Thoughts on Making the Switch From Firefox to Chrome


I always used Chrome as a secondary browser. Firefox was always my main one and if I needed another browser with separate cookes (so I could log in to two gmail accounts, for instance), I’d use Chrome. But Firefox 3.6 is behind the times and with 4.0 beta 1 looking fucking hideous, I temporarily switched to Chrome as my default browser until Mozilla releases and/or gets their shit together with Firefox 4.

But you really need to spend time using a browser to understand it inside out. Here are a few of its quirks that annoy me that I never noticed because I used to use Chrome so infrequently:

  • The preferences dialog is confusing as hell and poorly organized
  • You cannot middle click to open links in a new tab in chrome:// pages (plugins, bookmarks manager etc)
  • There needs to be a custom print dialog box and a print preview
  • There needs to be a native proxy support, not use the IE/system proxy setting dialog
  • You can’t clear browsing data on exit.
  • Memory usage sucks. I have like 9 chrome.exe processes running.
  • There’s some funkiness going on with selecting text on pages sometimes. It’s slightly annoying
  • You can’t open files from the browser. You need to download them first. This is more secure, but its annoying when you want to open a torrent from the browser. With Chrome, I need to download it first then click on it.
  • Firefox has a huge advantage for the location bar. I hate how you can’t control what pops up in the location bar. It searches history over my bookmarks.
  • It never seems to remember my window preferences / always opens windowed instead ofmaximized(maybe a beta issue?)

Other than that, it’s better at rendering pages. It’s faster. Its UI is clean. That’s enough to make me happy for now.

Uh, on the second though, those are a lot of quirks / things that annoy me. If Firefox ever gets their UI problems sorted and boosts browser speed, I’m running back to it.