Ask HN: For those who use Chrome, why do you?

Because monoculture force me to (I only use it to test with).

It remembers all my (unimportant) passwords.

I've used every popular browser (chrome/edge/old edge/firefox/opera/brave/chromium/vivaldi) on Windows. Chrome works most smooth of the time without any funny issues.

Supposedly people said Edge is Chromium based, and is better, less memory usage, etc. I tried it, it just feels more clunky, takes longer to open, pages take longer to load. I also dislike the interface, chrome's interface seems more natural to me. And of course doesn't have the same extensions.

Firefox feels faster than chrome for certain sites, but I find it has issues with other sites. Might be because sites design for Chrome these days. Also Firefox like the original Netscape has random freezes and bugs. A lot less, but I find chrome just works most of the time with less problems.

An example site I can think of, off the top of my head, youtube works way smoother in chrome than firefox. I'm not a huge youtube fan but lately I've been trying to view content that happens to be only available on youtube. Opera has even worse youtube support.

I can't remember why I stopped using Chromium but I think it was a lack of extension support. I recalled it lacked something Chrome had that was important to me. If it's important to you, I can use it again so I can remind myself what it was.

For the record I do use Firefox as my backup browser, and I would say it's better than Chrome at some things (it loads certain sites faster, and has better extension support), and better privacy options, but overall Chrome works better for every site.

Integration with Google services and account

Fast, stable, feature-rich, well tested, excellent security, continuously updated, first-rate support on all websites, cross-platform continuity, best extension ecosystem, excellent developer tools, easy to run different channels (e.g. stable and canary) simultaneously. I would use it on mobile if it supported extensions.

I try to use Firefox (I do) but there are still issues every now and then and I find that I have to use Chrome for something at least once a day.

Most developers develop for Chrome and don't even consider Firefox.

I'm not particularly fond of Google (and growing less fond by-the-week) but the best I can do for now is use Firefox for 95% of things and keep Chrome around for the rest.

No matter what my current dreamboat browser is at home, I always use Chrome at work. Their dev tools are unparalleled. I’m amazed MS hasn’t poached the Dev Tools director to work on VS.

It's a very good question, I'm afraid the answers will mostly be shallow post-defacto justifications. I think we do many things autonomosly, reflexively, and come up with justifications after-the-fact.

Habit. Also my employer some years ago settled on GMail and Google Sheets/Docs/etc. (Not that they don't work well enough in Firefox.) I tend to use Chrome for work and Firefox for personal stuff, just as a convenient way to keep GMail accounts separate.

I was there when IE was better than Netscape. Gmail became a thing and I loved Google and their quality since.

I use Chromium, but I've always had a better experience using hardware acceleration and it runs a lot faster than Firefox when playing videos and having multiple tabs open and uses less resources.

Chrome dev tools are great. Or maybe I'm just use to them by this point.

Chrome also just by far has the best compatibility throughout the web. Whenever I try going to another browser, I always keep a copy of Chrome just so that I can pay utilities (because, of course, their site is broken on Safari, for example).

Also, I use all three major desktop OSes, and Chrome has been the most consistent throughout all 3. Firefox use to have serious rendering issues on macOS; I believe they may have been fixed but I can't be arsed to keep track of that.

Passwords and autocomplete.

Only one reason: Chrome has hands down the best security track record.

I heard Chrome is faster. It might not be, given that I'm running a bunch of privacy extensions. But I don't really know how to benchmark this.

This subject has gotten extremely political and I simply don’t trust most of what’s posted on Hacker News. Everything looks like motivated reasoning to me. Only a small minority really understand the issues and they use motivated reasoning too.

It’s much like deciding which nutritional studies to trust when most people aren’t scientists and are just reposting memes.

And although I don’t know what’s going on anymore, I have residual trust in the Chrome team since I used to work for Google.

I won't make a blog-post detailing things, since you could just as well google your way into those details. Instead I'll note down:

- Best devtools, particularity regarding how the tools feel to browse around in.

- Feels slightly better to browse with. Only small differences, like how scroll is just a bit "smooth".

- Looks better ui-wise. (arguably a personal take, but also arguably not)

- (as others will note) Because it's essentially standard at this point, and I work with webdev.

I use chromium though, at least it makes things less google-y. And I thoroughly dislike the Alphabet-monopoly situation and all the bad things it brings. I really wish browsers were far less centralized than they are right now, and that some kind of web-standards consortium worked better than it does. But I don't pretend to be able to fix things like that right now. Besides, at this point, the whole Alphabet-monopoly situation is arguably a political issue rather than a technical one. (Political issues require political solutions)

Better dev tools. So I only use it for localhost. Everything else in Firefox.

I am on Android and see no reason to use Firefox

Chrome tab bar reduces width and overflows, Firefox tab bar scrolls

That’s makes chrome more power user friendly. Sadly

I don't but I can share a reason someone I know uses it instead of Firefox: profile switcher.

In Chrome you have pretty little button you click on that lists all your profiles in a nice looking way; with two actions you're done.

In Firefox, you have to type about:profiles, you get a horrendously looking list with all sorts of useless information, it's just a pain to access and look at.

Implement the same UX Chrome has for profiles in Firefox and you'll get more people on board.

I settled on Chrome years ago, and it hasn't caused enough grief for me to investigate alternatives.

I use it on my work laptop.

- Most of our web-app users are on Chrome anyway.

- The dev-tools are excellent.

- I'm lazy and it already has all my passwords.