The Firefox Dilemma

I fully agree with this article.

I respect people choosing products based on ideality, but I personally will just use what suits my demand/preference best.

When I first switched from IE to Firefox 1.5, it's because it has tabs. And I loved it more and more once I figured out how well-built it is and how powerful addons can be.

When Chrome firstly came, it was pretty bad in term of functionality. The extension system is weak (compared to what Firefox can offer at the time), it lack TONS of what I personally consider as "essential features" (font settings for different languages is a big one for me as a non-Latin character user, for example), so I continued to use Firefox.

But Chrome catched up very quickly. Today, the features of two browsers are basically on par in my user case, especially after Firefox switched to WebExt (which I think is the right direction, by the way). I started to use Chrome more and more due to some small details, like better sync experience etc. Again, purely personal choice based on my heavy use of both.

Another thing that pushed me away from Firefox is my personal experience in bug reporting. I'm not a software developer, but I do report bugs semi-frequently. I feel like I was treated better in Chromium project than Firefox's one. I have lots of unhappy experiences there (the one that I still can't get over is that they won't fix a video playback bug that affects all Win7 + nVidia GPU users [1]). I think in Chromium everytime you report a bug with clear repro steps, there will at least an employee (or volunteer? Not sure) that will attempt to repeat your steps and attach a screencat of that in 1-2 days. It feels good.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1410693

This is indeed what people expect but it’s still pretty far from true. There are still a bunch of CSS quirks that are vendor specific. Also if you want to have fun read about the history of the innerText API - it even works different in different versions of IE! And wasn’t adopted by Firefox until about two years ago. These are only a few of the myriad mines you dodge when developing a library for the web at large. Have a look at caniuse.com for a journey down a compatibility rabbit hole. :)

You'd lose out on the WebRender and all the other Quantum/Servo-related improvements, their influence over web standards, their extended extension APIs and pretty much all respect they've built up over the years.

Yeah. In the early days of internet, web won, because of its relative expressiveness and lack of -rigidity- structure, compared to gopher for example. Now we see that the same unbounded expressiveness led to a monolithic system within a system, that is only feasibly maintainable by large organizations. One program should do one thing, (and do it well): that's what leads to healthy systems.

For me, it's not the bloated browser centric computing experience that's the biggest problem. In my eyes, it's eclipsed by the armies of web developers whose only professional purpose is to work with this technological mishap. If our only document delivery system, i.e. web, wasn't such a mess, the same could be accomplished by a fraction of the current workforce.

I'm not sure even technical users care what engine their browser is using. I think most web devs would prefer a smaller number of engines.

I use Firefox mainly for privacy and containers. Is there a good reason Firefox couldn't provide features based on Chromium/Blink too (like Brave)?