Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Chrome vs. Firefox

Although I'm generally a Google products enthusiast, I'm wondering if I should be a bit more antsy about monopolizing so much of my cloud information on one company's servers.  Still, in general my experience with their products tends to be better than most of the competitors, so it's hard to stay away.

Maybe a year and a half ago, I switched from Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome as my primary web browser, but I still use both on a daily basis.  Just for fun, I figured I'd chronicle my reasons for switching and the pluses and minuses for each.

Why Chrome?
+++ The biggest feature that Chrome has that Firefox hasn't implemented yet is a separate process for each tab, and for various sub-processes/functions.  This was my primary pain point with Firefox that Chrome solved - whenever a page in FF got unwieldy or started running away with memory and CPU, I had to restart the entire browser.  In Chrome, I can pull up the process manager and kill Flash or the offending webpages, then refresh them, without losing all my good tabs.  This feature alone, and the amount of mental well-being it provides, was enough for me to switch.
+ The tabbed interface for Chrome has some nice features - being able to drag a tab into a new window lets me group like tabs together much more easily than in FF.

Why Firefox?
+ A feature of Firefox that I miss in my daily web-browsing now is the "Awesomebar".  In Firefox, the location bar will do on-the-fly pattern matching in your history, bookmarks, etc. and it is incredibly useful to pull up pages that you looked at a few days ago.  Chrome is beginning to implement this and it's gotten better since the first release, but FF is still better.
+ Another FF feature that is easier to use than on Chrome is the keyword bookmarking feature - basically, saving various searches as keywords so that I can go to the location bar and type "wiki [search term]" to find something on wikipedia.  Chrome can do this but it isn't as easy to implement.
+ I was never that into the multitude of extensions that FF provides, but it's nice to have the option.
+ The history on FF is much easier to navigate than on Chrome.  Oddly enough coming from Google, the search function in history didn't seem to work well - there's no hierarchy of ranking search results (i.e., if I'm looking for "NBA" in the history, I don't want it to return all the non-NBA ESPN pages I browsed just because there was an "NBA" term somewhere in the text of the page).
+ Interestingly enough, Yahoo! Mail works really badly on Chrome, while working just fine on FF.
+ Finally, FF tends to be tested and supported by more commercial/financial websites, since it was the first "successful" big competitor to IE, so sometimes I'll switch to FF or IE for personal finance stuff, etc.

Anyway, those are some of my reasons.  If FF were to ever implement the features I mentioned in Chrome above... I might switch back.

Here are Lifehacker's reasons for one or the other.  Which one do you prefer?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm a firefox person. Tho, I'll use Chrome when my FF is acting up. When both are acting up, I go to IE (which happens more than one would expect).