I've made multiple attempts recently to switch to Firefox as my primary browser, but I never could stick with it.
1) It's simply not as responsive. They've worked really hard to keep up with Chrome, and I respect that, and the recent overhaul did make a big difference. But Chrome just feels like a piece of physical machinery, where Firefox still feels like a piece of software.
2) The dev tools are just not quite as good. As with general performance, they've always been very close, but there's just something about them that's off. Enough to disrupt my work.
3) Firefox mobile, at least on Android, has weird high-friction scrolling behavior that doesn't match the rest of the OS and feels terrible, and there's no way to turn it off.
I use Firefox for casual browsing on my gaming desktop, but that's about it. I'm rooting for them, but there are just improvements that still need to be made.
On the bright side, Chromium is 99% OSS (as opposed to Android, which is like 70% OSS). I think a fork could become a competitor if Google took the project in a direction that was just really egregiously bad. Let us not forget that Chrome's rendering engine, Blink, was itself a fork of Safari's WebKit.
> Chromium is 99% OSS
OSS but owned totally by google.
I don't believe such a product should get any credit for being OSS. It will never do what the community wants.
But it can be forked. Which means I can go start a Chrome competitor by myself, today, with zero up-front investment.
Good luck with making meaningful changes with zero investment.
At best, you could probably maintain a patch that changes some of the more Google-oriented behaviour of Chrome. A full-blown fork would never keep up with new development in Google or Firefox.
This exists as: