Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

I use FF Nightly as my primary browser at work. Sometimes a site doesn't work and I'll try it in Chrome instead. 40% of the time, the site doesn't work there, either, so I try Internet Explorer. By the time I get this far, 75% of the time, it doesn't work there either and I decide that the website is broken. Note that some sites I always open in MSIE or Chrome due to prior experience.

It is worth noting that aside from a few web-based developers' demos, my browsing on the work PC is notably undemanding: documentation, blogs, email, messaging, etc. Among the actual web applications I interact with, many require MSIE... (Intranet!)

At home, I use FF stable on Linux and nothing works, ever. I don't have enough RAM or CPU power... I also use qupzilla, which performs well enough, but some rendering fails and I don't feel comfortable using it on wild URLs because ... well that's off topic.

I like the chrome debugging tools a lot. I do try to use firefox+DDG but everytime I am doing some dev work, I switch to chrome.

Maybe someday I will try and understand the firefox development+debugging system and then, FF will become my primary browser.

> Personal favorite: 8-year-old bug that causes select options to render incosistently if there's a transform anywhere in the DOM above it

How is it critical to apply a transform to a select option? I don't see how this comes even close to the absurd IE bugs.

This may appear flippant but its insightful in that sometimes the reason is non-technical and not anyone's fault.

In the mega-corporate IT world you have supported locked down apps and best effort apps (and banned apps but thats not relevant to this discussion)

Officially FF is locked down to hell and back and I can't customize it in any way or install ad blockers or web development tools in any way. HOWEVER being locked down the IT support personnel can officially walk users thru using the corporate intranet or the medical insurance site or whatever without any weird "peoplesoft doesn't work, I didn't think it important to mention I installed an adblocker or javascript blocker and fifteen toolbars and ...". Support isn't happening without it being locked down to the point of uselessness.

Meanwhile chrome is on the tolerated but not locked down list and I can install ad blockers and development tools all I want but if it doesn't work then IT support has a written policy to not give a F. They're not actively blocking it, deleting it, or locking it down, but they are not actively supporting it at all. If some obscure IT supported something-as-a-service doesn't work with Chrome, they autoclose the ticket officially. Unofficially they're not total jerks, of course, so they'd fix it, just officially Chrome doesn't exist.

So take a wild guess which one I use at work... I can't imagine using the internet without an adblocker, can't install one, or anything, on FF, so ...

I keep trying to go back to Fx, and get held up on a few things (partly due to my own laziness):

1) tab-to-search (you mention already) 2) Chrome is "cleaner" out of the box (I'm sure I can have an omnibox in Fx I just haven't tried very hard) 3) I prefer Chrome's developer tools by a huge margin (especially the react/redux ones) 4) easy profile switching in Chrome (I have a dev profile that I use a lot) 5) Chrome better history plugin