Speed almost doesn't matter for me, since Chrome allows ads and Firefox actually lets me use adblockers and privacy badger. The time wasted on ads are way larger than the time spent loading a page.
I rarely feel like the slowness of a website was due to the browser. I mean .4 seconds or .5 seconds does it really matter? I've been using Firefox since it was Firebird and speed has never really been a complaint. People need to measure and quantify everything.
What appeals to me about Firefox is how customizable it is, and all the extensions.
I use FF to help keep the browser "market" competitive. We don't want to end up in the same situation as early 2ks where html standardisation was essentially "internet explorer compatibility", and if you wanted to use newer features as a web dev you had to put multiple implementations, one for IE, and one for the others, as in the browsers actually implementing the specifications correctly.
Now MS didn't exactly do nefarious things with their market power, it was rather neglect, but it damaged the industry nevertheless. For Google, in today's market, I'd anticipate they would use it to make it very difficult to block ads etc. Internet will become less free.
Crazy fact. Firefox, for me, has ALWAYS been much faster/stronger on YouTube than any chromium based browser I've used. Better than chrome on their own site. This makes it even better. I love this browser.
Great, now implement modern exploit mitigations and sandboxing like Chrome uses.
Firefox is objectively less resistant to exploitation.
Some Firefox security has improved since the article was written, such as some sandboxing on Windows, but it's definitely not as mature.
I'm not writing that Firefox is insecure. Security is very important to Firefox! However, Chrome has had more work done in the realm of browser hardening.
I have been using Firefox for basically as long as I can remember and I love it. However, there's one website that I go to Chromium for: GeoGuessr/Google Street View. For some reason it's unbelievably slow and sluggish in Firefox whereas it works normally in Chromium. Why could this be? To be clear, it's only the Street View part (and moving/panning/zooming) that's slow on GeoGuessr.
Firefox in general is faster for me than Chrome in many pages
However a notable exception are web games and web based game emulators. They're a lot slower on Firefox and i get horrible sound crackling whereas on Chrome its much better. It's been like this for years with no seeming improvement.
even when chrome was obviously faster, and was gaining in popularity, I still used FF. It's my preferred browser, and using it along with ublock origin makes going online more hassle free. Add to that multi account containers, reader mode, and just the general ability to customize it, I really can't see myself using another browser