I ran an experiment over the last week to see if I could replace my Firefox browser with Chrome. I’ve been a long-time FF user (since back in July ’04, back when it was still in beta), but spent a lot of time running Chrome in parallel during the Great Gmail Experiment. There’s been a lot to recommend Chrome — cleaner interface, tabs-as-processes (reducing the overall footprint) — so I thought I’d give it a more thorough try.
Going from FF to Chrome wasn’t trivial — I was able to easily save all my current tabs in FF (I usually have around 20+ open from session to session) but there are enough odd interface differences and, of course, the need to try to replicate all the behavior I expected and the add-ons I use. Chrome’s add-on ecosystem is much newer (it only recently started supporting extensions in the production version) so there were some gaps, which ended up being part of why I ended the experiment.
Which I might as well get to at this point. Note that most of these are personal “why it didn’t quite work for me” sorts of things. Chrome is a good, solid product, and if Firefox vanished from the face of the earth, there would be worse fates than having to run it. (To be fair, Internet Explorer, at version 8, is light years past where it was, but it reeks of Microsoft and Central Control, so I avoid it where I can.)
First off, performance was not as vastly better in Chrome than in FF. I didn’t find it any more stable, or faster to load or shut down. No scientific testing, just general perception. I think, in aggregate, the memory footprint for Chrome was lower, but that was about it.
I really dislike (ironically) how Chrome handles search engines. Yes, having the Omnibox is nice, but I like Firefox’s search box approach to having a drop-down to chose the search engine to go to, rather than typing in a short code + Tab to look for anything other than your default search engine. I do enough specialized searches (sorry, Google) to make that an annoyance. (That said, Chrome’s method of adding search engines much more dynamically is pretty slick.)
The biggest issue was not around native performance or capabilities, but how it could be extended. Here are the add-ons I used in Chrome, and their analogs in Firefox.
| Chrome | Firefox | Notes |
| AdBlock | AdBlock Plus | Both work fine, though the Chrome version has some odd latency in blocking images. |
| FlashBlock | FlashBlock | Both work fine. |
| Copy Without Formatting | Extended Copy Menu | Allow copying of text from a web page while stripping out formatting. Very cool for blogging. The Chrome version works as part of the selection process; the FF version as a context Copy option. I think the FF one works a bit better. |
| Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google) | Google Docs Viewer | Open up various doc types through the Google Docs engine, as tabs, rather than opening up an application to do it. Very nice. |
| IE Tab | IE Tab 2 | Open up a tab using the IE engine, for applications that require it to function properly. The FF version seems to be a bit more robust (it handles window closures in OWA better). |
| Last Pass | Last Pass | Password manager. The FF version is a scosh nicer, but both work fine (as does the IE version; Last Pass rocks). |
| Xmarks | Xmarks | Bookmark sync tool. I used this rather than Chrome’s own tool because it works cross-platform (i.e., all my machines have the same bookmarks in IE, FF, and Chrome). |
| FreshStart | Native FF capability | Controls session crashes and sessions for different users of a computer. Never made much use of the crash recovery (which, I suppose, is a good thing.) |
| New Tabs Always Last | Default FF behavior; can override with Tab Mix Plus | Have new tabs open at the right-hand side rather than next to the tab that opened them. Not needed in FF. |
| Tabs to the Front | Native FF option | Have new tabs open as the focus. |
| N/A | TabMixPlus | Controls a zillion options about how tabs should behave. FF’s native tabbing is good (as good as Chrome’s); this makes it far superior. |
| Tab Menu | Unneeded | Search through and select tabs. |
| N/A | Add a Bookmark Here 2 | Allow easy adding of a bookmark within the bookmark menu. Chrome’s bookmark management is more crude than FFs even without this (e.g., the ability to save all tabs as bookmarks). |
| N/A | Clippings | Create a library of text/code that can be easily pasted into any window. Great for blogging. Lots of requests on the forum for this to be ported over to Chrome, and there’s nothing like it I could find. |
| N/A | imgTag | Right-click any image and get an IMG tag for it (including alt, sizes, etc.) created in the clipboard. Great for blogging. |
| N/A | FireFTP | Great FTP client, runs within FF. |
As seen above, a lot of the gaps are around the whole tabbing behavior — that might just be me and my expectation, but I really do feel that FF still has this down much better. Of the “missing” extensions at the end, Clippings and imgTag are the most critical just on a day-to-day blogging basis.
