With Mozilla, all discussions are open, choices are justified, and literally anyone (assuming your reasoning and technical abilities are sound) can contribute.
(I'll note that I don't actively contribute much to Mozilla, but if nobody uses Firefox then it's not going to keep getting better).
Occasionally there are already Chrome-only websites, there is a Chrome web store that could potentially become a gatekeeper for software similar to what Apple is doing in the iOS ecosystem.
I'm using Firefox even if that means that I don't get some cutting edge feature that I don't really need until a few weeks later. Hope that makes sense.
1) PDF viewer. 2) Flash. 3) Some audio/video codec support (e.g. Chromium has no support for MP3, AAC, H.264, or the MP4 container format; see <http://www.chromium.org/audio-video>). 4) Crash reporting, metrics, that sort of thing.
#1 and #2 are certainly closed-source. I can't speak to #3. [EDIT: as surrealize points out, #1 is no longer closed-source.]
From an end-user perspective, there's a significant difference between "browser that will play the music and the videos and show me the PDFs" and "browser that will not do those things". Chromium, while open source, is really not a viable end-user browser on today's internet.
I don't think so, because really it's a difference between "will show the pdf..." and "will launch a program to show the pdf."
As a full time Chromium user, I've had frustrations twice--once trying to figure out why Netflix didn't work after I had heard it "now worked on linux," and the other with an app called mightytext that was doing a very stupid redirect loop forever in Chromium, but not Chrome.
That's over the course of a year or so.
Not only that, but PDFs embedded via <object> don't get shown in external apps in any browser. And this does in fact happen. For example, if you want to get your pay stubs or W2s via https://portal.adp.com you end up dealing with just such a setup.
I realize anecdotes aren't data, but this also applies to your anecdote; you're very much not a typical end user (starting with the fact that you're using Linux!).
I should note that "Netflix doesn't work" is probably a deal-breaker for the average user all on its own.
http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/06/google-chrome-pdf-engine-f...
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoo...
Chromium is fine, and I use it next to FF all day every day. I have never tried committing to it so I have no idea, but the general mindshare seems to be Chromium contributions are Google dominated.
