Early in this thread, I stood up for Firefox. However, not so much now....
Having been an early adopter and staunch user of Firefox since it's conception, I've been alarmed by both the major release cycle silliness and arbitrary enforced changes to the user experience.
I thought, "Well, if I'm going to be using a browser that wants to look and be like Chrome, why don't I just use Chrome?" So I did, and haven't looked back. It took some adjusting to, as any change to a tool that I use a lot, but honestly - the shift to Chrome was less jarring than staying with Firefox and its changes in design."
Also, I had some major performance issues with Firefox on windows. It would regularly absorb over 1gb of ram, and often went over 2 and even 3 gb and then it needed restarts or it would crash. Chrome doesn't have that problem with different processes for tabs and plugins. I like it. ÂI've managed to move most of my scripts across (although the discovery that userscripts now needed a plugin to work was a small negative)
And... A silly thing. But early last year, Sainsbury's online shopping stopped working with Firefox when FF silently dropped connections on pages which were a mixture of http and https. Sainsbury's went as far as emailing customers as they had so many confused customers. It turned out this was a setting change in yet another major firefox release that was enabled, without consultation. So to shop online, I had to remember to launch Internet Explorer or I would not be able to check out, and risked having to re-enter all my items again.
Honestly, I think FF development has lost touch with its userbase. The "We know best" mantra from them is insulting and uncaring. Chrome isn't much better, but it /is/ consistent. As Rob pointed out, the UI changes in FF have been so fundamental it really is a retraining issue for some people.Â
