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Ask HN: Why is Chrome a better browser than Firefox?

1 points by chris_f ↗ HN
There seems to be common acknowledgment throughout HN discussions that Chrome is a better browser than Firefox. Why?

I segregate different parts of my online activity into different browsers (work, personal, side projects, etc) and use Chrome, Firefox, and Brave all daily. With the exception of learning some of the UI differences, and the built-in privacy features of Brave, I use all the browsers interchangeably and without any issues (I manually add uBlock Origin to Chrome and FF).

Without focusing too much on the personal subjective elements, what are the definitive features that makes Chrome a better browser?

6 comments

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explorigin
This question assumes that Chrome is "better". But what does that mean? Faster? Generally no. Uses less memory? No. The core engine is easier to extend? Perhaps in the webkit days.

Chromium ships with the Raspberry Pi but its an optimized version so not a clean comparison.

chris_f
I guess that's what I'm wondering. Is there something that I make missing?

FF has lost so much ground to Chrome. Does it just come down to Google having significantly better distribution channels vs. a "better" product?

explorigin
I think a lot of it comes down to mindshare. Firefox has does some advertisement but what to we call it when we "search the internet"? We "google" something. Google has so much mindshare and they exploit that to push their browser. What is popular is often what is known and available, hardly what is best. IE is only not popular because it was so bad for so long.
byoung2
To me they are pretty much interchangeable. I used to use Firefox primarily but maybe 20 years ago Chrome was slightly faster so I switched. Now I use both.
thro1
I'm not aware of any.. but lack of future for Firefox and discrimination by Google on his sites.

Mind that Mozilla Foundation main source of income is Google, Mozilla is not much interested in spending that money on Firefox development and Firefox loose his great competitive advantage of powerful addons making everything possible, since allowing WebExtensions only (same as Google uses) at version 57.

MzHN
I switched back to Firefox as my main browser when containers (and Temporary Containers) were introduced.

The biggest issue I have with Firefox compared to Chrome is that even though DevTools is constantly getting updated, I still can't trust it. At all.

Try to use breakpoints for a bit and it quickly gets so tangled you have to close everything and start over to untangle it. Tangled how? Disabling a breakpoint and refreshing restores the breakpoint. Often there are ghost breakpoints remaining that you can't disable at all. I don't think I've ever gotten DOM breakpoints to work in FF, never had issues in Chrome. I can't even dream about using logpoints or similar.

Just today I was helping a coworker debug an issue using DevTools. We enabled break on exception and refreshed. Nothing happens. The console still shows the exception on every refresh. We click around and realize the Sources tab doesn't load anything. Again closing everything and reopening fixes the issue, but I hate to always have to suspect the DevTools first when debugging.

Another thing, which obviously isn't Firefox's fault, is that websites are optimized and built for Chrome, so you often get a degraded experience, if they work at all.

Regardless, I don't see myself ever going back to Chrome.