I’ve been using Chrome for the first time today, and it’s a lot faster than Firefox. I’m thinking of switching over to Chrome completely.
Chrome looks better than Firefox. It’s design and layout make more sense.
Firefox has more extensions, but there aren’t that many that I depend on. StumbleUpon is available for Chrome. There isn’t much more that I need.
One downside that I see for Chrome is that I don’t see how it protects my saved passwords. Firefox has an option to protect your passwords with a password.
Another downside is that it’s too diligent when it comes to saving my history. I need to find ways to limit what Chrome remembers so that I won’t have to constantly remember to clear my history.
I’ve had Chrome for several months now, and when I use Firefox on my mom’s computer, it feels cluttered and clunky in comparison.
Chrome does have an option to not auto-fill specific searches, if you don’t want someone else to have an idea of what you’ve been searching for. So if you want to stop it from auto-filling your favorite porn site as you start to type in the URL, it will act like you’ve never been to that site before.
I like the way the url bar functions as a google search, and how it keeps track of recently closed windows, so if you accidentally close a window or a tab, you can get it back.
The only add-on I use is ad-block, which Chrome has, so that’s not an issue for me.
IE 6 in the early days.
Chrome
Chromium
Opera. My second favourite browser
Midori
Seamonkey
And a few others. But I always come back to Firefox. Yeah, it’s a huge memory hog as time goes on, and it’s not the fastest, but it’s got the best addons out there. I just don’t feel safe without my addons.
Exactly. Chrome may be faster, both in render time and definitely in startup time, but Firefox has the better extension support, and is therefore more usable.
The only time I use Chrome is when Firefox starts messing up. For instance, since they modified the plugins system, 3.6 has had crappy Flash support, with constant memory leaks from non-Youtube videos. So, if I needed to watch said videos, I pulled up Chrome. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the Firefox 4.0 beta, which is far enough along for my daily use, and most extension authors have provided at least a beta version to work with it.
And I don’t think the extension support is something that’s going to change. Firefox was built from the ground up to support extensions. With Chrome, extensions are basically being hacked in to work with a preexisting engine. An extension author often has to work around the limitations of Chrome, while the big problem with Firefox right now is actually adding limitations so poorly coded extensions can’t break the browser. (And that’s only in the beta.)
For me, the 4.0 beta is fast enough at rendering to be usable–it’s only downside is its slow startup time. But I get around that by having Firefox start when Windows starts, and rarely if ever closing it.
There is an extension for Chrome called Click&Clean which works in a similar way to Firefox’s ‘delete on browser close’ function. You can customise which aspects of your history you want to be deleted when you close the browser. The only issue with it is that if you re-launch the browser before it has finished clearing the old session it tends to bugger things up.
I keep trying Chrome when they bring new versions out but for some reason I keep coming back to Firefox, I can’t really put my finger on why exactly, maybe it’s that stupid frowning face when the page crashes! On a side note IE9 is pretty cool.
I want to switch to Chrome, but only Firefox has the Search for text when I start typing option, which I cannot live without.
It continues to blow my mind that neither Chrome nor Safari include this seemingly trivial-to-implement option, despite many, many people asking for it.
For passwords, I’d recommend a password program like LastPass. For history, get CCleaner and run it on a schedule to clean whatever you like and also “Compact Databases”, which speeds up either browser.
Same here; I was a long-time Firefox user, and experimented with a whole bunch of add-ons, but I never found very many to be especially useful. So for me, Chrome’s increased screen space and speed work better. I have a few little add-ons in Chrome, but I don’t hanker for anything I used to have in Firefox.
I am not iamnotbatman, but if I may - the difference is Ctrl+F; in Firefox, you can set the option to begin searching the page you’re on as soon as you start typing, so you don’t have to hit Ctrl+F at all - simply start typing what you’re looking for and the browser will highlight matches as you go.
It’s what happens when you use CRTL+F, and it’s actually one of the things that bugs me about Firefox. Firefox starts searching for the text you type into the search box as soon as you type it. For example, if you’re looking for “doper,” it will find the first “d,” then the first instance of “do,” and on and on until you get to “doper.” What I hate about it is that if you accidentally type “do[” it jams the process up. I would rather the browser wait until I click a button before it starts searching.
Different strokes, I guess, but the instant searching is something I find highly useful in Firefox - because (fat finger errors excepted) it should take you to the first instance of the sought term in the absolute minimum of keystrokes (for example, if you were looking for the word ‘keystrokes’ on this page, you only need type the first four letters in the search box in Firefox, and you’re alreadt there)
Also, if you were searching for the word ‘already’, you’d have a fighting chance of finding it in this post, even though I spelt it ‘alreadt’.
I have used both and swear by Chrome. It is totally a personal preference though. Firefox always seemed like a Bizarro IE to me. Just different enough to be annoying to get used to so I never bothered (yes I know it is the greatest and most wonderful piece of software ever…I just didn’t like it).
Chrome is so much faster and sleeker. If you are worried about how it saves history, it has Incognito Mode which doesn’t save the history.
The only down side is once in a while I find a web site that doesn’t work quite right on it but that is getting less and less common as the browser becomes more established.
There are a lot of Firefox extensions that I find useful. Three I really hate having to do without are Back to Close (highly recommended, especially with a mouse side button), Image Zoom, and Nuke Anything Enhanced (especially when combined with Flashblock).
Maybe it is just psychological, but Chrome somehow feels cold to me. I admit that Firefox (on my ancient system, anyway) takes way too long to start up, but I don’t care about a few milliseconds either way in rendering speed.
Also, I agree with iamnotbatman on the text search issue.
On balance, I prefer FF, although I agree with criticisms about memory management, bloat, etc. In principle, I think Chrome sounds great - especially the sandboxing of each tab, but I just got horribly frustrated by the difficulty in customising the browser to fit me - in particular, blocking ads.
I realise that as the progeny of Google, it’s not surprising that blocking ads wouldn’t be so easy, but some bits of the internet are just unbearable (or downright unsafe) if their ad components are rendered. Maybe it’s changed recently and this is now easier in Chrome, but they lost me at the start and I haven’t been back to check. If Chrome was somehow able to use Firefox extensions, I’d be all over it like a rash.
I don’t know if it’s a setting somewhere, but some time back the default behavior was set so that you had to lead off with a forward slash before it would start the “find as you type” searching.
I ended up switching to Chrome after seeing how much faster it was on my netbook. Firefox is slow as molasses in comparison.
I switched from Firefox to Chrome as my primary browser early last year. Since then I’ve had three or four malware attacks that got through the first line of defence, which never happened before. I suspect that Chrome/Webkit has more vulnerabilities than Firefox/Gecko and whatever IE uses as its engine. Some surveys I have seen back this impression up.
Haven’t had any such problems since the last Chrome upgrade, but if it happens again I might go back to Firefox. It looks like FF v4 will incorporate some of the Chrome features that I like.