Posted by kombuta on July 6, 2013 at 1:55pm
One of the hot topics at the JHB meetups revolves around the question "which web browser performs the best?". I'm an advocate for Firefox and I'm pleased with the findings from the browser review by Tom's Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera-next,3534...). Firefox 22 has improved greatly and now outperforms Chrome. :)
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Firefox > Chrome
Just last week I had a moment of slowness in Firefox in Google applications. After Ivan mentioned all the changes that have been made to Chrome and added speed as one of the highlights (especially client-side code execution), I reasoned it may be time to make the switch to Chrome.
I run Chrome and Chromium to test sites with and to have two more browsers with separate login sessions for secondary logins to Google services.
Today I move back. Chrome did indeed feel much, much faster in Google services, but it fell flat in just about every other area.
Functionality lacks in Chrome. I didn't know just how much I'd need the flexibility of the Firefox browser interface, the ability for add-ons to alter the UI, adding status bar elements and not-just-icons to tool bars. Chrome\s got an insipid excuse for a status bar that can just show the URL of the link you're hovering over (no extensions can change it). In fact, no extension can change anything but add an icon to the single tool bar available.
That has some serious implications. It feels like going back to an iPhone with icons and no widgets after getting used to the rich widgets system of Android. No more list of icons from Wappalizer showing tech used on a site, no more week-ahead day/night weather prediction, both are now hidden under single icons with drop-downs. Really, for today's weather I can look out my real-word windows.
Another implication of the single top tool bar is that you can't really have many extensions' icons readily available. They just eat up the tiny bit of space in the tool bar that you have to share with the single search-and-URL combo box. That means you can't type a search term into that box composing it from one window to another and then search on a later new tab, it's a URL text box too, so you lose terms typed. No extension can change this in Chrome.
Then there's the rendering problems. In CKEditor Chrome regularly failed to render parts of the canvas and routinely inserted it's own tag styles. That's just CKEditor, but Chrome also renders fonts in some ugly thin and not smooth way and breaks on several sites I use regularly.
Some add-ons for FF that I couldn't find any equivalent Chrome ones for and use regularly were:
Yes, in Chrome I had no way of splitting the window to display two browser panes in the same window. It's like browsing for kids.
Some things Chrome was able to obsolete in FF (it was as close to, or in fact included in Chrome):
Chrome can't add new tabs to the end natively like Firefox. The New Tabs at End extension can do that for you, but because it is not native it breaks things in subtle ways. For example, if you reload a closed tab it now opens at the end of the tab list, so out of place.
Some final plug-ins that I use often in FF that it appeared there were extension for in Chrome but that turned out to be useless are:
This morning's Chrome crashes was the last nail in the coffin. I moved all my recent browsing history, bookmarks and such back to Firefox. At least now I have a slightly more functional Chrome with more related extensions to use as a secondary browser.
Here's a list of the FF -> Chrome extensions that was OK replacements.