I just wanted to say that, despite a few mishaps, firefox is what _everybody_ on hn should be using. I can give my browser-time credentials, but really. Firefox is amazing. Care for the open web, fear ie6, and at the same time enjoy firefox!
> Care for the open web, fear ie6, and at the same time enjoy firefox!
And remember: Chrome is the new IE.
(Since a number of people have misunderstood this quote in the past I'll explain it up front: 1. IE was in some ways technically superior to competition until they became dominant. 2. At the same time devs stopped caring about other browsers, and then 3. Microsoft lost interest in it. We are repeating this it seems, currently at step 2 for a few years already, waiting for Chrome to completely outcompete other browsers and for Google to abondon it like so many other of their projects :-)
For people who don't care about privacy, what would be the motivation for making the switch?
Chrome is good enough. The interface is still streamlined.
Microsoft didn't just lose interest in IE, but it became bloated with the toolbar. The UI wasn't well proportioned in general.
Web development wise, it was a struggle to be compatible with IE. Chrome may be setting the web standard for better or worst, but atleast developers are more comfortable developing and testing Chrome. The sentiment is that writing code to work I.E. would be exceptional, whereas now writing code for non-Chrome browsers would be the exceptional case. In fact, developers sometimes only test Chrome. Some popular E2E JavaScript testing frameworks only work with Chrome.
Also, I don’t know if there are examples of Chrome implementing non-standard behavior that rivals IE having an event bubbling system that was inverted from every other browser.
As a developer you get a lot for free by developing in Firefox, most importantly if it works in Firefox the it will likely work in all other browsers as well. This is, in my experience as developer and code reviewer not the case for code written and tested exclusively on Chrome.
>The sentiment is that writing code to work I.E. would be exceptional, whereas now writing code for non-Chrome browsers would be the exceptional case. In fact, developers sometimes only test Chrome. Some popular E2E JavaScript testing frameworks only work with Chrome.
This was once the case with IE, as well. Testing code in non-IE browsers used to be the exceptional case, and a lot of developers only ever tested in IE. There are countless enterprise applications that only work in IE even now, which is most likely the main reason that Microsoft is still keeping IE alive.
I wish I could recommend Firefox but I can't because it cripples performance of the things I'm working on, namely streaming and rendering large 3D data.
I'm using Firefox privately at home but for work, including work@home, I'm using almost exclusively Chrome. Chrome is just so much faster and the developer tools so much more polished than Firefox. DataView is 40 times slower in Firefox, and I'm using it quite extensively to read binary files. There is a Uint8Array hack/workaround that lets you write your own DataView that is 4 times faster in Firefox, but 10x slower in Chrome, so it's not an alternative I'm going to use.
A rather basic jsperf is here: https://jsperf.com/dataview-float-int
The results are that the u8 hack is equally slow in firefox and chrome (~90ops/sec), the DataView version is 10x faster in chrome(945ops/sec) but almost 4x slower in firefox(25ops/sec).
