Maybe your memory is failing you, but FF and Safari were still great browsers when Chrome first came out. Chrome took over slowly because of constant improvement, it wasn't much different except for some technical details and clean UI.
Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3, and the time between releases was measured in years, not weeks. Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.
> Firefox was great, but the performance was sub-par around version 3
Before Chrome, Firefox's performance was sub-par compared to... what? Definitely not to Safari, Chrome, or IE.
The main knock on Firefox at that time was that it was too memory-hungry. That was always somewhat of an inaccurate rap. Not totally undeserved, but not totally deserved either.
> Chrome definitely gave Mozilla a nice kick in the backside, which I am very thankful for. These days Firefox is now close to, if not faster and less memory hungry than Chrome.
The performance improvements have been great, but I have to admit the UI changes are highly concerning to me. Fortunately the FF extension APIs are the best around, so now I just can't use Firefox without "Classic Theme Restorer".
I personally never minded Australis, since I've been used to it via Thunderbird (which rolled it out first). That said, it really doesn't affect me that much since I use Tree View Tabs anyway (and I don't use the menu enough to really care beyond having nice big buttons to click on when my morning coffee hasn't kicked in yet).
There's nothing wrong with my memory. In fact, I remember (as an OS X user) running a Windows VM specifically so that I could use Chrome; it performed so much better that it was actually worth the emulation overhead to run it in a VM.
FF and Safari were okay, but at the time Chrome was a revelation.
For simple pages Chrome was faster. But the tradeoff was that you didn't get things like MathML- which was important to- maybe- three of us. And iirc, SVG was better on FF (I did physics tutorial and animation stuff- I told people to use FF).
Also, I still prefer video on FF. Chrome is choppier with a lousy connection or hardware. But Chrome is quicker to load a simple site which makes it overall a better experience for passive web browsing. (But to be fair my FF is loaded with add-ons so that may slow it down a bit).
You should restart FF with addons disabled (Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled) and then compare the two. If you want a "passive web browsing experience" on FF, you could create a separate profile.
I have installed lots of extensions on FF because I find them to be useful. If I were to use Chrome as my primary browser and wanted the same features that my current FF setup gives me, then I would have to install extensions. But the extensions would slow Chrome down and then I would be back to square one. So "just use Chrome" is not a solution.
Maybe not for everyone. I find myself alone amongst many because I hate tools. The need for a tool means there is some problem that has to be solved. For instance, I much prefer languages that don't necessitate an IDE. I'd much rather program in Ruby, Python, Javascript, or anything else I can do competently in vi, with a 5 line .vimrc file. Even when in vi I only use like 5 commands. I find other ways to be effective. I can boot up Eclipse or IntelliJ or whatever and get the job done, but certainly there has to be a better way?
I installed Chrome because its fast. I liked it for web development because it had "Firebug" essentially built in. I eventually peeked back at Firefox to see if was doing anything interesting on the development side, but by that point much preferred the overall speed and simplicity of Chrome that I simply haven't bothered to go back.
Compared to IE, developing for both platforms rarely requires you to even check Firefox for correctness or performance once you get around the quirks or use more recently developed JS libraries.
I think the only extension I installed for Chrome was TamperMonkey. And a couple of things developed for work purposes.
That's what I do. I use chrome for a lot of stuff, but if I'm browsing video or or doing web development stuff I use FF.
And people here have told me that I'd like the Chrome dev tools better, but although I tried I was too lazy to completely switch so I just use FF and Firebug.
I was one of the users who thought MathML was important. Until I don't. MathML itself is a terrible idea as no one can write a formula like that. Most mathematicians and physicists are already familiar with LaTeX, but the standards body have to invent an much more verbose language that only machines can read.
