I'm just surprised people use Chrome at all. Google has proven over and over they can't be trusted and will exploit you every chance they get.
I'm just surprised people use Chrome at all. Google has proven over and over they can't be trusted and will exploit you every chance they get.
Because some things only work in Chrome. It's a fact. It's terrible.
We're the frogs being boiled, over the last decade. People sounded the alarms, but they were looked at like they had tin foil on their heads. Now, it's clear they were right.
I'm speaking generally, of course. I use Firefox for all my personal stuff, except for those situations where it doesn't work.
>> Because some things only work in Chrome.
What things? Looks like an urban myth.
Chrome likes to make up new "standards" and then some websites adopt them immediately.
That said, I can only remember two instances of that slightly inconveniencing me in the past, and both times I was inconvenienced by a Google-run website: once upon a time Google Earth refused to work, and once upon a time I couldn't tweak my Google Meet background. Both are no longer the case.
Citation needed. I've seen the opposite--unless there's a very specific niche that can't be otherwise solved, there's huge internal resistance to going it alone.
The biggest counterexample I can think of: WebUSB was critical to Chromebooks supporting external devices, but I can see why Safari might not want it. It has Firefox support at last, though.
Citation of what exactly? That not all browsers implement the same thing at the same time and that some features are Chrome-exclusive because for one reason or another other browsers refuse to implement it?
Is that really something you need a citation on? You sure seem to have come up with an example of your own.
"Chrome likes to make up new standards"
I can think of just one, USB.
Chrome was built on the premise that web standards matter. Remember IE 6?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/30/mozilla-push...
Remember AMP?
AMP wasn't part of Chrome.
The Prompt API is part of a real W3C standard: https://www.w3.org/2025/03/webmachinelearning-charter.html
It's not even chaired by Google. It's Intel, believe it or not.
I'm aware of a few things, myself:
1) Google properties
1a) Chromecast
2) a few web-based games that were really pushing the envelope on web APIs and didn't bother testing on Firefox
3) WebUSB, commonly used for some things like keyboard customization apps
Which Google properties are Chrome only? I'm not doubting you but the major ones (search, mail, maps, ads) are extremely cross-platform.
In the past there were features that didn't work at all; I used to hit those regularly. Device setup flows, AV features, etc. These days, it's never "this doesn't work on other browsers". It's always "this is worse on other browsers", whether because they don't test it or because they don't care.
YouTube is terrible on Firefox. There was a period where it was usable but got increasingly worse with missed frames, low frame rate. On FastMail and Gmail the expanded search overlay doesn't disappear when you click outside (ESC doesn't work), you often get stuck with it. On YouTube when you stop hovering over the "I like this" etc. on full screen video view, the tooltip doesn't disappear. It's death by a thousand cuts.
It sounds like Firefox needs to implement hardware assisted AV1? I don't see how you can plausibly blame anyone but Mozilla for this.
A lot of IT now curates the extensions for the browsers and doesn't allow extensions not on the whitelist and then they basically just only do that work on Chrome and disable Firefox. It's kinda self defeating in the long run imo but that's the problem in the industry.
I've run into a few restaurant sites whose ordering pages just do not work properly (or at all) in Firefox. Also webgl2 performance is unfortunately still much better in Chrome vs Firefox; as an example, FoundryVTT (virtual tabletop software) works fine in Firefox but is a stuttery mess IME (though it has improved slightly in the last few years).
I'd bet my bottom dollar those websites still work in Edge, Chromium and Brave. The alternative to Chrome is not Firefox, it's just Not Chrome.
The driver and store signup/portal for doordash returns a 403 forbidden on firefox.
ups.com is one that really infuriates me. It shows 404s for me on Firefox and works perfectly on Chrome.
Kaiser's website works mostly on Firefox. Recently I had to print a "letter" and on Firefox it was blank and printed fine with Chrome.
I don't know if it's still this way, but Google Meet didn't work very well in Firefox, so last year I took all my meetings in Chrome.
These are just what I remember. There are a LOT more.
EDIT: on the UPS thing... it happens when I follow links from gmail in Firefox. Sometimes it wouldn't 404, but I'd see a "..." and it would just stay that way.
EDIT2: for a long time (not anymore), sending Kaiser emails was broken. Hitting enter would warp to the bottom on the page and I'd have to scroll back up to finish typing. They're completely redesigned the website recently and that bug is fixed.
95% of people who use Chrome have no clue what browser they are using.
They got Chrome when it was bundled with every single installer ever for about a decade (which was so prolific and scummy that Microsoft had to make the "default app" picker system more defensive, because Chrome was abusing it more than microsoft apps were).
When you installed Java, you also got Chrome set as your default browser with no interaction.
Or they one click downloaded it from Google.com because of a giant banner saying "You gotta download chrome"
It's insane to me how rarely people on HN seem to actually know the history of this. Everyone who worked in tech support in the 2010s experienced this.
It was an identical strategy that most spyware and adware used at the time.
Why would people still be using a computer from 2010? That might have made sense in 2015, but beggars belief in 2026.
Not everyone has a well paying tech job. Many have to use their devices until they literally die and many more choose to do so because getting a newer device would mean having to deal with the bullshit of newer software.
I have family on fixed incomes. They don't use 15 year old computers. They simply don't last that long.