I switched to Firefox as my primary browser a couple of months ago, and have been happy enough that I haven't looked back. It is significantly more smooth and performant than it was; the work on Quantum cannot be understated, and the minor fiasco with their extensions ecosystem, though painful, I feel was the right move. With that said, a few anecdotes keep jumping out at me:
- Pocket integration. Dive into about:config, turn it off, lather rinse repeat on every device and every fresh OS install. I have about a dozen.
- The default theme has two large "spacer" elements that shrink the address bar towards the center. These might not bother anyone else, but they drove me nuts; fortunately they can be removed with the customization menu.
- Bookmarks sync well (yay!) but don't always retain the same ordering on each device, which gets a bit confusing. I can work around this easily enough, but it's not quite as smooth as the same feature on Chrome.
- JavaScript performance is not as fast as Chrome. This is normally a non-issue, but occasionally I'll run into someone's ShowHN demo here and find that while it technically works, the performance is sometimes quite slow. Ditto for anything using WebGL. Again, mostly a non-issue, but I do find myself firing up Chrome to run the odd app.
Most of these issues are relatively minor, and fortunately Firefox still has a fantastically intelligent community, so any time I ran into an issue the solution was a quick search away. I think the value add in feeling like I'm in more control of my browser is well worth it, and I hope Mozilla continues moving in this direction. More competition is good!
- Pocket integration. Dive into about:config, turn it off, lather rinse repeat on every device and every fresh OS install. I have about a dozen.
- The default theme has two large "spacer" elements that shrink the address bar towards the center. These might not bother anyone else, but they drove me nuts; fortunately they can be removed with the customization menu.
- Bookmarks sync well (yay!) but don't always retain the same ordering on each device, which gets a bit confusing. I can work around this easily enough, but it's not quite as smooth as the same feature on Chrome.
- JavaScript performance is not as fast as Chrome. This is normally a non-issue, but occasionally I'll run into someone's ShowHN demo here and find that while it technically works, the performance is sometimes quite slow. Ditto for anything using WebGL. Again, mostly a non-issue, but I do find myself firing up Chrome to run the odd app.
Most of these issues are relatively minor, and fortunately Firefox still has a fantastically intelligent community, so any time I ran into an issue the solution was a quick search away. I think the value add in feeling like I'm in more control of my browser is well worth it, and I hope Mozilla continues moving in this direction. More competition is good!