans piss me off on a semi-regular basis.

Work forces me to on the work laptop. But Ublock Origin Lite is good enough for that use-case. I use firefox everywhere else.

uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly, so I have no complaints?

That's pretty irrelevant isn't it? Shouldn't all users demand privacy, especially from ads?

On lower end cpus (N100) chromium/brave benchmarks 10-20% faster than Firefox.

On mobile, Opera is the only usable browser. It supports text reflow on zoom, and also I can choose the download folder for each file. Allows me to keep porn and non-porn downloads separate.

only reason I can think of is synchronization among devices since you can't find same decent browser you could use on Android phone and desktop, Firefox ain't decent browser on neither of those, on desktop Vivaldi with customization and stability is superior, on Android Firefox actually ain't THAT bad since good browsers with extensions support are not that common, I would recommend Cromite, though there is also Helium and Ultimatum

I'm a Firefox user for about 20yrs (since Firefox 3);

but too often I have to use Chrome, as so many sites only work properly on it; Firefox is really buggy or laggy on those websites;

For a time, all those AI chat web pages were just very slow on Firefox even with very little context, whereas Chrome only gets laggy when there is a lot of context.

Ex-bosses used it so had to test shit on them.

Firefox will also disable V2 sooner or later. BUT. Chrome then will still have uBlock Origin lite. Firefox won't, because mozilla banned that extension from store.

I switched from Firefox to Chrome a couple of years back because Firefox always dragged its feet when it came to implementing important developer features. Like, DataView was excruciatingly slow in Firefox; WebGPU support didnt go anywhere; and they initially refused to implement import maps. I consider the latter to be an essential tool as it allows me to work without the need for build systems. Also, chrome dev tools worked far better.

Since Chrome blocked ublock, I switched to Edge. Not sure where I will go next, but I dont think it will be Firefox since they are always years late.