So is that it? Not really. Chrome will continue to develop. There’s a new version of it coming out soon (FF4 appears this fall.) And I expect the extension ecosystem in Chrome will continue to grow, too, and likely address a variety of the concerns listed here.
I may very well be back, but it will take (a) Firefox becoming a significant problem and/or (b) Chrome gaining some very significant advantages. Or my becoming bored and wanting to try Chrome again.
I’ve been on Chrome for about/at least six months now, and it’s gotten to the point where starting Firefox is as distasteful to me as starting IE was when I was using Firefox. Just a few comments/reactions.
* You didn’t find that Chrome started any faster? That just baffles me; if I start both browsers simultaneously, I’ll be reading my email on Chrome in about three seconds — almost half a minute before the screen even opens on Firefox.
* Twenty open tabs from session to session? Sweet fancy Moses, I just can’t get my head around that. Kate runs about seven during the day, and I find that cluttered as hell — like leaving ‘to do’ stuff in one’s inbox. Only time I have more than three open (email, newsreader, brizzly) is when I’m opening a bunch of different topics in a forum/searchpane at the same time and plan to read through them all in one go. I don’t have the browser retain my open tabs from session to session, because I finish whatever I want to do with those tabs before I leave the browser. If I want to keep a page around for later reference, I bookmark it and close it.
* Related: what’s hard about bookmarks? You click the little gold star and pick a category to safe the favorite in. I suspect I use these differently/less.
* Clearly the way I use tabs is different than the way you do, so most of the tab extensions you use, I really don’t see the need of. I had to acclimate to Chrome’s default tab behavior for about a week, and now it’s what I expect Firefox to act like, rather than the other way ’round.
* I still can’t get over that they open at the same speed for you.
* I’m not sure I see what imgTag does — does it hotlink images from other sites or something? I don’t do that, I suppose, because inevitably anything I don’t host myself moves or linkrots.
* Yes, Chrome totally needs an FTP extension. It’s the only reason I still open Firefox. (I used to use it for Firebug, also, but they’ve ported a ‘lite’ version of that over to Chrome that serves well enough.
Anyway: the best part of about all these browsers competing is that they get better, right? Maybe Chrome will get a TabMixPlus? Maybe whatever the hell Firefox did in version 3.5 that slowed it down so much will be fixed in 4?
Clearly the “too many tabs” experience is part of the different experience here, as is how I use bookmarks.
I have at least 9 tabs open at a minimum right now (for various blogs and tools — Gmail, Gcal, Greader, Brizzly, my four currently active blogs, and 100Words). Any or most of these could in theory just be opened up when I need them, but except for initial startup this works out faster for me.
The others are ones that I leave open between sessions until I’m done with them (or until the occasional crash that FF can’t recover from that loses them all). While bookmarking site for a later reference is something I occasionally do, for the most part my bookmark file tends to be a black hole, and bookmarking something for later reading is a guarantee I’ll never read it.
I’m just not good at putting stuff away, as my mother will tell you.
Most of what I use imgTag for is grabbing images I’ve previously used on my own blog over the past eight years. “Hey, yeah, I did that one post where I had the Space: 1999 logo …” which I can then use rather than loading something new. (If all my images were stored in the WP media library then I wouldn’t need this, obviously.) I rarely if ever hotlink to an image elsewhere, if only because it’s impolite. Using imgTag not only gives me a full img tag rather than rebuilding one around the URL of the image, it includes the height/width info, which makes it render faster. It’s not a drop-dead necessity, but it’s a handy convenience.
Both the new Chrome and the new Firefox are being touted as much faster, which will be good. I expect I’ll probably stay with FF for the time being, at least until FF4 comes out this fall; if I’m not wowed by the experience, I’ll give Chrome another spin.
Okay, loading up the same set of 18 tabs between FF and Chrome, both took about 20 seconds before all tabs were finished loading. (The time varied from 15-25 seconds in multiple trials.)
Hmm. So the speed thing there would appear to be the tabs. It would seem that all the tabs slows down Chrome. (Whereas, at least in my experience, FF is slow regardless, and the number of tabs doesn’t appreciably affect it.)
I think there’s no doubt that FF is the right browser for you, given how you use the browser.
Well, like I said, for now.