Why do you use Firefox?

Personally, I disliked the fact that Chrome would spawn so many processes. This has become less of an issue (as each process is no longer as heavy), but was a big deal previously as other people at work would constantly complain about their computers being slow.

Call me old school, but I actually like the fact that the URL bar and the search bar are two separate things and that I can actually have a menu bar. I find the way that Chrome handles its navigation a little annoying at time and I don't see a big deal about losing a few hundred pixels to FF's chrome.

I actually like the way that Mozilla communicates information about Firefox (less automated).

Aside from that, unabashed fanboyism.

Yep. If you make a change that upsets nearly 40% of your userbase, can you really act surprised when you hear people complain about it? Even if you go with the comparatively tiny 5% estimate of users who are 'unable' to switch, that's still a number that's in the millions.

This is the sort of thing that Google does all the time - optimize for the 90% at the expense of the remaining 10%. I think a lot of the more extreme backlash is because of that vocal (but not insignificant!) minority which is disappointed by the perception that Mozilla is going down the same route as Google (and all the other tech behemoths before them).

Chrome is all about delivering web content to the user, as the web page developer designed it. Firefox moves the balance of power closer to the user. And not just with extensions, but by building in Readability mode and letting users pick fonts, sizes, colors etc. Even though Firefox is going to move away from their old addon model, they are constantly pushing to standardize more functionality in the new model. They really want users to experience the web on their own terms, even when that means putting a lot of extra work into the core framework of the browser.

WebExtensions are going to look a lot like Chrome's extensions, to the point that many addons will be compatible between the two. So, speaking loosely, anything Chrome addons can do now will be supported.

> Recently Firefox said they were moving away from threads to processes. I think that's a mistake. Killing Chrome was a pain at times because when it does hang all the child processes had to be killed independently. It was possible to restart Chrome with orphaned processes. What a mess.

Your argument against a multi-process architecture is you once encountered a process-reaping bug in chrome. Can't even.

> I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability.

I worked as a platform engineer at Mozilla for several years. I heard so many unfounded opinions about 's consumption that ran contrary to every benchmark and defied every attempt to extract statistics from the user that you'd think I would be numb to it. But I still get chills.

The advice was always the same though. "Does this occur if you open a fresh profile without your 900 tabs or 50 addons?" -- "If I'm going to do that I might as well switch to Chrome!" -- Well, I mean, okay.

> Chrome developers are crap developers and they hide behind processes because they don't have the chops to do threads. I hate to see Firefox move in that direction. Maybe Firefox needs to since Firefox is adopting Chrome extensions. But I refuse to use Chrome because it has crappy performance and usability. Hopefully Firefox doesn't move in the same direction.

This is insulting to a lot of very smart people who spent an enormous amount of time working on these engines. You can't just infer two traits about random software, attribute it to the biggest technical difference you can see, and then state that as fact. A multi-process architecture is much more difficult to get right than a multi-threaded one, and every single modern browser is pursuing it because it is worthwhile on numerous axis. Citing nothing but a vague luddite sentiment, you assert the hundreds of engineers who have spent years working on chrome don't "have the chops" to "do threads". Wat.