My love-hate relationship with Firefox

I’ve been swapping back and forth between Chrome and Firefox for the good part of the last year. Here are my findings.

Back when Chrome first was released it crashed, was somewhat unstable, had virtually no addons but was marketed very well by Google.

The adoption rate spiked a little while later and now almost everyone you can think of is either using Internet Explorer (let there be mercy on this planet) or Google's Chrome. The pool of addons has grown and the functionality is now actually pretty cool.

Sync works very well with tabs being instantly synced across devices and it's VP8 engine doing an amazing job at providing a very smooth experience across the board.

My time with Firefox started as soon as I began using the Internet. Which was probably around 2004. So it's been a while for me. 10 years.

But things have changed.

Firefox is still not the popular browser and I don't think it ever will be. Which I like, it seems to me as if Firefox is always the quirky kid with the really cool things that you'll only know about once you befriend him.

Either way, the novelty has been a little spoilt by Chrome. For a long time, Chrome had better sync, had a smoother experience and was largely the better browser out of the box. The party stopped there though because Chrome didn't allow you to make any changes to the UI which Firefox allowed you with almost no restrictions.

Addons are still king on Firefox and often are given more love (slowly changing as well unfortunately) and It generally stayed true to itself.

Not so much anymore, with the new UI you do see a lot of influences from Chrome, the UI isn't that customisable anymore and the addons are just not becoming that much of an issue anymore.

It's sad to see a browser that's had such an amazing rep slowly becoming a giant, difficult to move and feeling sluggish.

I hope they fix this. I hope e10 makes a difference. I hope I get Firefox back.