Choose Firefox Now, Or Later You Won't Get A Choice (2014)

As Fifer says, it's a popularity issue. As a web dev, for me, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem that relies on who is the majority that I need to support — and that's where all my energy and time go. As a result, it becomes my browser of choice because I have to test in it so much. I also prefer the dev tools.

Are you on a Mac? I used to do this to

I used Firefox for a long time as I wanted to use the same browser across all my devices [for synching reasons]. The Android version of Firefox is definitely the least 'crippled' browser I've used on mobile, with full support for plugins [not that I'm one of those who load up their browser with dozens of plugins, but I like to add a few things like uBlock, NoScript, etc].

Unfortunately [and call it subjective, if you like] Firefox on Android is slow and gets noticeably slower as you use it. It needs regular 'fettling' by manually wiping its caches –more so than any other Android browser, in my experience.

After getting fed up with Firefox, I gave Opera a try and, for a while, that was my default browser across all devices. It has a brilliant text reflow on Android, which is a real 'killer feature' and, of course, the desktop version supports those 3 or 4 'must-have' plugins.

Unfortunately, Opera seem to be on a kamikaze mission to drive away their few remaining users –and contrive to make each release worse than the one before. The last straw for me was when they started pushing those trashy clickbait type junk articles on the homepage as a "News Feed" and adding spamvertising bookmarks to your 'speed dial' page. Opera on mobile also seemed to suffer the FF style slow-downs, after prolonged use.

So, after a brief trek through a couple more browsers [Vivaldi on desktop, Ghostery on Android], I arrived back [reluctantly, I thought at the time] at Chrome [or Chromium for the desktop version]. And you know what?... it runs great on Android. It doesn't slow down after a couple of weeks of use and have to be given a 'cache enema'. It's the only browser I've used on Android that can be relied on to communicate semi-reliably with LastPass's atrocious mobile version...

[OK. I'll admit. That's LastPass's fault for making their Android app so bad that it only [just about] works with Chrome]

...and, since I've got my Android devices rooted and have AdAway patching my hosts file, I actually find out that, in daily use, the lack of plugins for Chrome on Android isn't such a big deal after all.

I'd like to use Firefox for all the reasons you mentioned but, I've evaluated them all and switched between them all quite recently and have come to the conclusion that, while all browsers are flawed and all have their particular strengths and weaknesses across platforms and in terms of 'philosophy', Chrome/Chromium is currently the best of a bad bunch, for my use case.

I'll be happy to take Firefox for a spin again, if they make any measurable improvements to the browser [I've read that they're working on re-writing it in Rust, which may make it a leaner machine] but frankly, the whole 'Firefox experience' recently has been a complete turn off. Are they still carrying on that lunacy of what seems like a new release every couple of days which appears to do nothing other than annoy me with yet another hefty download?

I don't understand when you say firefox is not actvely attempting to violate privacy, Mozilla is almost entirely financed by google through advertising money a.k.a a very notorious privacy violations. They deliberately and knowingly made this choice to give away their not knowing better user privacy to google in exchange for money.

This one of the main reason why google search engine has been and is still so popular in Europe. Not such a good record for someone who pretends to champion users right and privacy.

Interesting that you say firefox gets better, I have been using firefox since it was called firebird and to me firefox gets worse with time by adding features I do not want (persona, sync, pocket, hello, botched speed dial, drm), removing features I use (status bar, ui redesign to look more like chrome, disabling script, panorama) and lacking useful features (a working history, a full text search of history, usable bookmarks over time, integrated adblock, live edit of source, an editable speed dial, side bar, disabling author css, ...).

Good that you don't use firefox then, because the chrome UI is awful (at least to me) and the trend from firefox and other browsers to copy it and all look the same is highly irritating.

At least firefox allows for some customization, though not as much as the old opera used to offer.