The Intro Bit
This is something I sometimes argue about, and "fight" people over, so I though I'd explain exactly why I prefer Firefox over Chrome.
I've been using Firefox since before it was called Firefox. It was Firebird when I first started using it, back in 1999 or so, if memory serves. Anyway, I've been using Firefox for a long time now, and know a lot about how it works. Then Chrome came along in 2008 and (guessing here) because of it's speed, it gained a fuckton of popularity.
I'm not trying to say that Chrome is a total waste of hard drive space and that it's evil or anything, but there's some major advanteges to Firefox that I don't think everyone knows about and appreciates.
Firefox Just Has Features I Like
Firefox has a handful of features I just can't get in Chrome. From sidebars, to live RSS bookmarks, to it's preferences page. I load a few bookmarks into a Firefox sidebar, and that loads the bookmark on the side of the page. That's really helpful since I can still be doing things in the main window, but I can also do other things in the sidebar. For example, I load this page in a sidebar, just to get easy access to a color picker, which is helpful when doing CSS things. I have about 11 things I load into the sidebar, and Chrome just doesn't have one.
I also bookmark a number of live RSS bookmarks, and when I open them, I get the latest things listed there. Here's a picture of what that looks like when I open them, and here's the RSS page. You'll notice that in Firefox you get a subscribe option, and also options to pick how exactly you want to subscribe to them. Chrome just shows the plain XML page, and while you can probably find an extension to handle that, I find it much easier to do in Firefox.
Firefox 4 has a new feature that tells sites "do not track me", and being the paranoid person I am, I really like that. I've heard Chrome tried to do their own version of the do not track header, but I haven't heard many updates on that. They just don't have it, as far as I'm aware. And it's Google, of course they want to track you. They make money off of knowing as much information about you as possible. I'm guessing they'll eventually have the do not track header, but it might not come as fast as it could.
Then there's that very cool
about:config page that lets you tweak settings. It's not very user friendly, and you have to research exactly what each setting does, but I guess I just like that it's at least there. But I'll get into the customization in the next section.Firefox == Customization
The main reason I like Firefox over Chrome is it's customization. There's the URI
about:config and as most Firefox users know, this is that area that seems a bit daunting, but lets you customize the shit out of Firefox. I actually bookmarked this URI (chrome://global/content/config.xul to be specific, but that's just the geeky way to get there) so I can easily get to it without having to type it into a new tab URL. But this area lets you change all sorts of things. From how wide your tabs are, to how you accept cookies, to all your extension settings. Basically all things relating to how your browser talks to the internet, and how your browser works. I love this, and I don't see this in Chrome. Chrome has it's options, but there's just a lot missing there. Or at least, it's a lot less customizable.For example, I tell Firefox not to send the referrer URL to any sites. If you type
javascript:alert(document.referrer); into the URL of your browser, it will tell you where you last where (if you're on that same domain). So if you go from a facebook userpage to a facebook image, it will say the userpage you were on previously. Facebook had an issue recently that leaked certain information about your login info to third party sites because your access token was sent in the referrer (as far as I know - haven't looked too far into it all), and they could have potentially taken that and impersonated you. Pluse, I just don't like the idea of sites tracking where I come from on their site. So I turn it off, and I do run into cases where I can't look at something, since they have some anti-hotlinking protection, and they need to see that I saw the site from their site, not hotlinked from somewhere else, but it only takes a few seconds to set the referrer back to normal.Then I also have custom settings for the max zoom level, settings for how websites can make browser windows open (I keep them from hiding certain parts of the browser), what the backspace key does, what the minimum font size can be (no "hiding" text in a million sub tags), how many things show up in the URL dropdown when I start typing something in, how long scripts can hang before I get a popup telling me it's taking a long time, how focus rings show up, and probably a ton of other settings.
Chrome is simple, and that is cool for some people, but not for me.
Extensions & Themes
Firefox was the first browser to offer extensions, and it's what's made it so popular, I think. Chrome has extensions and themes, but they're sort of a joke compared to Firefox extensions. Firefox can add things into your right click, and change how the browser works. Chrome only lets you add things to a couple places on the browser, and you can't go changing how the right click menus work or anything like that. Chrome has decent extensions, but they can't compare with Firefox.
I recently wrote a theme for my Chrome, since there was only a few themes when I went looking for some last week. I just checked now, and the whole Google theme place has changed. Anyway, I wrote my own theme, and the way you do it is completely strange. You put all your color, tint, image, and theme configuration settings into one JSON file, with the images in a folder. You can sort of specify normal colors, but only in the
rgb and rgba format. It's just strange. Firefox does it's themes with CSS files, you know, that file format that tells the site how to look. And you can customize everything about Firefox, not just the few things Google specifies. Here's a screenshot showing my Firefox theme and Chrome theme. For Firefox, I'm not even using an official theme (or persona), it's merely a Stylish skin that applies to the browser window.
So Firefox extensions and themes just go way more into the browser than the surface stuff Chrome extensions do. Yes, it's handy that Chrome can use
whatever.user.js files without an extension, but that's just very strange, and you don't even get the bonuses that comes from applying a real extension to your browser to handl the whatever.user.js scripts. Feels like Chrome did that just because it was popular.What Chrome Does Right
Chrome isn't totally bad and evil, though. It does a lot of cool things, and I wish Firefox could copy some of it. For example, Chrome has it's own Flash plugin, that they keep updated when new security exploits are found. They also have their own PDF reader, so you don't have to go and download the bloated Adobe PDF reader (I use Foxit Reader myself, which works loads better than Adobe's reader). Then it's just fast. A fair bit faster than the Gecko engine. They also load each page in a seperate process, so if one page crashes, it won't take out your entire browser and all it's tabs.
So there's a fair bit of coolness Chrome does, but it just doesn't even compare to Firefox, for me. I'm sure I could learn more about it, and tweak some things to be better, but I already did that for Firefox. I guess, for me, I like how Firefox works, and can't see just dumping it for a bit more speed.
So, what say you guys?