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Speed isn’t anything. Ask any one who’s used both Firefox and Chrome, and if they know what they are talking about and they are being honest they will tell you that in terms of capability, customizability and features, Firefox wins hands-down. What’s more, Firefox uses much less memory than Chrome does. That’s not very important these days for users like me who have 8GB+ of RAM, but if you’re on a netbook or an old PC that has 1GB or less, memory usage can be a real bottleneck for your overall system performance if you’re trying to multitask.
What’s more, the reason the browser exists all all does matter. It matters a lot even though you probably don’t realize why and how it matters. Let me show you why: Firefox is open-source from the bottom to the top; It’s not made by a for-profit corporation so it isn’t in the browser game to get you to buy their stuff. In fact, they don’t even sell stuff. It was built by users, for users, because people wanted a better browser and people who knew how to make that got together and built a community who made Firefox. Compare that to Chrome, which is a closed-source and corporate owned property. While is is true that Chromium is open-source and Chrome is built on top of Chromium, Google Chrome is not the same thing as Chromium. Basically, Google takes the work that Chromium developers do for free because they love coding and programming, and they then turn around and do closed-source coding to turn Chromium into Chrome. In the final analysis Chrome is designed to do one thing and one thing only: Make money for Google. They’re not making it because they love you and want to give you a browser for free. They are giving you a browser for free because they know that most of you will end up making money for them, either by watching an ad that Google gets paid for hosting, or you buying something off the Google Play Store, or one of the many other ways Google makes money.
This doesn’t mean the Google is inherently evil and wants to spy on you because they hate privacy. That sort of conspiracy theory nonsense belongs over in the junk-heap next to Area-51 and nazi-moon-base idiocy. All they want to do is run a business and stay profitable. That’s not so much evil as it is how corporations work. Don’t like it? Nobody’s putting a gun to your head and forcing you to use Google.
As a side note, when I have used Chrome, I have been disappointed at how unstable it is. For example, the last time I tried it I added an extension, decided I didn’t like the extension, uninstalled it, and that broke the UI. Nothing I could do could seem to get the UI back to it’s default state. Even uninstalling and reinstating didn’t fix it. I gave up and went back to Firefox.