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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.

Get with the times Mozilla, You’re so… 2000s

At the start of the new decade, Google Chrome is currently winning the browser war. Don’t get me wrong Firefox is solid, and I still love it to death, but there are three things that Google does much better:

• Simplicity Google Chrome is very clean, has minimal toolbars and has no clutter. Firefox has an antique, confusing menu structure, a bookmarks toolbar and a huge set of navigation buttons. The mockups for Firefox 4 themes mimic Chrome and look sweet, but Firefox 4 won’t be out for a while. 3.6 will be released soon, which implements more HTML5 properties that Chrome and WebKit lack. However, developers need to code sites for multiple browsers, so this is not very important right now since these fancy new features will not be implemented for a while. Drag and drop file uploads are cool Mozilla, but it’s not practical yet. I want to see a UI overhaul. Since it’s such a major change, they are waiting for Firefox 4 – and we’ll probably have to wait well into 2011 for that.
• Private Browsing This is my biggest pet peeve with Firefox. Ah yes, Mozilla rushed this one out of their asses. That’s because IE8 had a feature called InPrivate and Chrome has its incognito mode, both of which were released before Firefox 3.5. Once again, lets put aside the joke ass IE browser and get to Chrome. They implemented private browsing perfectly. It opens in a new window with a cool looking detective dude on it. At the same time, you can still access your other webpages that are not in private browsing mode. And this is my absolute pet peeve about Firefox – if you turn on private browsing, it hides your current windows and tabs, disconnects you from AJAX-ish sites, stutters, lags, calculates pi and then finally opens. It almost looks like it closes out of one window and opens the next. Pathetic. Suppose I need to open a private page, but still want another window with my GMail open. Not happening on Firefox. But you can with Chrome. When you exit Firefox’s private browsing mode, it then restores your windows, and is again clunky.
• Speed Before I get to the JavaScript benchmarks, Google Chrome hands down starts faster than Firefox. With that being said, let’s move on to JavaScript and get a little technical to explain some terms. Lots of modern webpages use a lot of JavaScript. A browser has a JavaScript interpreter which interprets the code and as a result, the page behaves accordingly. Javascript is not written in machine language, so it is slower. Mozilla got smart and created a new JavaScript rendering engine called TraceMonkey, which was added to Firefox 3.5. TraceMonkey compiled the code so it runs at machine level, which is ultimately faster. Sweet. Two seconds after this happens, Google decides to break balls and release its new JavaScript engine in Chrome, called V8. This engine is the fastest thing ever (except on Mac OSX – Safari is faster, sorry Google). Anyway – my point: If you have to take one thing away from this whole rambling paragraph, Firefox is significantly slower than Safari and Google Chrome on JavaScript benchmarks. (And forget IE, it’s 40 times worse than Firefox. But no one should have taken IE seriously after 2003, so shut up.)

There are a lot of other things Chrome does really well (syncs bookmarks, looks cooler, does the dishes, etc.) but I am too lazy to go looking for them. I still use Firefox as my main browser, but Chrome is technically better and I use it interchangeably when I need to log into a site without wanting to log out in Firefox and mash around cookies. Mmmmm cookies.

Portfolioso’s orders: Grab a copy of Chrome and try it out. It’s neat. If not, use Firefox. And NEVER use IE. Only morons use that.