It's a very good question, I'm afraid the answers will mostly be shallow post-defacto justifications. I think we do many things autonomosly, reflexively, and come up with justifications after-the-fact.
Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
11–20 of 118 posts
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#12Habit. Also my employer some years ago settled on GMail and Google Sheets/Docs/etc. (Not that they don't work well enough in Firefox.) I tend to use Chrome for work and Firefox for personal stuff, just as a convenient way to keep GMail accounts separate.
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#13I was there when IE was better than Netscape. Gmail became a thing and I loved Google and their quality since.
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#14I use Chromium, but I've always had a better experience using hardware acceleration and it runs a lot faster than Firefox when playing videos and having multiple tabs open and uses less resources.
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#15Chrome dev tools are great. Or maybe I'm just use to them by this point.
Chrome also just by far has the best compatibility throughout the web. Whenever I try going to another browser, I always keep a copy of Chrome just so that I can pay utilities (because, of course, their site is broken on Safari, for example).
Also, I use all three major desktop OSes, and Chrome has been the most consistent throughout all 3. Firefox use to have serious rendering issues on macOS; I believe they may have been fixed but I can't be arsed to keep track of that.
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#16Passwords and autocomplete.
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#17Only one reason: Chrome has hands down the best security track record.
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#18I heard Chrome is faster. It might not be, given that I'm running a bunch of privacy extensions. But I don't really know how to benchmark this.
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#19I've used every popular browser (chrome/edge/old edge/firefox/opera/brave/chromium/vivaldi) on Windows. Chrome works most smooth of the time without any funny issues. Supposedly people said Edge is Chromium based, and is better, less memory usage, etc. I tried it, it just feels more clunky, takes longer to open, pages take longer to load. I also dislike the interface, chrome's interface seems more natural to me. And…
Do you know which extensions are not available on Firefox? I'm considering moving to Firefox and feel like after I move there'll be that one Chrome extension that isn't on Firefox.
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?
#20I've used every popular browser (chrome/edge/old edge/firefox/opera/brave/chromium/vivaldi) on Windows. Chrome works most smooth of the time without any funny issues. Supposedly people said Edge is Chromium based, and is better, less memory usage, etc. I tried it, it just feels more clunky, takes longer to open, pages take longer to load. I also dislike the interface, chrome's interface seems more natural to me. And…
Do you know which extensions are not available on Firefox? I'm considering moving to Firefox and feel like after I move there'll be that one Chrome extension that isn't on Firefox.
Firefox + Multi-Account Containers [1] + Container Proxy [2] + Cookie Auto-Delete [3] have completely changed the way I use the web. I can now have multiple Discord accounts open, multiple e-mail accounts, etc.
Cookie Auto-Delete removes all persistent traces of my browsing (Cache, IndexedDB, LocalStorage, Plugin Data, Service Workers, Cookies) unless I have whitelisted a site. And you can whitelist sites on a per-container basis - the integration with Multi-Account Containers is solid.
Container Proxy lets me set up different SOCKS proxies per container. For example, if you have a system-wide VPN with a killswitch running, but want to stream from Netflix or HBO, you can attach a SOCKS proxy to a new "Streaming" container that connects to a SOCKS server running on your local network, effectively bypassing your VPN. Alternatively, if you want to make sure a container is unable to connect to anything without going through a VPN connection, you can bind the container to the SOCKS server on localhost created by your VPN client. You can then use this to set up multiple geographically separate "identities" that don't mix with each other.
All three extensions are reviewed by Mozilla - and Multi-Account Containers is actually written by Mozilla!
After using this setup, I feel that context separation is the future to privacy (and perhaps even security, as Qubes OS demonstrates.)
[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-pro...
[3]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...