For me, the product differentiation of Firefox is a bunch of small convenience features which Chrome in its monolithism refuses to provide, such as:
Allowing Backspace to go back a page.
The built-in screenshot tool.
Being able to turn off smooth scrolling.
Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly.
Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language).
A usable/useful bookmark manager with things like sorting, tags/labels, timestamps, etc.
"Restore Previous Session" feature.
These are just a few features off the top of my head, I know there are many more.
Of course, for certain sites like Google Docs and YouTube, I have to use Chrome for obvious reasons, but for most browsing I use Firefox (and qutebrowser.)
Can disable as easily as Firefox -- chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling
Actually, Firefox lately introduced a bug that will reset smooth scrolling everytime I remote desktop to my Windows machine. Which is annoying AF and they haven't fixed it for months.
This only works on pages where extensions are enabled, and only after the extension is successfully activated, so about 30% failure rate for me.
>Can disable as easily as Firefox -- chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling
This has not worked for me reliably, and the flag has been renamed several times.
For example, on my Mac, it reads "Not available on your platform."
>Actually, Firefox lately introduced a bug that will reset smooth scrolling everytime I remote desktop to my Windows machine. Which is annoying AF and they haven't fixed it for months.
I use all the extensions I mentioned for years, claiming it has 30% failure rate is bullshit. They don't work on internal special pages, sure, but they work flawlessly on any "normal" webpages with close to zero load time.
And no, disabling smooth scrolling works totally fine as I use it for more than 10 years.
If you're going to exaggerate your points to make a statement instead actually trying to find solutions, I have nothing for you, then.
What is more likely that they are lying or it doesn't work as well in their configuration as yours? The good faith answer is that it is probably the latter.
Out of curiosity, what "obvious reasons" issues have you had with Docs and YouTube. I use Firefox for everything, including those, without problems. (Though not in any kind of advanced way.)
I use Firefox on my HTPC, running a 6700K with 24GB of RAM. Not new, but not “slow”. Clicking a YouTube video will cause a three second page load, even if the actual “page” says it’s finished loading. Videos will start to play audio before the page is rendered. Navigating back and forth causes issues like this too. Sometimes I can get it to show a video but not change the title or comments that it renders. If I accidentally click the “Shorts” hyperlink I basically have to close the tab to stop it from endlessly playing shorts in the background of the SPA.
It’s awful. The best example I experience on a day to day basis that the SPA as a concept is utterly flawed. YouTube is a fucking webpage that fails to work like a webpage and an app that behaves like a students rough alpha. An utterly painful experience, continually made worse by likely skilled devs who are managed by complete bozo losers. But at least the progress bar has an ugly pink hue now.
Docs just almost entirely does not function for me on Firefox on Linux. As in, I've had it crash the entire browser while just trying to type in a document. In general, Google just aggressively seems to be hostile to any non-Chrome browser using any of their sites. I'm sure they cloak it in "well Firefox just hasn't implemented this spec yet" but when it's functionally enforcing their browser monopoly I have to assume malice at this point.
Too many Google sites behave worse on any non-Chrome browser for it not to be intentional.
I wouldn't call them "obvious" reasons but I recently discovered that in Google Sheets under FF I couldn't duplicate a tab or copy a tab to a new sheet. I had to fire up Chrome to do that.
Oddly enough, Chrome had somehow lost my settings since the previous time I started it a few months earlier, as if it were a new install. :-?
I've not noticed any problems under YT Premium so far.
You may not like it, but I don't think it's a good reason to remove the option of enabling it for those who rely on it for daily work, which is what Chrome did.
Allowing Backspace to go back a page.
The built-in screenshot tool.
Being able to turn off smooth scrolling.
Support for a menubar, so that I can navigate the features I want quickly.
Being able to choose page encodings (I use a non-Latin charset language).
A usable/useful bookmark manager with things like sorting, tags/labels, timestamps, etc.
"Restore Previous Session" feature.
These are just a few features off the top of my head, I know there are many more.
Of course, for certain sites like Google Docs and YouTube, I have to use Chrome for obvious reasons, but for most browsing I use Firefox (and qutebrowser.)